Astral Codex Ten

Benjamin Jolley

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Benjamin Jolley

Article

Benjamin Jolley is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between January 27, 2022 and October 30, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Benjamin Jolley (author of Ramblings Of A Pharmacist ) writes”; “Benjamin Jolley (who writes the blog Ramblings Of A Pharmacist ), has a couple interesting comments”; “Benjamin Jolley ( blog ) writes”. It most often appears alongside Scott, COVID, FDA.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 6
  • Issue count: 6
  • First seen: January 27, 2022
  • Last seen: October 30, 2025

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.

Highlights From The Comments On Health Care Systems
January 27, 2022 · Original source
And Benjamin Jolley (author of Ramblings Of A Pharmacist) writes:
Inline links: Benjamin Jolley, Ramblings Of A Pharmacist
Highlights From The Comments On Zulresso
March 16, 2022 · Original source
— Benjamin Jolley (who writes the blog Ramblings Of A Pharmacist), has a couple interesting comments:
Inline links: Benjamin Jolley, Ramblings Of A Pharmacist
Highlights From The Comments On Semaglutide
November 30, 2022 · Original source
Benjamin Jolley (blog) writes:
Inline links: blog, writes
Open Thread 344
August 26, 2024 · Original source
3: Comment of the week is Benjamin Jolley on compounding semaglutide. You can read Benjamin’s blog on pharmacy work here.
Inline links: Benjamin Jolley on compounding semaglutide, blog on pharmacy work here
Your Review: The Astral Codex Ten Commentariat (“Why Do We Suck?”)
July 26, 2025 · Original source
I think, in hindsight, that this is reflecting a unique characteristic of the ACX Commentariat, which is that it is unusually likely to develop an idea or conceptual schema rather than just asserting something and moving on. For example, here’s a Comment of the Week where Anatoly spends a very long time explaining the different meanings of ‘infinite’ and ‘finite’ in the context of explaining why P=NP is a difficult problem. It has a Brunet Index of 14.3 (so a little less than double the local average) because it repeats the words ‘infinite’, ‘finite’ and ‘algorithm’ many times. But I agree with the responses that this is a great comment, and exactly the sort of thing which only the ACX Commentariat seems to produce with any regularity. For a more recent example, here’s another comment of the week by Benjamin Jolley which adds some details to Scott’s post The Compounding Loophole, and is also clearly a great post which fits very well into the Commentariat corpus. So my conclusion here is that documentation for these tests assumes that stale vocabulary is always bad, because it expects you to be using the tests on – for example - novels. However, stale vocabulary isn’t inherently good or bad, and in this case it serves as a marker for something the Commentariat like or value. Anecdotally, it looks like what the Commentariat value is something like ‘well defined terms’. Even if this doesn’t map cleanly to something we can point to, there’s no accounting for taste - if the Commentariat just happen to prefer lengthy stale sentences there’s nothing actually wrong with that. Therefore, this measure is consistent with the other measures of complexity even though it very clearly shows the opposite relationship than I expected. Just for fun, I thought I would show the most repetitive comment ever written. This was actually slightly difficult as there are a lot of things which are both comments and repetitive but which would be uninteresting to count (spam, code snippets, pasted text from early LLMs where the model hangs and repeats the same text to infinity). The most repetitive non-spam comment which I reckon was generated by humans alone is this comment by Deiseach, which quotes extensively from an early Irish law book (Brunet = 16.9). The most repetitive non-spam comment which I reckon has a single human author is this comment by Fahundo (Brunet = 16.5), giving the answer to a logic problem in ROT13 (so actually possibly breaks the rule about not using a computer in the writing, but not in the way I meant!) Complexity Approach 4 – Reading age Finally, I looked at reading age, although this approach was largely unsuccessful. ‘Reading age’ is an approximate composite measure of the complexity of language and sentence construction in a piece of text. There are quite a few different measures of reading age, which all show roughly the same outcome in my data. The one I have depicted below is the Flesh-Kincaid Grade level, which roughly tracks how many years of continuous schooling you would theoretically need to read and understand the text. The Commentariat is a largely very intellectual bunch and so a typical reading age of around 10.5 is unsurprising (a typical SSC/ACX comment is just barely less complex than an academic article in terms of vocabulary and construction, and the most complex comments significantly exceed this). The graph shows that comment complexity jumps by approximately half a grade level when SSC becomes ACX, but I’m a bit sceptical this is a ‘real’ effect. Most reading age formulae track sentence length very closely, and for some reason sentence length also changes significantly around this time. I could genuinely believe that sentence length changes on the switch to ACX, but I don’t think measures of reading age are designed to be valid if sentence length is changing for reasons unrelated to the complexity of text, so I don’t think you can confidently conclude the ACX comments are more sophisticated from this measure alone. Complexity - Conclusions Overall, it is appropriate to discover that my measure of ‘complexity of thought’ is itself complex. We do see very clear peaks in the SSC era, but not actually quite in the place we expected to see them. Similarly, we don’t always see the peak in the direction we expect (sentences are long and stale in the peak SSC years, which doesn’t seem like a recipe to promote engagement). Finally, we have a puzzle about how the Substack UI/UX causes significantly fewer sentences per comment. My conclusion here is that these data are completely consistent with a Commentariat who have a particular thing that they like, which peaked in 2017. This thing quantitively looks like long stale sentences, but actually might qualitatively feel different – like for example careful definitions of words