Astral Codex Ten

Sam Harris

18 min read

Sam Harris

Article

Sam Harris is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between August 23, 2022 and February 27, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “interviewed by Sam Harris”; “Owl lifted it from Sam Harris”; “Owl lifted it from Sam Harris, and it’s a story about a woman who described herself as ‘enlightened’“. It most often appears alongside China, Elon Musk, AGI.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 5
  • Issue count: 5
  • First seen: August 23, 2022
  • Last seen: February 27, 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.

Book Review: What We Owe The Future
August 23, 2022 · Original source
If the point of publishing a book is to have a public relations campaign, Will MacAskill is the greatest English writer since Shakespeare. He and his book What We Owe The Future have recently been featured in the New Yorker, New York Times, Vox, NPR, BBC, The Atlantic, Wired, and Boston Review. He’s been interviewed by Sam Harris, Ezra Klein, Tim Ferriss, Dwarkesh Patel, and Tyler Cowen. Tweeted about by Elon Musk, Andrew Yang, and Matt Yglesias. The publicity spike is no mystery: the effective altruist movement is well-funded and well-organized, they decided to burn “long-termism” into the collective consciousness, and they sure succeeded.
Inline links: What We Owe The Future, New Yorker, New York Times, Vox, NPR, BBC, The Atlantic, Wired, Boston Review, Sam Harris, Ezra Klein, Tim Ferriss, Dwarkesh Patel, Tyler Cowen, Elon Musk, Andrew Yang, Matt Yglesias
Can People Be Honestly Wrong About Their Own Experiences?
November 10, 2022 · Original source
From the Superb Owl blog: Can We Trust Self-Reported Mystical Experiences? A lot of the post addresses what seem to me to be easier problems. But one example stuck with me. Owl lifted it from Sam Harris, and it’s a story about a woman who described herself as ‘enlightened’ to a Tibetan Buddhist master.
Inline links: Can We Trust Self-Reported Mystical Experiences
Grading My 2018 Predictions For 2023
February 20, 2023 · Original source
The culture wars will continue to be marked by both sides scoring an unrelenting series of own-goals, with the victory going to whoever can make their supporters shut up first. The best case scenario for the Right is that Jordan Peterson’s ability to not instantly get ostracized and destroyed signals a new era of basically decent people being able to speak out against social justice; this launches a cascade of people doing so, and the vague group consisting of Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, etc coalesces into a perfectly respectable force no more controversial than the gun lobby or the pro-life movement or something. With social justice no longer able to enforce its own sacredness values against blasphemy, it loses a lot of credibility and ends up no more powerful or religion-like than eg Christianity. The best case scenario for the Left is that the alt-right makes some more noise, the media is able to relentlessly keep everyone’s focus on the alt-right, the words ALT-RIGHT get seared into the public consciousness every single day on every single news website, and everyone is so afraid of being associated with the alt-right that they shut up about any disagreements with the consensus they might have. I predict both of these will happen, but the Right’s win-scenario will come together faster and they will score a minor victory.
Links For January 2025
January 17, 2025 · Original source
I agree with this solution. 3: Ruxandra Teslo and Willy Chertman: The Case For Clinical Trial Abundance 4: This month in nominative determinism: NYT article calculating your chance of winning the lottery, by Victor Mather (h/t Yafah Edelman). 5: Someone is working on a dating site that uses your conversations with Claude to find a match. Link here, although so far it’s just a landing page where you can register interest (h/t @venturetwins) 6: The Lyttle Lytton Contest searches for the worst possible opening line for a novel; it’s been going on since 2001 and this year’s results are in. 7: Gary Marcus and Miles Brundage have made a bet about AI progress. I agree with @tamaybes and others in saying that Miles let Gary off too easily; Gary’s public statements all sound like “modern AI is mostly hype, it doesn’t really do anything like thinking”, but the bet is about things like “will AI make a Nobel Prize caliber scientific discovery by 2027?” and “will AI write Pulitzer-quality books by 2027?” I don’t blame Gary for taking the best terms he could find. But I am worried that if AI makes a Nobel-quality scientific discovery in 2026, but doesn’t quite write the Pulitzer-quality book, then Gary will get to claim victory over the AI optimists, whereas in fact that would be at probably the 95th percentile of fast timelines by most people’s estimate. 