Astral Codex Ten

Aella

34 min read

Aella

Article

Aella is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 32 times across 32 issues between December 30, 2021 and February 05, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as ""Aella’s twitter polls on eugenics.""; “Aella’s twitter polls on eugenics”; “one of (our mutual friend) Aella’s weird parties”. It most often appears alongside Twitter, OpenAI, Scott.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 32
  • Issue count: 32
  • First seen: December 30, 2021
  • Last seen: February 05, 2026

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Links For December
December 30, 2021 · Original source
6: Aella's twitter polls on eugenics. EG: "A lesbian couple is looking for a sperm donor, and choose their donor based on how healthy, smart, and happy the donor seems to be. Is this: A) not eugenics / B) eugenics I don't support / C) eugenics I support?"
Inline links: twitter polls on eugenics
There's A Time For Everyone
January 12, 2022 · Original source
I met her two years ago, at one of (our mutual friend) Aella’s weird parties.
Twenty years and exactly one million micromarriages later, I have yet to find any better advice. Gather your micromarriages while ye may, for time is still a-flying. Do annoying things, expect them to fail, and increment a little counter in your head each time, to prevent yourself from going insane. Then do more annoying things. Teach a juggling class. Join a weird transhumanist compound. Go to one of Aella’s weird parties. There is no royal road. I’m not claiming to have super useful advice here, just to be able to say from the end of a long and very rocky path that it does eventually pay off. Or as Lin Manuel-Miranda put it:
Inline links: Lin Manuel-Miranda put it
2022
January 28, 2022 · Original source
Aella (f / 29 / Austin) Alyssa (trans-f / 30 / SF) Damon (m / 34 / undetermined) Linch (m / 28 / SF) Nate (m / 30ish / Bay? Austin?) Rebecca (f / 30 / San Jose) Shaked (m / 30 / NYC)
Inline links: Aella, Alyssa, Damon, Linch, Nate, Rebecca, Shaked
ACX Grants ++: The First Half
February 03, 2022 · Original source
#56: Aella Wants To Start A Dating Site Like Old OKCupid Hi it's Aella! I have a concrete thing i want funding for now - rationalist-targeted dating app. there's a few in the works but none hit the really specific spot I want. my proposal is to rebuild a version of old-okcupid (match scores from questions, user profiles, basic messaging, high control over search, strong orientation towards compatibility and personality), and include personality tests/results (women like this, would get women on the app and we should have plentiful data to do this). I also want to structure the questions awesomely, in clear, unambiguous ways that translate to both efficient matching and also good data for us on the back end. I think this would also be a great way to do research, where it would generate a huge amount of data that hopefully spans across a ton of different questions. I'd like to make some very anonymized version of the data publicly available. My goal is to have it be just profitable enough to cover its own costs (tho if it ends up being more profitable i won't complain, i'm just not orienting it towards that). I estimate i need between 30k-150k in funding for a basic version depending on how fancy we wanna get/how much programmers wanna get paid. My personal reach is around 750k horny men, which uhh definitely doesn't help the gender ratio *but* if the site is structured such that personality results are easily shared, i think this would be a great organic start to catch the eye of female users. [If interested, email aellasinbox@gmail.com]
Contra Resident Contrarian On Unfalsifiable Internal States
November 11, 2022 · Original source
In college I had the great honor of hearing a lecture by legendary neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran, who helped put synaethesia on the neuroscientific map. Synaesthesia is where people have an association between unlike sensory or conceptual domains - most often color and something else. For example, each number might be a different color. Many people have this to a weak degree (Aella has an interesting survey here) but some people apparently have it to such a strong degree that it almost-literally jumps out of the page. Ramachandran demonstrated this in an experiment by showing that these people could identify 2s among a sea of 5s faster than everyone else: In his paper on the phenomenon, Ramachandran wrote that he got pushback from other scientists for studying this, since they thought synaesthetes: “…are just crazy. The phenomenon is simply the result of a hyperactive imagination. Or maybe they are trying to draw attention to themselves by claiming to be special or different in some way.” You can read the paper here. This has left me nervous about explanations where people only say they have a weird mental ability to “draw attention” or “claim to be different”.
