Astral Codex Ten

Scott Aaronson

26 min read

Scott Aaronson

Article

Scott Aaronson is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 22 times across 22 issues between March 16, 2021 and January 26, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “see eg Scott Aaronson’s discussion here”; “physics blogger Scott Aaronson mentioned his own experience”; “Relevant Scott Aaronson lecture and SSC story”. It most often appears alongside Trump, ACX, Elon Musk.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 22
  • Issue count: 22
  • First seen: March 16, 2021
  • Last seen: January 26, 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.

Sleep Is The Mate Of Death
March 16, 2021 · Original source
R&K start by reviewing the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis of sleep developed by neuroscientist Giulio Tononi (equally famous around these parts for his integrated information theory of consciousness, see eg Scott Aaronson's discussion here). As you learn stuff throughout the day, your brain builds new synaptic connections representing what you learned. For example, as you read this article connecting depression and sleep, your brain might be forming new synapses between neurons storing information about these two concepts (or strengthening existing synapses). That means as time goes on your brain will get more and more synapses, the synapses will become stronger and stronger, and everything will be more and more connected to everything else. But synapses take lots of energy to maintain. And "everything is maximally connected to everything else" works well for conspiracy theorists and Zen masters, but less well for neural networks trying to perform specific computations.
Inline links: synaptic homeostasis hypothesis of sleep, integrated information theory of consciousness, here
The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars
May 10, 2021 · Original source
I was heavily involved in this discourse, more than in any other part of this history, so I am a bad person to have writing about it (some people would omit the "to have writing about it" from that sentence). But I do want to higlight the "climax", which occurred when physics blogger Scott Aaronson mentioned his own experience a few hundred comments down in an unrelated essay. He self-disclosed that he had been really affected by this kind of thing when he was younger, ended up convinced that he was a bad person for feeling sexual attraction to women, and had no idea what to do about it. After becoming suicidal, he was referred to a psychiatrist, who he asked to "chemically castrate" him (obviously he refused). It took him years to get over his hangups and misery enough to ask anybody out, although he was eventually able to get married and have a happy family. After disclosing all this, he said that he remains "97% on board with the program of feminism", but that he wishes they would tone down the condemnation of shy male nerds in particular.
Inline links: mentioned his own experience
Links For June
June 23, 2021 · Original source
25: Related: when surveyed privately, most Saudi men support women working outside the home. But in public they oppose it because they think everyone else opposes it and don’t want to get in trouble! Relevant Scott Aaronson lecture and SSC story.
Inline links: when surveyed privately, most Saudi men support women working outside the home, Scott Aaronson lecture, SSC story
So You Want To Run A Microgrants Program
February 09, 2022 · Original source
A second possible answer: no big foundation exactly captures your beliefs and values. Scott Aaronson ran a grants round recently and donated entirely to causes involved in STEM education. Maybe he thinks STEM education is more important than other big players believe (which actually seems very plausible). Or maybe his value system puts less emphasis on pleasure vs. suffering compared to the human urge toward deep understanding of Nature, and he feels incompletely aligned with OpenPhil who eg donate $786,830 to crustacean welfare.
Inline links: ran a grants round recently, donate $786,830 to crustacean welfare
A third possible answer: you have no absolute advantage, but you do have a comparative advantage. Scott Aaronson was both a student and professor at one of the math education groups he donated to, knew people who had been to the others, and had readers of his (math-focused) blog advise him on others still. I totally believe Aaronson is at least as qualified to evaluate math education as big foundations are, especially math-education-as-understood-and-appreciated-by-Scott-Aaronson’s-values. I gave several grants to prediction markets, something I’m plausibly an expert on.
Information Markets, Decision Markets, Attention Markets, Action Markets
March 28, 2022 · Original source
Think of eg physics crackpots sending their manifestos to Scott Aaronson. After a while, Aaronson gets tired of reading every manifesto in detail. If there could be a prediction market for whether Aaronson would agree the manifesto contained a revolutionary insight, Aaronson could only read the ones that scored above some bar.
