Dean
Article
Dean is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between September 13, 2024 and October 30, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Dean claims that these all overlook a major goal that motivated him and many of his comrades”; “The young Dean travels to the Philippines”; “plans were often very explicitly laid down by Dean’s comrades and superiors inside al-Qaeda”. It most often appears alongside al-Qaeda, Anthropic, COVID.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: September 13, 2024
- Last seen: October 30, 2025
Appears In
Related Pages
-
- al-Qaeda (2 shared issues)
-
- Anthropic (2 shared issues)
-
- COVID (2 shared issues)
-
- Dean Ball (2 shared issues)
-
- NVIDIA (2 shared issues)
-
- OpenAI (2 shared issues)
-
- Syria (2 shared issues)
-
- Wikipedia (2 shared issues)
-
- X (2 shared issues)
-
- 1999 apartment bombings (1 shared issues)
-
- 767 AD (1 shared issues)
-
- 80,000 Hours (1 shared issues)
External Links
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.
Aimen Dean (pseudonym) compares himself to the proverbial cat: he has nine lives, surviving every impossible situation and starting new lives under strange new conditions.
Cats pack their nine lives in an average of 12-18 years, which is a quite impressive speed, but Aimen Dean was committed to living his lives even quicker than that.
Looking at the list of chemical terror attacks, it still doesn’t seem to be a very practical weapon for them, as they have only managed to kill a handful of people so far, and none in Western countries. But certainly, they are trying, and some of their plots might have gone through if one of their few chemical weapons experts, a certain Aimen Dean, hadn’t always dutifully informed the MI6 about their plans.
Inline links: chemical terror attacks
Dean Ball wrote:
Inline links: wrote
Last year, I would have told Dean not to worry about us allying with the Left - the Left would never accept an alliance with the likes of us anyway. But I was surprised by how fairly socialist media covered the SB 1047 fight. For example, from Jacobin3:
Dean Ball calls this strategy “an unholy alliance with the unions and the misinformation crusaders and all the rest”, and equates it to selling our souls. I admit we have many cultural and ethical differences with socialists, that I don’t want to become them, that I can’t fully endorse them, and that I’m sure they feel the same way about me. But coalition politics doesn’t require perfect agreement. The US and its European allies were willing to form an “unholy alliance” with some unsavory socialists in order to defeat the Nazis, they did defeat the Nazis, and they kept their own commitments to capitalism and democracy intact.
40: Dean Ball proposes an AI pre-emption deal. Congressional Republicans worry that if all fifty states pass different AI bills, then there will be so many regulations that it’s near-impossible for AI companies to follow them all. They and Dean (a former White House policy advisor) have proposed federal preemption, where Congress bans states from regulating the industry and instead regulates it directly from DC. Ted Cruz tried to pass an AI preemption bill in June. But many people suspected that Congress would ban states from regulating AI, not regulate AI itself, and leave the field totally unregulated - so a combination of pro-regulation Democrats and anti-big-tech Republicans defeated the bill. If the pre-emptionists try again, their strategy will be to peel off some groups with pet issues from the anti-preemption coalition, promising them concessions (either that Congress will take their pet issue seriously, or that they’ll carve out an exception to the preemption where states can still regulate on their pet issue) to cajole them into switching sides. AI safety is a plausible beneficiary of such bargaining, given that the Republicans’ real enmity is towards other groups with more “woke” concerns. I think this is the context for Dean’s proposal - a potential draft of a preemption bill that tries to peel off AI safety people as a favored bargaining partner. And Anton Leicht argues that safetyists should take Dean’s preemption deal. Miles Brundage says (X) he “would like to see something non-trivially stronger, esp. around third-party auditing...but think his basic line of thinking is good.”