Inline links: has an interesting survey here, here
Selection Bias Is A Fact Of Life, Not An Excuse For Rejecting Internet Surveys
December 27, 2022 · Original source
Sometimes people do amateur research through online surveys. Then they find interesting things. Then their commenters say it doesn’t count, because “selection bias!” This has been happening to Aella for years, but people try it sometimes on me too.
Inline links: has been happening to Aella for years, try it sometimes on me too
Links For December 2022
December 28, 2022 · Original source
14: Aella on color synaesthesia. Lots of people report feeling like certain numbers “feel like” certain colors - but which ones?
Inline links: Aella on color synaesthesia
29: Aella’s survey confirms my old one: lots of people have autogynephilia and it is not especially associated with transgender. See also some open thread comments here.
Inline links: my old one, have autogynephilia and it is not especially associated with transgender, some open thread comments here
23
February 14, 2023 · Original source
In honor of Valentine’s Day, this installment of Mantic Monday will focus on attempted clever engineering solutions to romance. We’ll start with the usual prediction markets, then move on to other types of algorithmic and financial schemes. Normal content will resume next time around. Date Recommendation Markets Aella is a Internet celebrity known for her interest in various disgusting crimes against nature, ie podcasts and video streams. Unrelatedly, she also studies fetishes. She’s been looking for a partner for a few years. Most recently, she created this prediction market. The way it works:
Aella is a Internet celebrity known for her interest in various disgusting crimes against nature, ie podcasts and video streams. Unrelatedly, she also studies fetishes. She’s been looking for a partner for a few years. Most recently, she created this prediction market. The way it works:
A candidate “wins” if Aella goes on at least four dates with them, something she would probably only do if the first date went well and she really liked them.
Highlights From The Comments On Geography Of Madness
February 27, 2023 · Original source
Regarding PMS and PMDD, Aella writes:
(source)
Inline links: source
If I’m reading that poll right, many more ghost believers than ghost skeptics get PMS. I am boggled by this and Aella is a national treasure - although I look forward to her reporting the more formal investigation of this in her survey.
Links For July 2023
July 06, 2023 · Original source
5: Aella discusses her survey results on polyamory (more data here). Key point: both decisively monogamous and decisively polyamorous couples are often happy and stable, but couples who are lukewarm and in the middle do worse than either extreme (maybe because the partners disagree on the right degree of poly, or because they’re switching modes to “save the relationship”). This neatly (maybe too neatly) explains an otherwise confusing pattern: most of the poly relationships I know seem fine, but many monogamous people say most of the poly relationships they know are trashfires. If like groups with like, most of the poly people who mono people know will be only slightly polyamorous, a dangerous place to be.
Inline links: Aella discusses her survey results on polyamory, more data here
Open Thread 285
July 17, 2023 · Original source
3: In 2020, using data from the SSC survey, I wrote about how Autogenderphilia Is Common And Not Especially Associated With Transgender. More recently, Aella did another survey and found the same thing. Last week Michael Bailey, a researcher who thinks autogynephilia is very associated with transgender, responded here, saying that our questions were bad. Tailcalled, who helped write the questions for Aella and my survey, explains here why they think the questions were good. Instead of having an opinion on this, I plan to ask Michael to design the questions for the next survey and demonstrate that they get the same result.
