Astral Codex Ten

Mark Zuckerberg

14 min read

Mark Zuckerberg

Article

Mark Zuckerberg is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 19 times across 19 issues between March 25, 2021 and January 06, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “Imagine that Mark Zuckerberg decided he personally really disliked BLM”; “Open Letter From The BMJ To Mark Zuckerberg”; “Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg says that AI will be fine and that warning people about existential risk is “irresponsible”“. It most often appears alongside facebook, China, US.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 19
  • Issue count: 19
  • First seen: March 25, 2021
  • Last seen: January 06, 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.

More Antifragile, Diversity Libertarianism, And Corporate Censorship
March 25, 2021 · Original source
Right now there's religious pressure on tech companies to conform. Someone on Twitter pointed out that tech censoring Parler isn't a sign of their strength, but of their weakness. Imagine that Mark Zuckerberg decided he personally really disliked BLM, and he was going to censor BLM and any people/organizations/apps that promoted it from Facebook. Do you think he would succeed? Do you think he could stay CEO of Facebook after he was found to be doing this? Mark Zuckerberg and Big Tech in general are as much slaves to the prevailing religion as the rest of us; their "power" is the power to choose between medium vs. high levels of conformity.
Links For February
February 22, 2022 · Original source
36: An interesting recent spat between BMJ and Facebook: BMJ, one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world) published some article about poor clinical research practices at a vaccine company. Some anti-vaxxers shared it on Facebook, and Facebook responded by adding their “missing context” tag to the BMJ article. This made the BMJ angry (well, this plus Facebook’s explanation which called the BMJ a “news blog”), so the editors wrote an Open Letter From The BMJ To Mark Zuckerberg, saying “actually, we are one of the most powerful medical establishment institutions in the world, you can’t do this to us”. The fact checker who Facebook subcontracts their censorship decisions to, Lead Stories, then wrote a surprisingly thoughtful response saying: they thought the BMJ article lacked important context, that was all they told Facebook, and they stand by their decision even after learning that the BMJ is much more prestigious and important than they thought. I’m having trouble figuring out what emotions to have here: on the one hand I hate censorship, but on the other hand seeing the BMJ seething at their inability to pull rank is oddly satisfying. Also, this same thing apparently happened around the same time with Instagram and the Cochrane Collaboration.
Inline links: Open Letter From The BMJ To Mark Zuckerberg, a surprisingly thoughtful, Instagram and the Cochrane Collaboration
Why Not Slow AI Progress?
August 08, 2022 · Original source
If OpenAI gets superintelligence in 2040, they’ll probably be willing to try whatever half-baked alignment measures researchers have figured out by then, even if that adds time and expense. Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg says that AI will be fine and that warning people about existential risk is “irresponsible”.
Inline links: says that
Highlights From The Comments On Billionaire Replaceability
September 22, 2022 · Original source
I’m still not sure about this line of thought. How is this situation? Do we think Mark Zuckerberg wouldn’t have founded Facebook, or Bill Gates Microsoft, if he could only get $1 billion? Can people really tell the difference between $10 billion and $100 billion? Has Jeff Bezos even spent $10 billion?
I think this is actually a significant problem w/ Scott's last argument - the founders of Friendster and Myspace aren't infamously super-rich, because unlike Zuck, they were not able to keep their thing going strong, in the face of competition, over a long period of time. Getting in first is a huge advantage - but then competition comes in and challenges you. If you don't rise to that challenge, you may walk away with some I-did-it-first money, but the competition will wind up getting the big pot. If you consistently whoop the competition, it's either because you're providing better value, or because you're shrewder at business (this latter part is something the left can perhaps legit complain about, but it's a hard thing to correct accurately). To the extent you're providing better value than all the other competitors who come along over the years, you should reap proportionate rewards. So it is w/ amazon - no one else has 2 day shipping afaik. This accords w/ a general statement about profit margins and competition - low competition should naturally lead to high profit margins, because you're apparently doing something so hard or risky that hardly anyone else can manage to pull it off (this argument falls apart completely when you have low competition because you're exploiting regulation, e.g. IP laws, or when you have a true monopoly).