which are then used repeatedly. As for why the peak sentence length is after peak engagement, my best guess is that people didn’t stop engaging at random; the people with the strongest commitment to the Commentariat stuck around longest, and these are also the people with the most respect for SSC cultural norms (leave long, thoughtful comments) and willingness to dedicate time to commenting. I have heard this described as ‘evaporative cooling’ before. This group of ‘fanatics’ hung around for a bit longer than everyone else, but eventually either they mostly left too or their influence on discussion norms was not strong enough to prevent a reversion towards the comment section mean (which tends towards shorter and less rigorous comments) What happened in 2016? From the data I extracted, it is clear something happened to the Commentariat in 2016(ish) and again in 2021 with the switch to ACX. Of the four measures I presented: Depth of engagement shows two clear directional reversals in 2016 and 2021
Inline links: here’s, here’s, The Compounding Loophole, this, this, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!EIYh!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff6ac85e8-5bee-420c-8c36-205ae697484c_749x394.png, evaporative cooling’
Links For October 2025
October 30, 2025 · Original source
Everyone who studies biochem asks themselves at some point “Why do cells need such long signaling pathways?” - ie so many chemicals whose only point is to activate other chemicals and so on in a chain, until the last chemical in the chain makes something happen. If I understand this paper right, it’s claiming that if each chemical has enough positive and negative inputs, this is analogous to a neural network, capable of making primitive decisions about cellular behavior. I asked some real biologists, who were not nearly as impressed with this thesis as I was and said that although these chains do help set cellular behavior, the analogy between levels of a chemical and the activation function of a neuron was too weak to carry so much weight. I still wonder whether insights from mechanistic interpretability could help us understand networks like these. 9: Political Symbols and Social Order: Confederate Monuments And Performative Violence in the Post-Reconstruction US South. Study claims that Confederate monuments reduced racial violence by serving as a substitute for it; when there was a Confederate monument in town, Southerners felt less need to enforce white supremacy in other ways. Therefore, removing racist monuments increases anti-black hate crimes. This finding is a little too cute, but I love imagining the world where we take it seriously and woke people demand a General Lee statue on every corner. 10: Sol Hando attends the Curtis Yarvin vs. Glen Weyl debate so you don’t have to. You won’t find many surprises about the content/arguments here, but it’s an interesting look at the personalities, the venue, and the debate as a cultural moment. 11: Pharmacy-blogger Benjamin Jolley becomes the latest Substacker to donate a kidney; congratulations Benjamin. My choice to donate felt right before I donated, it makes me feel satisfied that I did a good thing for another person, and it makes me feel like I’m making choices that are consistent with my belief system. The care team involved in the process were professional, exuded competence, and reassured me throughout the process. To others that I’ve discussed it with, it seems like a very large thing, which I suppose it is, but functionally the largest burden on my life so far has been that I haven’t been able to pick up my three year old when she asks me “hold me, daddy!”, because I’m not supposed to lift anything more than 10 pounds for the first 6 weeks after surgery. That burden will go away in 2 weeks. Completing all of the pre-operative blood draws, appointments, and other tests, plus my admission to the hospital in total took up about 100 hours of my life, mostly in the hospital recovering. While I hope that a few people in my sphere of influence will consider donating too (if you want to, filling out this form will connect you to your local hospital to start the process), my real hope is that we can solve the shortage of kidney donations more permanently. Zero people on the waitlist. People only on dialysis as a brief stopgap before they get their donated kidney. Let’s make that dream a reality. Inspiring words - but my personal strongest reaction was relief at learning that I wasn’t the only supposedly-competent health professional to bungle the urine jug. 12: The Case For A Technocratic Doge. This went an entirely different direction than I expected based on the title. 13: According to Justin Grimmer (X) and the Polarization Research Lab, there is been no change in support for political violence over the past two years: And related data from Jay Baxter here (X). 14: A surprising LLM failure mode: if you ask questions like “answer with a single word: were any mammoths still alive in December”, chatbots will often answer “yes”. It seems like they lack the natural human assumption that you meant last December, and are answering that there was some December during which a mammoth was alive. I find this weird because LLMs usually seem very good at navigating the many assumptions you need to communicate at all; this one stands as a strange exception. 15: Claim (X): some of the flags you see behind world leaders aren’t real cloth, but “flag cones” designed to avoid the problem where real flags might drape awkwardly and look wrong. 16: The oldest surviving joke book is the Philogelos (X) from ~300 AD. An Abderite hears that beans cause wind, so he hangs a sackful on his sailing ship.
Inline links: this paper, Political Symbols and Social Order: Confederate Monuments And Performative Violence in the Post-Reconstruction US South., attends the Curtis Yarvin vs. Glen Weyl debate, becomes the latest Substacker to donate a kidney, this form, The Case For A Technocratic Doge, Justin Grimmer (X), Polarization Research Lab, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!a9vN!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fda934f72-6a31-4cec-bccd-46f7610c7fb4_2008x654.jpeg, related data from Jay Baxter here (X), A surprising LLM failure mode, Claim (X), https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!47SM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F94cc58e5-9d0c-4ffe-8d75-340332cc1757_583x588.png, Philogelos