Inline links: Autogenderphilia Is Common And Not Especially Associated With Transgender, and found the same thing, responded here, explains here why they think the questions were good
23: Room Temperature Superforecaster
August 01, 2023 · Original source
Jacob Cohen describes himself as the president of his school’s forecasting club. I think we’re going to be all right. Manifest 2023 Manifold Markets is sponsoring Manifest, an “inaugural forecasting & prediction market conference”, to be held at the Rose Garden Inn, Berkeley, California the weekend of September 22. Their website is short on details, but listed speakers and guests of honor are: …now that I think about it I do remember vaguely agreeing to something like this, though I’m not currently planning to give any particular speeches. But Aella and Robert are great - and although I’ve never met the third guy, it seems appropriate for a conference called Manifest to feature someone named Destiny. Manifold tends to do things on impulse and fill in the details later, so the schedule looks sparse. But usually the things they throw together last-minute end up being pretty good, so I’m looking forward to this. Tickets cost $220, but can also be purchased with mana (Manifold Markets’ play money), at least until the CFTC notices. It looks like there’s an arbitrage you can use to get the tickets at a 10% discount - I think this is less likely to be a mistake than a preference to have people who can spot arbitrages 10% over-represented at the conference compared to everyone else. Room Temperature Superforecaster Maybe the long-awaited killer app for prediction markets is . . . debating superconductors? First, the markets: I’m heartened to see these two very big markets ($200,000+ volume, 2,000+ traders) within 1% of each other (as of time of writing). This is a really difficult question without an obvious prior, so the level of convergence suggests the markets really are doing their job… …but Metaculus is much lower, probably because the other two are asking if any replication will be positive, and Metaculus is asking if the first replication attempt will be. It’s bad news that these numbers are so different, and suggests a high chance that this stays confusing and comes down to finicky resolution criteria. Still, this has gotten lots of people checking the prediction markets, including Paul Graham: …and around 500 others, according to the Manifold Active Users graph (source): Aside from headline numbers, I’ve also appreciated prediction market comment sections as a good place to stay up to date on the latest developments (including a link to this thread) Elsewhere In Forecasting NYPost: Blind Mystic Baba Vanga Makes Terrifying Nuclear Disaster Prediction For 2023: A blind mystic who allegedly predicted 9/11 is said to have foreseen a nuclear disaster that will ravage Earth before the end of 2023. Baba Vanga, a blind Bulgarian woman, is rumored to have predicted some of the biggest events in world history. She died more than a quarter of a century ago, but many of her predictions are said to have come true long after her death. Now, her followers claim that Baba Vanga foresaw a devastating nuclear disaster that will unfold this year. Big if true. In what sense did she predict 9/11? Another article gives the exact text of the 1989 prediction: “Horror, horror! The American brethren will fall after being attacked by the steel birds. The wolves will be howling in a bush, and innocent blood will be gushing.” This is a 1989 prediction! If you’re calling airplanes “steel birds” in 1989, you’re just hoping that people forget you lived when airplanes already existed and then get impressed with you for predicting them. Come on! (you could argue that the second half is about Assistant Secretary of State John Wolf and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz howling for war with Iraq from within the Bush administration, but Ass. Sec Wolf played a minimal role in the war buildup so I think if you are being very strict in your interpretation there was really only one wolf involved.) Anyway, Vanga’s other predictions for 2023 include: Earth’s orbit will change
Inline links: Jacob Cohen, Manifest, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!owXd!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F11594b53-e8df-4064-aacf-af4890ac0fe6_1503x615.png, https://polymarket.com/event/is-the-room-temp-superconductor-real, https://www.metaculus.com/questions/18090/room-temp-superconductor-pre-print-replicated/, Paul Graham, source, this thread, Blind Mystic Baba Vanga Makes Terrifying Nuclear Disaster Prediction For 2023, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!yIPJ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc81ce0d2-e9c7-41b9-be38-0182d21f0381_1024x682.jpeg, the exact text of the 1989 prediction
