Astral Codex Ten

Dan Elton

5 min read

Dan Elton

Article

Dan Elton is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between August 23, 2021 and October 13, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Contact: Dan Elton”; “But Dan Elton is still skeptical”; “Dan Elton still thinks it’s bad and has written a post”. It most often appears alongside FDA, Scott, ACX.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 6
  • Issue count: 6
  • First seen: August 23, 2021
  • Last seen: October 13, 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.

Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places
August 23, 2021 · Original source
BOSTON/CAMBRIDGE, MA (RSVP) Contact: Dan Elton, Robi Rahman, bostonacx[at]gmail[dot]com, Facebook event, Google group, Facebook group Time: 5:00 PM, Sunday, September 5 Location: John F Kennedy Park in Cambridge, near the picnic tables. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/area.bricks.tribune
Inline links: RSVP, Facebook event, Google group, Facebook group, https://w3w.co/area.bricks.tribune
Highlights From The Comments On The FDA And Paxlovid
November 23, 2021 · Original source
But Dan Elton is still skeptical:
Inline links: is still skeptical
Open Thread 200
November 28, 2021 · Original source
6: In the highlights to the comments on my Paxlovid post, I posted some people’s explanations for why the FDA’s behavior wasn’t so bad. Dan Elton still thinks it’s bad and has written a post on why he rejects the explanations.
Inline links: still thinks it’s bad and has written a post on
Links For September 2024
September 12, 2024 · Original source
14: Why did Egyptian pharaohs so often marry their sisters? David Roman explains that it actually made sense by the logic of the time. Pharaohs didn’t necessarily consummate their marriages, and their heirs would usually be born from unrelated concubines, so the risk of inbreeding was low. What they really wanted was to avoid having to marry royal-line women off to anyone else - who could then create their own branches of the royal dynasty with competing claims to the throne. 15: The ominously named “cerebrolysin” has a positive reputation in the nootropics community, but Greg Fitzgerald and Dan Elton do a deep dive and find that its manufacturing process is so poor that it ends up being mostly random amino acids - ie it can’t possibly work the way its proponents suggest. Interestingly, cerebrolysin performed about the same as some definitely-real chemicals (eg melatonin, nicotine) on my old nootropics survey, re-emphasizing that most of what the survey measures is placebo effects. 16: Why is the Ukraine war a horrible grinding war of attrition like World War I, instead of resembling more dynamic modern conflicts? I asked this on an Open Thread and got some good answers: PolymorphicWetware says that the Soviets focused on artillery, so the post-Soviet armies of both Russia and Ukraine are both artillery-heavy. Artillery is better at defending your lines than breaking your enemies’, so both sides are great at pushing back enemy troops but bad at pushing forward themselves.
Inline links: David Roman explains that it actually made sense by the logic of the time, Greg Fitzgerald and Dan Elton do a deep dive, my old nootropics survey, PolymorphicWetware
In Defense Of The Amyloid Hypothesis
August 14, 2025 · Original source
I am grateful to Logan Thrasher Collins, Tommy Crow, Dan Elton, and Greg Fitzgerald for valuable feedback on this essay, and to Scott Alexander for edits which improved its structure and presentation.
ACX Grants Results 2025
October 13, 2025 · Original source
Dan Elton, $25K, for a “metascience observatory”. Dan wants to use AI to “generate metrics that shed light on the health of science” - what percent of studies in different fields are retracted, challenged, successfully reproduced, etc. Although many people are monitoring reproducibility, Dan thinks he can develop an AI pipeline to do it at massive scale, eventually expanding to all of science.
Inline links: metascience observatory