Your Book Review: Consciousness And The Brain
May 13, 2022 · Original source
So should we say that the canton of Glarus becomes conscious once a year? Probably... not. There are similarities, and after reading this review you might understand what I mean if I call the Landsgemeinde a conscious event of Glarus. But in any other context, I would just cause utter confusion. More importantly, it goes against the intuitive meaning of consciousness for 99% of the people. So if we want to describe the concept of "all-parts-communicate-and-are-coherent-and-Granger-causal", then we should better invent a new name for it. Actually, there have been attempts to formalize and measure this, most famously the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) by Giulio Tononi. But the hope that this could give a formal definition of consciousness has the same problem as the idea that the Landsgemeinde is conscious. In a great rebuttal, Scott Aaronson has discussed the idea that IIT captures consciousness, and concluded that it "is wrong — demonstrably wrong, for reasons that go to its core. [This] puts it in something like the top 2% of all mathematical theories of consciousness ever proposed. Almost all competing theories of consciousness, it seems to me, have been so vague, fluffy, and malleable that they can only aspire to wrongness."
Inline links: In a great rebuttal
Open Thread 226
May 30, 2022 · Original source
2: Related: the rationalist/EA community has a week-long program on rationality at Oxford this summer for mathematically talented youth (ages 16 - 20). Past speakers have included Scott Aaronson and Stephen Wolfram, this year’s speakers TBD. This one is free, travel stipends potentially available if needed. If interested, apply here before June 12.
Inline links: program on rationality
Your Book Review: Viral
July 30, 2022 · Original source
Scott Aaronson’s review of Viral
Inline links: Scott Aaronson’s review of
Trying Again On Fideism
February 15, 2023 · Original source
Chris was too nice to really defend himself, but a few other people posted what I think of as partial arguments for the position I mocked as "fideism". For example, Scott Aaronson:
Inline links: Scott Aaronson
Eliezer Yudkowsky’s position is Let Them Debate College Students. I’m not a college student, but I’m not Anthony Fauci either, and I am known for blogging about extremely dignified ideas like the possibility that the terrible Harry Potter fanfiction My Immortal is secretly an alchemical allegory. I haven’t seen ivermectin advocates using “Scott takes this seriously enough to argue against it!” as an argument, and I have seen them getting angry about it and writing long responses trying to prove me wrong. Sometimes they have used me getting some points wrong as a positive argument, and I would be open to the argument that I failed in not arguing against it well enough that they couldn’t do that, but nobody has been making that argument, and if they did, then it would imply that people who are smarter than me should take over the job, which I endorse. III. I worry Scott Aaronson thinks I’m saying you shouldn’t trust the experts, and instead you should always think for yourself. I’m definitely not trying to say that. I’ve tried to be pretty clear that I think experts are right remarkably often, by some standards basically 100% of the time - I realize how crazy that sounds, and “by some standards” is doing a lot of the work there, but see Learning To Love Scientific Consensus for more. Bounded Distrust also helps explain what I mean here. I also try to be pretty clear that reasoning is extremely hard, it’s very easy to get everything wrong, and if you try to do it then a default option is to get everything wrong and humiliate yourself. I describe that happening to me here, and presumably it also happens to other people sometimes. What I do think is that “trust the experts” is an extremely exploitable heuristic, which leads everyone to put up a veneer of “being the experts” and demand that you trust them. I come back to this example again and again, but only because it’s so blatant: the New York Times ran an article saying that only 36% of economists supported school vouchers, with a strong implication that the profession was majority against. If you checked their sources, you would find that actually, it was 36% in favor, 19% against, 46% unsure or not responding. If you are too quick to seek epistemic closure because “you have to trust the experts”, you will be easy prey to people misrepresenting what they are saying. I come back to this example less often, because it could get me in trouble, but when people do formal anonymous surveys of IQ scientists, they find that most of them believe different races have different IQs and that a substantial portion of the difference is genetic. I don’t think most New York Times readers would identify this as the scientific consensus. So either the surveys - which are pretty official and published in peer-reviewed journals - have managed to compellingly misrepresent expert consensus, or the impressions people get from the media have, or “expert consensus” is extremely variable and complicated and can’t be reflected by a single number or position. And I