…now that I think about it I do remember vaguely agreeing to something like this, though I’m not currently planning to give any particular speeches. But Aella and Robert are great - and although I’ve never met the third guy, it seems appropriate for a conference called Manifest to feature someone named Destiny. Manifold tends to do things on impulse and fill in the details later, so the schedule looks sparse. But usually the things they throw together last-minute end up being pretty good, so I’m looking forward to this. Tickets cost $220, but can also be purchased with mana (Manifold Markets’ play money), at least until the CFTC notices. It looks like there’s an arbitrage you can use to get the tickets at a 10% discount - I think this is less likely to be a mistake than a preference to have people who can spot arbitrages 10% over-represented at the conference compared to everyone else. Room Temperature Superforecaster Maybe the long-awaited killer app for prediction markets is . . . debating superconductors? First, the markets: I’m heartened to see these two very big markets ($200,000+ volume, 2,000+ traders) within 1% of each other (as of time of writing). This is a really difficult question without an obvious prior, so the level of convergence suggests the markets really are doing their job… …but Metaculus is much lower, probably because the other two are asking if any replication will be positive, and Metaculus is asking if the first replication attempt will be. It’s bad news that these numbers are so different, and suggests a high chance that this stays confusing and comes down to finicky resolution criteria. Still, this has gotten lots of people checking the prediction markets, including Paul Graham: …and around 500 others, according to the Manifold Active Users graph (source): Aside from headline numbers, I’ve also appreciated prediction market comment sections as a good place to stay up to date on the latest developments (including a link to this thread) Elsewhere In Forecasting NYPost: Blind Mystic Baba Vanga Makes Terrifying Nuclear Disaster Prediction For 2023: A blind mystic who allegedly predicted 9/11 is said to have foreseen a nuclear disaster that will ravage Earth before the end of 2023. Baba Vanga, a blind Bulgarian woman, is rumored to have predicted some of the biggest events in world history. She died more than a quarter of a century ago, but many of her predictions are said to have come true long after her death. Now, her followers claim that Baba Vanga foresaw a devastating nuclear disaster that will unfold this year. Big if true. In what sense did she predict 9/11? Another article gives the exact text of the 1989 prediction: “Horror, horror! The American brethren will fall after being attacked by the steel birds. The wolves will be howling in a bush, and innocent blood will be gushing.” This is a 1989 prediction! If you’re calling airplanes “steel birds” in 1989, you’re just hoping that people forget you lived when airplanes already existed and then get impressed with you for predicting them. Come on! (you could argue that the second half is about Assistant Secretary of State John Wolf and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz howling for war with Iraq from within the Bush administration, but Ass. Sec Wolf played a minimal role in the war buildup so I think if you are being very strict in your interpretation there was really only one wolf involved.) Anyway, Vanga’s other predictions for 2023 include: Earth’s orbit will change
Inline links: https://polymarket.com/event/is-the-room-temp-superconductor-real, https://www.metaculus.com/questions/18090/room-temp-superconductor-pre-print-replicated/, Paul Graham, source, this thread, Blind Mystic Baba Vanga Makes Terrifying Nuclear Disaster Prediction For 2023, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!yIPJ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc81ce0d2-e9c7-41b9-be38-0182d21f0381_1024x682.jpeg, the exact text of the 1989 prediction
What Can Fetish Research Tell Us About AI?
August 21, 2023 · Original source
Still, I’ve been debating autogynephilia fetishes with Michael Bailey, tailcalled, Zack Davis, and Aella (Bailey and Davis think they’re deeply involved in transgender; tailcalled, Aella and I mostly don’t); I’ve also studied BDSM and lactation fetishes, and Aella has done even more fetish-ology work. In a world that might be on the verge of radical, even unimaginable changes, how do we justify spending time on such an unsavory field?
Inline links: been debating, involved, mostly don’t, BDSM, lactation fetishes, even more fetish-ology work
The real answer is - we don’t justify it. I’m easily nerd-sniped just like everyone else, and I assume the same is true of Aella, tailcalled, etc.
Highlights From The Comments On Fetishes
August 30, 2023 · Original source
Aella, who conducts fetish surveys, says she has the answer. Go to her comment for the full statistics, but people who report being spanked as children say they find spanking more erotic.
Inline links: says she has the answer
Aella finds that spanking fetishists are no older (on average) than non-fetishists. Since spanking rates were higher in the past, we might consider this evidence against the theory (using “time” as a non-confounded proxy variable for spanking exposure). But having fetishes was also less common in the past. I hope Aella is able to analyze some of this in more depth!
Open Thread 293
September 11, 2023 · Original source
2: Manifold Markets wants me to remind you that this is approximately your last chance to sign up for Manifest, their forecasting and prediction market conference in Berkeley, CA. Guests will include Nate Silver, Robin Hanson, Aella, Zvi, and the CEOs of Kalshi, Manifold, and Polymarket. I’m still figuring out if I can make it but I’ll try my best.
Inline links: Manifest, their forecasting and prediction market conference
Links For September 2023
September 28, 2023 · Original source
29: Re…lated? Blogger/model Aella is offering aella.ai, an “AI girlfriend” based on her, as the flagship product of a company (?) that will help influencers create AI chatbot girlfriends based on themselves. I haven’t seen a lot of uptake yet - my trollish theory, which I might explain more later, is that the real killer app will be AI boyfriends (horny men want sex, horny women want attention / emotional validation; which of these can chatbots more effectively fake?)