Universe-Hopping Through Substack
September 29, 2022 · Original source
“I was thinking at the time, that Mark Zuckerberg was never hot gluing anything at Facebook – so maybe this is not a good idea,” recalls Chesky.
If The Media Reported On Other Things Like It Does Effective Altruism
November 25, 2022 · Original source
4. Mark Zuckerberg is a good father and his children love him very much. Obviously this can only be because he’s using his photogenic happy family to “whitewash” his reputation and distract from Facebook’s complicity in spreading misinformation. We need to make it harder for people to be nice to their children, so that the masses don’t keep falling for this ploy.
23
February 14, 2023 · Original source
Thiel describes how PayPal solved this: they advertised really heavily within the small community of eBay power users, who often buy and sell to other eBay power users. Eventually many of these people started using PayPal, and then other people who might want to transact with eBay power users started using it, and so on to the rest of society. Mark Zuckerberg solved this by starting with Harvard students, then other college students, and then the rest of the world.
OpenAI's "Planning For AGI And Beyond"
March 01, 2023 · Original source
“The good people” (usually the people making this argument are referring to themselves) currently have the lead. They’re some amount of progress (let’s say two years) ahead of “the bad people” (usually some combination of Mark Zuckerberg and China). If they slow down for two years now, the bad people will catch up to them, and they’ll no longer be setting the pace.
Most Technologies Aren't Races
April 05, 2023 · Original source
Even in the unlikely scenario where AI causes a singularity and remains aligned, I have trouble worrying too much about races. The whole point of a singularity is that it’s hard to imagine what happens on the other side of it. I care a lot how much relative power Xi Jinping, Mark Zuckerberg, and Joe Biden have today, but I don’t know how much I care about them after a singularity.
“Wouldn’t Mark Zuckerberg perpetuate structural racism?” You will be able to change your race, age, gender, species, and state of matter at will. Nobody will even remember what race you were. If for some reason the glowing clouds of plasma that used to be black people have smaller customized personal utopian megastructures than the glowing clouds of plasma that used to be white people, you can ask the brain the size of Jupiter how to solve it, and it will tell you (I bet it involves using slightly different euphemisms for things, that’s always been the answer so far).
And yeah, that “they’re not actively a sadist” clause is doing a lot of work. I want whoever rules the post-singularity future to have enough decency to avoid ruining it, and to take the Jupiter-sized brain’s advice when it has some. I think any of Xi, Biden, or Zuckerberg meet this low bar. There are some ideologues and terrible people who don’t, but they seem far away from the cutting edge of AI.
Hypergamy: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
May 24, 2023 · Original source
And what about income? If women marry hypergamously in search of men who can provide for them, wouldn’t we expect income to be the most direct measure of this ability? Priscilla Chan (medical school graduate) married Mark Zuckerberg (college dropout), but probably doesn’t feel like she got a raw deal or “married down”. Should we be looking at this too?
Highlights From The Comments On Last Week's Model Cities Post
September 11, 2023 · Original source
Just because the city is founded by elites doesn’t mean it will be inhabited by them. Mark Zuckerberg is an elite, but that doesn’t mean Facebook is “a website for elites”. No elite wants to live in Solano County (unless it’s their summer ranch home or something). The natural demographic is people priced out of the Bay.
What Ever Happened To Neoreaction?
December 07, 2023 · Original source
Some individual neoreactionaries saw which way the wind was blowing and re-identified as alt-right in time to maintain some influence, but the two movements were philosophically and culturally incompatible. The alt-right was ironic, populist, communicated in tweets and greentexts, and - when it had any intellectual aspirations at all - leaned towards a grandiose Continental style. Neoreaction was dead serious, communicated in 10,000 word essays with lots of statistics, and thought Mark Zuckerberg was cool. Instead of any kind of merger, the alt-right just won, and neoreaction just lost.
Altruism And Vitalism As Fellow Travelers