genuinely think this is part of why ivermectin conspiracies took off in the first place. We say “trust science” and “trust experts”. But there were lots of studies that showed ivermectin worked - aren’t those science? And Pierre Kory MD, an specialist in severe respiratory illnesses who wrote a well-regarded textbook, supports it - isn’t he an expert? Isn’t it plausible that the science and the experts are right, and the media and the government and Big Pharma are wrong? This is part of what happens when people reify the mantras instead of using them as pointers to more complicated concepts like “reasoning is hard” and “here are the 28,491 rules you need to keep in mind when reading a scientific study.” IV. All of this still feels rambly and like it’s failing to connect. Instead, let me try describing exactly what I would advice I would give young people opening an Internet connection for the first time: You are not immune to conspiracy theories. You have probably developed a false sense of security by encountering many dumb conspiracy theories and feeling no temptation to believe them. These theories were designed to trap people very different from you; others will be aimed in your direction. The more certain you are of your own infallibility, the less aware you will be, and the worse your chances. The ones that get you won’t look like conspiracy theories to you (though they might to other people). When you run into conspiracy theories you don’t believe, feel free to ignore them. If you decide to engage, don’t mock them or feel superior. Think “there, but for the grace of God, go I.” Get a sense of what the arguments for the conspiracy theory look like - not from skeptics trying to mock them, but from the horse’s mouth - so you have a sense of what false arguments look like. Ask yourself what habits of mind it would have taken the people affected by the theory to successfully resist it. Ask yourself if you have those habits of mind. Yes? ARE YOU SURE? To a first approximation, trust experts over your own judgment. If people are trying to confuse you about who the experts are, then to a second approximation trust prestigious people and big institutions, including professors at top colleges, journalists at major newspapers, professional groups with names like the American ______ Association, and the government. You might ask: Don’t governments and other big institutions have biases? Won’t they sometimes be wrong or deceptive? And even if you’ve lucked into the one country and historical era where the government 100% tells the truth and the intellectuals have no biases, doesn’t someone need to keep the flame of suspicion alive so that it’s available to people in other, less fortunate countries and eras? The answer is: absolutely, yes, but also this is how conspiracy theories get you. They will claim that they are the special case where you need to take up the mantle of Galileo and Frederick Douglass and Jane Jacobs and all those people who stood up to the intellectual authorities and power structures of their own time. The whole point of “you are not immune to conspiracy theories” is that the evidence for them can sound convincing because something like it is sort of true. This is equally so for second-level claims like “prestigious institutions are fallible and biased”. Probably something like “make a principled precommitment never to disagree with prestigious institutions until you are at least 30 and have a graduate degree in at least one subject” would be good advice, but nobody would take that advice, and taking it too seriously might crush some kind of important human spirit, so I won’t assert this. But always have in the back of your mind that you live in a world where it’s sort of good advice. If you feel tempted to believe something that has red flags for being a conspiracy theory, at least keep track of the Inside vs. Outside View. Say “on the Inside View, this feels like the evidence is overwhelming; on the Outside View, it sounds like a classic conspiracy theory”. You don’t necessarily have to resolve this discomfort right away. You can walk around with an annoying knot in your beliefs, even if it’s not fun. Look for the strongest evidence against the idea. Keep in mind important possibilities like: Is it possible that everyone who disagrees with the idea is a bad mean cruel stupid person, but also, the idea really is false?
Inline links: Let Them Debate College Students, like the possibility that the terrible Harry Potter fanfiction My Immortal is secretly an alchemical allegory, Learning To Love Scientific Consensus, Bounded Distrust, happening to me here, ran an article, ARE YOU SURE?
Kelly Bets On Civilization
March 07, 2023 · Original source
Scott Aaronson makes the case for being less than maximally hostile to AI development:
Inline links: makes the case
It’s not that you should never do this. Every technology has some risk of destroying the world; the first time someone tried vaccination, there was an 0.000000001% chance it could have resulted in some weird super-pathogen that killed everybody. I agree with Scott Aaronson: a world where nobody ever tries to create AI at all, until we die of something else a century or two later, is pretty depressing.