8: “The probability that cows (or other non-human animals) are experiencing constant bliss, lack tanha (craving, aversion, and the resulting suffering), or are "enlightened by default" is, by my estimation, very low”. 9: Recursive Adaptation (blog on addiction policy)’s predictions for 2025. 75% of FDA approval of GLP-1 for a substance use disorder by 2029! 10: In my post on the economics of GLP-1 receptor agonists (eg Ozempic), I wrote about how they’re currently widely available because of a loophole suspending patents during a shortage, and predicted there would be a big fight when the shortage was over. Sure enough, the FDA tried to declare that the shortage of tirzepatide (a next-generation Ozempic relative) was over, compounding pharmacies sued, and tirzepatide is still available while the issue goes through the courts (and will the administration have an opinion?) Also, compounding pharmacy access startup Mochi says that they will continue to prescribe even if the shortage is over, using another loophole saying doctors can do this for specific individual patients in cases of medical necessity. This is an extremely fake use of this loophole, but will the government be willing to call their bluff? 11: Jacob Falkovich has a blog on dating advice, which he plans to turn into a book of dating advice. I can’t really comment on the accuracy (my dating strategy tends to look more like waiting for women to send me emails saying “I like your blog, would you like to go on a date?” which probably doesn’t generalize), but I’ve had many good interactions with Jake, and he has a beautiful family which means he must be doing something right. Also, Jake is poly, and I sometimes wonder if poly people are the only ones qualified to give dating advice: if you’re monogamous, you either met your future spouse quickly (in which case you have no experience), dated for years without meeting your spouse (in which case you can’t be very good), or aren’t looking for a committed relationship at all (which is just pickup artistry, and follows very different dynamics). Poly people are the only ones who can break out of this trilemma! 12: Christ And Counterfactuals is a blog on effective altruism from a Christian perspective. Some previous attempts at this have felt kind of forced, but the first post I read here was actually pretty interesting. Richard Swinburne (apparently “the world’s best Christian philosopher”), thinks that: “[One] reason why it is good that the human race should sometimes be in an initial situation of considerable ignorance about the causes and effects of our actions, is this. If God abolished the need for rational inquiry and gave us from childhood strong true beliefs about the causes of things, that would make it too easy for us to make moral decisions. As things are in the actual world, most moral decisions are decisions taken in uncertainty about the consequences of our actions. I do not know for certain that if I smoke, I will get cancer; or that if I do not give money to some charity, people will starve. So we have to make our moral decisions on the basis of how probable it is that our actions will have various outcomes—how probable it is that I will get cancer if I continue to smoke (when I would not otherwise get cancer), or that someone will starve if I do not give. Since probabilities are so hard to assess, it is all too easy to persuade yourself that it is worth taking the chance that no harm will result from the less demanding decision (the decision which you have a strong desire to make). And even if you face up to a correct assessment of the probabilities, true dedication to the good is shown by doing the act which, although it is probably the best action, may have no good consequences at all.” (Could a Good God Permit so Much Suffering? A Debate, pp. 52-53.) This is pretty galaxy-brained, but something galaxy-brained must be going on for God to tolerate the existence of evil at all, and this is a surprisingly natural extension of some common premises on the subject. 13: Swedish study: diagnosing the marginal patient with a psychiatric condition makes their life worse. Of the two mechanisms they looked at, stigma seems more involved than drug side effects. My opinion: this study was done on conscripts undergoing a mandatory psych evaluation for the army, who had no previous reason to think they had a psych disease and had not sought treatment. This is a different situation from somebody who comes to a psychiatrist asking for relief from specific symptoms they have noticed. Also, Sweden c. 2005 is a different culture from America 2025 in terms of how much stigma a psych diagnosis carries. I think it’s possible that if you never considered that you had psychiatric problems, and were suddenly given a diagnosis in 2005 Sweden and told you couldn’t serve in the army, that’s likely to destabilize your self-image more than a person who knows they’re depressed going to a psychiatrist in 2025 US and getting antidepressants. 