Inline links: aella.ai
23
October 31, 2023 · Original source
…and because most honest match percentages will be so low, it’s easy for an, ahem, motivated bettor to get to the top. Aella, who is very famous, has about 30 potential matches right now. But it would only take about 400ℳ for me to make myself her top match at 20%. Maybe if I like Aella enough to hack the system like this, it’s good for me to come to Aella’s attention - but this is a pretty different use case than it says on the tin.
Inline links: has about 30 potential matches right now
23
December 05, 2023 · Original source
4: Manifold might be planning a prediction market dating show - go here for more info or to sign up as a contestant. This has got to be a stunt by Aella, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t be fun.
Inline links: go here
Defying Cavity: Lantern Bioworks FAQ
December 07, 2023 · Original source
5.3: Why is local Internet celebrity Aella on the org chart?
Inline links: the org chart
Aella ends up involved in everything interesting in the Bay Area, and I have long since stopped being surprised by this. Aaron describes her as “a media and marketing advisor.“
Son Of Bride Of Bay Area House Party
December 12, 2023 · Original source
“I heard Q-star broke AES-192 encryption, Ilya used it to read Sam’s credit card transactions, and he found Sam spent all the Microsoft money on Aella’s OnlyFans,” says a woman, in a hushed whisper.
24
February 20, 2024 · Original source
This was a Manifold promotional event for Valentine’s Day, taking the form of a “prediction market dating show” where six contestants competed to win a date with local celebrity Aella. It was not what I was expecting.
I’m going to include a video embed in a moment, but fair warning: if you already hate any of rationalists, San Francisco, tech, prediction markets, polyamory, betting, love, reality shows, or Aella, this will definitely make you hate them more.
Highlights From The Comments On Polyamory
February 21, 2024 · Original source
I don’t know of any good published journal articles on this topic. I know of two informal surveys: Aella’s and mine.
Aella’s survey includes data from 430,000 people! The average social class is somewhere between lower-middle and middle, so this isn’t just capturing elites, and should be able to address concerns that polyamory only works as a “luxury belief”.
Inline links: includes data from
You can read a list of all her findings here. In all questions, monogamous people answer about their partner, and polyamorous people answer about their primary or longest-term partner. The ones that I found most interesting were these:
Inline links: here
Survey Results: PMS Symptoms
April 26, 2024 · Original source
In November 2022, Aella posted this Twitter poll:
Inline links: this Twitter poll
Here’s another one:
Inline links: Here’s another one
Now 72% of people with PMS self-describe as neurotic, compared to only 45% without. Aella writes more about this here, and sebjenseb confirms here. I’m less weirded out by this one, because you can imagine that people feel neurotic because of PMS symptoms, but it’s still a surprisingly strong effect.
Inline links: here, here
Open Thread 329
May 13, 2024 · Original source
4: And Lighthaven is still hosting two back-to-back conferences in Berkeley in late May early June, of which you are invited to both. First, Less Online, a conference for rationalists and rationalist-blog-readers, May 31 - June 2. I might have announced this before, but new guests since I last mentioned it include Patrick McKenzie, Agnes Callard, Kevin Simler, Cremieux, and Aella. Second, Manifest, a conference on prediction markets, June 7 - 9. I’ll be at both. Ticket prices go up midnight on Monday. If you want to meet the guests but can’t pay, there should be an ACX meetup at Lightcone around that time, which many guests will be attending and which will be free admission.