Why I Am Not (As Much Of) A Doomer (As Some People)
March 14, 2023 · Original source
Scott Aaronson says says 2%
Inline links: says 2%
Links For April 2023
April 20, 2023 · Original source
16: The Extended IQ Classification (Classified) 17: Eliezer in TIME Magazine. Related: 18: Related: interview with Ryan Kupyn, winner of the 2022 ACX Forecasting contest, on forecasting AGI: 19: Related: Geoffrey Hinton, probably the most accomplished AI scientist in the world, says that “until quite recently, I thought it was going to be like 20 to 50 years before we have general purpose AI, and now I think it may be 20 years or less”. Also that AI wiping out humanity is “not inconceivable . . . that’s all I’ll say”. 20: Related: you’ve probably all seen this by now, but Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter. 30,000 people - including deep learning pioneer Yoshua Bengio, former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Gary Marcus, and MIRI director Nate Soares - have signed a letter calling for a six month pause on training AIs bigger than GPT-4. Many people have made fun of this, noting that nobody has an argument for why a six month delay would help anything. And an additional reason for eye-rolling: training AIs larger than GPT-4 is extremely expensive and hard, the most likely people to do it within a six month timespan are OpenAI themselves, and they’ve announced they’re taking a break and not planning on doing this, so the letter is demanding a stop to something which probably won’t happen anyway. I think it’s intended be a compromise between many people all vaguely against current levels of AI progress for different reasons (Scott Aaronson says - I can’t tell how seriously - that some are AI researchers who want to be able to publish papers on the current generation of AI without them becoming obsolete halfway through peer review), most of them are thinking of it as mood-affiliation-y “let’s make noise and show lots of people are worried about AI and want action”, and “a six month pause” was a sufficiently vague proposal that it didn’t prevent any of these people from signing. You could have done just as well with a letter saying “AI BAD”, except that people would have taken it less seriously. Less cynically, FLI (the group behind the letter) has put out a list of concrete policy proposals they would like people to discuss during the pause. [update: here’s Max Tegmark from FLI explaining what he hopes to achieve with the letter/pause] The alignment community always figured their concerns sounded too weird for normal people to care about, that politics was a lost cause, and that our best hope lay in technical research. They also hoped that sometime in the future there would be a “fire alarm” - something would happen to get people and policy-makers’ attention - and then the political route would open up. I think we always imagined this as some AI-initiated disaster destroying a city or something. I personally am pretty surprised it was just “GPT-4 got released and was very good”. Still, that is what happened, and I’m updating. In fact, I’ve updated so far that I’m starting to worry that the problem won’t be building a political coalition against unsafe AI, the problem will be not overshooting and banning all AI forever. I’m against this: I think society’s current track is toward other existential risks or dystopia, that AI could kill everybody but could also create post-scarcity and an end to most of our current problems, and that at some point (not yet!) the risk of continuing the current path indefinitely becomes worse than the risk of just going with AI and seeing what happens. In my ideal world, we would take ten or twenty years to go really slowly with AI, pouring lots of resources into alignment the whole time - but eventually, we would take the plunge. Everything I’ve said on this topic in the has been about giving us that breathing room and those resources. Still, I also want to make sure we don’t totally kill AI the way we’ve killed (to various degrees) nuclear power, supersonic flight, and genetic engineering. I’m still trying to calibrate what that means I should be doing, but I have a lot of respect for everyone on all sides. Except the people making terrible arguments (you know who you are!) 21: I’m not sure what this means in real life or why this would have changed, but congratulations to Peter Thiel, I guess: 22: This month in institution design: The Pear Ring is a distinctive ring you can wear to signal that you’re single and interested in people introducing themselves or flirting with you. Good idea in a vacuum, but I’m worried about the two usual banes of things like this - how do you build up a critical mass who understand the signal, and how do you prevent negative selection (even if it’s just “selection for weird people who like weird institution design things”?) Also, this is one of the rare cases where a startup is selling a practical product and I’d prefer a subscription-based Internet Of Things monstrosity - surely it would be even better if you spotted someone wearing the ring and then you could use your smartphone to call up their dating profile. 23: A few years ago I wrote Trump: A Setback For Trumpism, about how after Trump was elected, support for most of his policies (including immigration restrictions) fell. A new paper confirms that this is a general pattern whenever right-wing populists win an election. I continue to be interested in why this is true for right-wing populists in particular. 24: 200 Concrete Problems In AI Interpretability. “You can note which you're working on, and reach out to other people doing the same.” 25: Some good discussion of Nayib Bukele’s apparently successful anti-gang crackdown in El Salvador: Richard Hanania presents evidence that it’s not just a “deal with the gangs”, it’s a real crackdown that should be embarrassing to other countries that choose not to do this.
Inline links: The Extended IQ Classification (Classified), Eliezer in TIME Magazine, says that, Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter, says, a list of concrete policy proposals they would like people to discuss during the pause, here’s Max Tegmark, https://twitter.com/tedgioia/status/1642205821256736768, Pear Ring, Trump: A Setback For Trumpism, A new paper confirms, why this is true for right-wing populists in particular, 200 Concrete Problems In AI Interpretability, Richard Hanania
Highlights From The Comments On The Academic Job Market
June 06, 2023 · Original source
Scott Aaronson (blog) writes:
Inline links: blog, writes
Open Thread 306
December 11, 2023 · Original source
1: Comments of the week: Timothy Johnson tries to explain why Taylor Swift is such a big deal; Waldo explains why regulated businesses might sue their regulators even when trying to stay on their good side; and Scott Aaronson sets the record straight on his beliefs about AI risk. And I previously said I couldn’t find the source of a poll claiming that the median American estimated a 26% chance AI would kill all humans, but an alert reader found it here. Remember that ordinary people aren’t good at asserting probabilities, and also that medians don’t always present the full picture; see the link for more details.