14: RIP Felix Hill, research scientist at DeepMind and mentor to many in the AI community. You can read his suicide note here, though the obvious content warning applies. He says he took ketamine for mild anxiety and it plunged him into an incredibly deep depression that he couldn’t get out of; he leaves his story behind as a warning for others. I appreciate his warning, but I wish he had said more about what dose he used; different people’s ketamine doses vary by almost two orders of magnitude, I’d previously thought that the low doses were pretty safe and the high doses were sketchy, and I would like to know whether I should update or not. 15: RIP Max Chiswick, professional poker player, effective altruist, and ACX reader. 16: Adrian Dittman, a Twitter account widely accused of being Elon Musk’s alt, has been revealed to be . . . a guy named Adrian Dittman. Congrats to Maia Crimew and the Spectator for actually investigating this, unlike many other news sources which spread the Musk conspiracy theory. Also, the people involved got banned from X for some reason, maybe because this qualified as doxxing Dittman. 17: Related: Musk claims to be among the top players in the world at several computer games. A veteran Path of Exile gamer presents evidence that Musk faked his PoE2 accomplishments by hiring a Chinese guy to play on his account. Some Musk supporters in the comments suggest that maybe he hires the Chinese guy to level up his account, but his accomplishments (eg speedruns) are still his own? 18: Related: Sam Harris says he has been friends with Musk since 2008, but he noticed a sudden shift for the worse in his personality around 2020 which made it impossible to stay friends with him. He gives the example of Musk losing a bet with him that there would be 35,000+ COVID cases in the US, refusing to pay up, and launching personal attacks on Sam when asked to do so. What happened? Some theories: Musk turned right-wing, which ended his friendship with Sam for the same reason political differences have always ended friendships (but then what about the bet, which seems like objectively bad behavior?)
Inline links: this, The Case For Clinical Trial Abundance, NYT article calculating your chance of winning the lottery, here, @venturetwins, this year’s results are in, Gary Marcus and Miles Brundage have made a bet about AI progress, @tamaybes, by my estimation, Recursive Adaptation, my post on, the FDA tried to declare, will continue to prescribe, a blog on dating advice, Christ And Counterfactuals, the first post I read here, diagnosing the marginal patient with a psychiatric condition makes their life worse, RIP, here, RIP, a guy named Adrian Dittman, got banned from X for some reason, presents evidence
Links For February 2025
February 27, 2025 · Original source
You can see more examples and comparisons of different models here (X). 9: Related: is AI a better poet than famous bad poet William McGonagall? 10: Last month I linked Sam Harris’ claim that Elon Musk seemed to change into a different person around the start of the pandemic. I recently saw a Reddit thread asking Tesla employees for their opinion. Unfortunately, the best answer by an actual employee got deleted; the site says it was by a mod and not the original author, but I don’t know whether to trust it, and don’t want to repost something in its entirety if the author might have wanted it hidden. But I hope it won’t cause too much trouble to quote a few key sentences: I've personally had conversations with Elon back in 2018. He was polite, listened, and genuinely cared about both the employees and Tesla's mission. But something changed during the COVID-19 pandemic, and now he's no longer the role model he once was. And Desmolysium on Why Is Elon Musk So Impulsive? I think the article gets some of its psychiatry wrong (it would be bizarre and basically unprecedented for bupropion to radically change someone’s personality) but I appreciate the thoughtful analysis. And re sleep deprivation: 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 $10,000 per life saved. The US government is willing to spend at least a thousand times this much to save an American life.
Inline links: here (X), is AI a better poet than famous bad poet William McGonagall, Sam Harris’ claim, Why Is Elon Musk So Impulsive?, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!1zjD!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fef2308ba-2204-4232-ba14-eeef99c637a9_670x752.png, 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