Inline links: Less Online,, Manifest
Links For February 2025
February 27, 2025 · Original source
11: Intrinsic Perspective wants a law saying AI-generated text must be watermarked. I was most interested the article’s claim that there is now “semantic watermarking” - watermarking which operates on the level of ideas, and can’t be defeated by rephrasing an AI-generated text in your own words. I have skimmed the paper explaining this and think I vaguely understand what’s going on, but it still boggles me that this is possible. 12: Aella: How OnlyFans Took Over The World. There have been camgirl sites since forever. How did OnlyFans leap over all of its predecessors and achieve an unprecedented level of success? Aella discusses many factors, but one stands out: traditional camsites advertised the site as a whole, and then once you got to the site you chose which model you wanted to see. OnlyFans encourages models to advertise themselves - often on their own social media accounts, sometimes via scams - which “unlocks human creativity” on the problem of bringing new eyeballs to a porn site. 13: Nate Silver has 113 predictions for Trump’s second term. I’d be interested to see whether making each of these predictions 10% less confident (to account for possible gameboard-overturning AI) ends up beating Nate. 14: Sarah Constantin: What’s Behind The SynBio Bust? Three of the most promising synthetic biology companies - Gingko, Zymergen, and Amyris - all crashed between 2021 and 2023. Why? Producing chemicals in traditional factories is orders of magnitude more efficient than synthesizing them via microbes (except for the sort of large biomolecules that can’t be produced in factories). These companies had brilliant employees and cool tech, but no clear plan to get around this handicap, and used up their runway before they could figure one out. They also focused too hard on designing the microbes, and were too willing to outsource the actual manufacturing to other people without being sufficiently paranoid that those other people were doing quality control. 15: One of the more exciting psychiatric results (which I blogged about a long time ago) was the apparent finding that omega-3 supplementation could prevent high-risk people from having first break schizophrenia. A new RCT says this doesn’t replicate and cites two other recent trials showing it didn’t replicate. There’s also a new meta-analysis which says actually it does replicate, but usually failing a big RCT is a bad sign and I’m pretty skeptical. Thanks to Isaak F for the links. {ETA: Thomas Reilly says: “Although I don't believe omega-3 supplementation has any benefit in psychosis, I also don't think this new trial should shift your opinion much, given the total sample size was n=135 and the total number of transitions to psychosis was n=8.”] 16: Claim that predictions of global warming magnitude are gradually going down thanks to successful pledges/action: Source is CipherNews (h/t Stefan Schubert) apparently citing Climate Action Tracker, but I get the impression that this is just some people eyeballing the size of pledges and not any more sophisticated forecasting. I don’t know how to square this with the claims that such and such a thing (summer temperature, sea ice, etc) is much worse than anyone expected. 17: I don’t know anything about the Lucy Letby case, but all of my smart friends who have been right about this kind of thing before say she’s innocent. 18: A reader asks House of Strauss (edgy sports Substack) whether the vibe shift away from political correctness threatens the edgy Substack business model - as the power of orthodoxy declines, can you still get rich and famous as a brave anti-orthodoxy critic? His answer: nothing that can happen from here is as bad as the Twitter/X link deboost (which made attracting attention harder for everyone). I mostly agree: I think discoverability has suffered, people who are already famous will be able to stay famous without too much extra effort, and everyone else will have to explore new options. 19: Spectator: Could AI Lead To A Revival Of Decorative Beauty? Profiles Not Quite Past, a startup using AI and fancy printing to make customized Delft tiles. It’s a good idea and the tiles are very pretty, but the tiles are sort of a best possible case (a pretty, traditional object that can have a customized 2D image and be mass-printed). I think most forms of lost decorative beauty aren’t bottlenecked by ability to generate 2D images of the type image models are good at, and so will have to wait. 20: Some friends including Kelsey Piper wrote an emergency PEPFAR Report, collecting evidence for why PEPFAR is good/effective/important and deserves to be kept. Some key points: PEPFAR has saved between 7.5 and 30 million lives, at a cost between $1,500 and $10,000 per life saved. The US government is willing to spend at least a thousand times this much to save an American life.
Inline links: wants a law saying AI-generated text must be watermarked, skimmed the paper explaining this, How OnlyFans Took Over The World, 113 predictions for Trump’s second term, What’s Behind The SynBio Bust?, this doesn’t replicate, actually it does replicate, says, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!S0yA!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb75ee3e3-3c0d-48b7-aa98-88f5e33dbf55_748x447.png, CipherNews, Stefan Schubert, Climate Action Tracker, the Lucy Letby case, His answer, Could AI Lead To A Revival Of Decorative Beauty?, Not Quite Past, PEPFAR Report
50: Lots of buzz over Aella’s appearance on the Whatever Podcast. I haven’t seen it because I don’t watch podcasts, but relevant excerpt here (X), full episode here. I was most interested in Maxwell Foley’s description (X) of the Whatever Podcast’s premise:
Inline links: here (X), here, description (X)
Open Thread 383
May 26, 2025 · Original source
3: Less Online and Manifest are rationalist blogosphere and prediction market conferences, respectively, held at the same Berkeley venue one week apart in late May / early June. Guests (attending at least one; check which) include me, Eliezer, Zvi, Aella, Nate Silver, and some of the AI 2027 team. Last-minute tickets still available. In between the two is Arbor Summer Camp, a lower-key, longer “experimental learning” event. It includes some trading/startup related classes, featuring Ricki Heicklen, Austin Chen, and others. Check out their startup workshop and startup pitch competition.