Inline links: why Taylor Swift is such a big deal, why regulated businesses might sue their regulators even when trying to stay on their good side, sets the record straight on his beliefs about AI risk, found it here
AI Sleeper Agents
January 16, 2024 · Original source
Scott Aaronson sometimes equates this kind of issue to “the grue problem” in philosophy. The problem goes: you look at grass and it looks green. This provides some evidence that grass is green. But it also provides evidence that grass is “grue”, a mythical color which is green until 1/1/2030, then blue afterwards. The predictions of both theories are confirmed equally. So why do you think that grass is green and not grue? The answer has to have something to do with our brains preferring simpler theories. AIs also seem to have this ability to prefer “green” over “grue” built in, so good job there.
Inline links: “the grue problem”
24
January 30, 2024 · Original source
Here’s an experiment courtesy of Metaculus, Scott Aaronson, and Boaz Barak. Aaronson and Barak wrote a blog post trying to divide AI scenarios into five categories, which Metaculus summarizes as:
Links For December 2024
December 17, 2024 · Original source
9: The guy who accidentally threw away a hard drive with $700 million in Bitcoin is suing the city to let him search the landfill. I actually think the city (Newport, Wales) comes out looking pretty bad here. The guy is obviously miserable thinking about his lost chance at wealth, he’s promised them 10% which could be a big windfall to this medium-sized community, and their only argument against is “regulations say we can’t let the public into the landfill”. Is this what Scott Aaronson calls a blankface?
Inline links: is suing the city to let him search the landfill, calls a blankface
Links For February 2025
February 27, 2025 · Original source
36: Boaz Barak (friend of Scott Aaronson’s, now working on OpenAI alignment team) has six thoughts on AI safety. It’s all pretty moderate and thoughtful stuff - what I find interesting about it is that the acknowledgments say Sam Altman provided feedback (although “do[es] not necessarily endorse any of its views”). I think this is a useful window into OpenAI’s current alignment thinking, or at least into the fact that they currently have alignment thinking. Not much to complain about in terms of specifics and glad people like Boaz are involved.
Inline links: six thoughts on AI safety
Open Thread 393
August 04, 2025 · Original source
2: Lighthaven (the rationalist community campus in Berkeley) is hosting Inkhaven - a blogging bootcamp aimed at people who want to blog more but struggle with motivation. Selected fellows will live on site for the month of November, and write one blog post per day or else be kicked out. There will be some mentors around including Gwern, Scott Aaronson, and me. I don’t want to over-endorse this - I have no idea whether it will create any kind of lasting motivation or tendency that sticks around after the program, for most people blogging is a low-reward activity, and the cost is pretty steep - but I think it’s a good experiment for Lighthaven to try, and trust potential applicants to make good choices for their own situation. Cost is $2,000 (program only) to $3,500 (program plus housing for one month) to $4,700 (program _ housing + meals). Some financial assistance available. Apply here. And yeah, they should have called it “Writehaven”.
Inline links: Inkhaven, here
The New AI Consciousness Paper
November 20, 2025 · Original source
In 2004, neuroscientist Giulio Tononi proposed that consciousness depended on a certain computational property, the integrated information level, dubbed Φ. Computer scientist Scott Aaronson complained that thermostats could have very high levels of Φ, and therefore integrated information theory should dub them conscious. Tononi responded that yup, thermostats are conscious. It probably isn’t a very interesting consciousness. They have no language or metacognition, so they can’t think thoughts like “I am a thermostat”. They just sit there, dimly aware of the temperature. You can’t prove that they don’t.
Inline links: proposed, complained, responded
The Dilbert Afterlife
January 16, 2026 · Original source
As is quantum complexity blogger Scott Aaronson.
Open Thread 418
January 26, 2026 · Original source
1: Inkhaven was a blogging residency/bootcamp/program in Berkeley last November. The conceit was that residents had to write one post per day for thirty days, or else get kicked out without a refund. I ran some sessions, and so did other people you might recognize like Gwern, Zvi, Ozy, Aella, and Scott Aaronson. People seemed to like it (average rating 8/10, see also reflections here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, etc; when you make forty people write every day, you sure do end up with a lot of written reflections on the experience). They’re doing it again this April, and you’re invited to apply. You’ll need ~$3,500 (some scholarships available) and a month free. I plan to help again. Application deadline March 1.
Inline links: Inkhaven, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here