August 06, 2024 · Original source
An obvious counterexample to this is all the extremely successful people from privileged upbringings. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg all had great childhoods. So did Caesar and Napoleon. So did Einstein and von Neumann. Meanwhile, there are millions of poor people and war victims who have lived lives of constant horrible trauma without much benefit. If success and creativity were proportional to suffering, the West would have to ban refugees from the Gaza Strip, lest they take all the spots in the best colleges and form an elite billionaire overclass.
This isn’t to say that there isn’t some level of spoiling that can mess someone up. I just think it’s more than Mark Zuckerberg (who was raised by two loving parents in an upper class suburb and went to prep school) got. If an altruist’s goal is to give everyone the equivalent of a childhood raised by loving parents in a happy suburb with great schools, I don’t think a vitalist can complain.
How Often Do Men Think About Rome?
September 24, 2024 · Original source
Learned about Mark Zuckerberg's kids names.
Your Review: School
July 04, 2025 · Original source
Bill Gates has funded efforts like the Gates Foundation’s "Next Generation Learning Challenges," promoting software-driven schools where algorithms tailor lessons to each student. Mark Zuckerberg donated $100 million to Newark Public Schools in 2010, largely earmarked for "personalized learning" tech. Zuckerberg echoed a common critique of traditional education, saying that it’s absurd to teach all students "the same material at the same pace in the same way.” These arguments resonate with many parents and reformers. It seems obvious: if some children grasp fractions in a week while others need a month, why not let them move at their own pace?
Press Any Key For Bay Area House Party
July 21, 2025 · Original source
"Hey man," says Mark Zuckerberg, grabbing your wrist. "You wanna come build superintelligence at Meta? I'll give you five million, all cash."
Mark Zuckerberg, heavily bruised and covered in glitter, stands in front of the smoking ruins of your wheelchair and laughs maniacally. He is holding a small silver box he has extracted from one of the fragments. “I got it!” he shouts. “I got the last GPU in San Francisco!”
“Let me guess,” you say, finding the host. “You got Zucked.”
Book Review: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
September 11, 2025 · Original source
Eliezer Yudkowsky, at his best, has leaps of genius nobody else can match. Fifteen years ago, he decided that the best way to something something AI safety was to write a Harry Potter fanfiction. Many people at the time (including me) gingerly suggested that maybe this was not optimal time management for someone who was approximately the only person working full-time on humanity’s most pressing problem. He totally demolished us and proved us wronger than anyone has ever been wrong before. Hundreds of thousands of people read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, it got lavish positive reviews in Syfy, Vice, and The Atlantic, and it basically one-shotted a substantial percent of the world’s smartest STEM undergrads. Fifteen years later, I still meet bright young MIT students who tell me they’re working on AI safety, and when I ask them why in public they say something about their advisor, and then later in private they admit it was the fanfic. Valuing the time of the average AI genius at the rate set by Sam Altman (let alone Mark Zuckerberg), HPMOR probably bought Eliezer a few billion dollars in free labor. Just a totally inconceivable level of victory.
Why AI Safety Won't Make America Lose The Race With China
November 26, 2025 · Original source
If the US knows about Chinese chip smuggling strategies, why can’t it crack down? The main barriers are a combination of corporate lobbying and poor funding. That is, chip companies want to continue to sell to Singapore and Malaysia without too many awkward questions about where the chips end up. And the Bureau of Industry and Security, the government department charged with countering smuggling, gets about $50 million/year to spend on chips, which experts say is not enough to plug all the holes. To put that number in context, Mark Zuckerberg recently made job offers as high as $1 billion per AI researcher. If America cared about winning the race against China even a tenth as much as Mark Zuckerberg cares about winning the race against OpenAI, we would be in a much better position!
Highlights From The Comments On Boomers
January 06, 2026 · Original source
This Boomers vs Millennials framing is explained very well in this email exchange between Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg, I recommend the whole email exchange but I’ll heavily quote this reply from Thiel.
Inline links: this reply from Thiel