Inline links: Less Online, Manifest, Arbor Summer Camp, startup workshop, startup pitch competition
Bayes For Everyone
May 30, 2025 · Original source
And I think I heard Aella mention it on a podcast?
Book Review: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
September 11, 2025 · Original source
Despite my gripes above, this is an impressive book. Eliezer Yudkowsky is a divisive writer, with plenty of diehard fans and equally committed enemies. At his best, he has leaps of genius nobody else can match; at his worst, he’s prone to long digressions about how stupid everyone who disagrees with him is. Nate Soares is equally thoughtful but more measured and lower-profile (at least before he started dating e-celebrity Aella). His influence tempers Yudkowsky’s and turns the book into a presentable whole that respects its readers’ time and intelligence. The end result is something which I would feel comfortable recommending to ordinary people as a good introduction to its subject matter.
Non-Book Review Contest 2025 Winners
October 17, 2025 · Original source
Dating Men In The Bay Area, by Alex King. Alex is an engineer from San Francisco. She’ll be experimenting with more essays on her new blog, King of Daydreams. When she’s not igniting turmoil in the ACX comments section, she can be found mentoring young engineers, hosting community events, and failing to find a boyfriend. She pinky-promises she is not Aella.
Inline links: Dating Men In The Bay Area, King of Daydreams
Highlights From The Comments On Vibecession
December 31, 2025 · Original source
Aella talks a lot about how she used to have a manufacturing job, hated hated hated it, and decided to switch to sex work so she never had to do anything like that ever again; this seems like a pretty common opinion among people who have legit worked in factories (cf. how many of them are motivated by the dream of giving their child a better life where they won’t have to work a factory job). And we’ve already talked about how the average parent now spends far more time with their children these days than they used to.
Inline links: talks a lot, we’ve already talked about
Open Thread 418
January 26, 2026 · Original source
1: Inkhaven was a blogging residency/bootcamp/program in Berkeley last November. The conceit was that residents had to write one post per day for thirty days, or else get kicked out without a refund. I ran some sessions, and so did other people you might recognize like Gwern, Zvi, Ozy, Aella, and Scott Aaronson. People seemed to like it (average rating 8/10, see also reflections here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, etc; when you make forty people write every day, you sure do end up with a lot of written reflections on the experience). They’re doing it again this April, and you’re invited to apply. You’ll need ~$3,500 (some scholarships available) and a month free. I plan to help again. Application deadline March 1.
Inline links: Inkhaven, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here
Links For February 2026
February 05, 2026 · Original source
51 ACX reader Simon Berens reports that his company GetBrighter has succeeded at its IndieGogo campaign and now has a decent stock of their ultrabright lights. We’ve talked before about the weaknesses of light boxes for seasonal depression - much dimmer than the sun, and you’ve got to stay right next to them. GetBrighter isn’t being marketed as a clinical product, and its form factor optimizes for wider area rather than greater brightness at a single point, but it’s still a step in the right direction (very rough guesses: normal lightboxes are 10,000 lux if you’re right next to the bulb, 500 lux if they’re just ambiently in a room; GetBrighter is ~20,000 lux right next to the bulb, 3,000 ambiently in a room, but harder to be right next to because of the height). Testimonials from Aella and Miles Brundage. Cost is $1200; in theory you can hack together a cheaper version out of industrial lighting, but I tried that and it unsurprisingly-in-retrospect looked like my room was lit by hacked-together cheap industrial lighting.
Inline links: ultrabright lights, the weaknesses of light boxes, Aella, Miles Brundage