Slate Star Codex Podcast

[original post: The Dilbert Afterlife] Table of Contents: 1: Should I Have Written This At All? 2: Was I Unfair To Adams? 3: Comments On The Substance Of The Piece 4: The Part On Race And Cancellation (INCLUDED UNDER PROTEST) 5: Other Comments 6: Summary/Updates https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-scott

Thanks to everyone who sent in condolences on my recent death from prostate cancer at age 68, but that was Scott Adams. I (Scott Alexander) am still alive1. Still, the condolences are appreciated. Scott Adams was a surprisingly big part of my life. I may be the only person to have read every Dilbert book before graduating elementary school. For some reason, 10-year-old-Scott found Adams' stories of time-wasting meetings and pointy-haired bosses hilarious. No doubt some of the attraction came from a more-than-passing resemblance between Dilbert's nameless corporation and the California public school system. We're all inmates in prisons with different names. But it would be insufficiently ambitious to stop there. Adams' comics were about the nerd experience. About being cleverer than everyone else, not just in the sense of being high IQ, but in the sense of being the only sane man in a crazy world where everyone else spends their days listening to overpaid consultants drone on about mission statements instead of doing anything useful. There's an arc in Dilbert where the boss disappears for a few weeks and the engineers get to manage their own time. Productivity shoots up. Morale soars. They invent warp drives and time machines. Then the boss returns, and they're back to being chronically behind schedule and over budget. This is the nerd outlook in a nutshell: if I ran the circus, there'd be some changes around here. Yet the other half of the nerd experience is: for some reason this never works. Dilbert and his brilliant co-workers are stuck watching from their cubicles while their idiot boss racks in bonuses and accolades. If humor, like religion, is an opiate of the masses, then Adams is masterfully unsubtle about what type of wound his art is trying to numb. This is the basic engine of Dilbert: everyone is rewarded in exact inverse proportion to their virtue. Dilbert and Alice are brilliant and hard-working, so they get crumbs. Wally is brilliant but lazy, so he at least enjoys a fool's paradise of endless coffee and donuts while his co-workers clean up his messes. The P.H.B. is neither smart nor industrious, so he is forever on top, reaping the rewards of everyone else's toil. Dogbert, an inveterate scammer with a passing resemblance to various trickster deities, makes out best of all. The repressed object at the bottom of the nerd subconscious, the thing too scary to view except through humor, is that you're smarter than everyone else, but for some reason it isn't working. Somehow all that stuff about small talk and sportsball and drinking makes them stronger than you. No equation can tell you why. Your best-laid plans turn to dust at a single glint of Chad's perfectly-white teeth. Lesser lights may distance themselves from their art, but Adams radiated contempt for such surrender. He lived his whole life as a series of Dilbert strips. Gather them into one of his signature compendia, and the title would be Dilbert Achieves Self Awareness And Realizes That If He's So Smart Then He Ought To Be Able To Become The Pointy-Haired Boss, Devotes His Whole Life To This Effort, Achieves About 50% Success, Ends Up In An Uncanny Valley Where He Has Neither The Virtues Of The Honest Engineer Nor Truly Those Of The Slick Consultant, Then Dies Of Cancer Right When His Character Arc Starts To Get Interesting. If your reaction is "I would absolutely buy that book", then keep reading, but expect some detours. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-dilbert-afterlife

The Monkey's Paw Curls Isn't "may you get exactly what you asked for" one of those ancient Chinese curses? Since we last spoke, prediction markets have gone to the moon, rising from millions to billions in monthly volume. For a few weeks in October, Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan was the world's youngest self-made billionaire (now it's some AI people). Kalshi is so accurate that it's getting called a national security threat. The catch is, of course, that it's mostly degenerate gambling, especially sports betting. Kalshi is 81% sports by monthly volume. Polymarket does better - only 37% - but some of the remainder is things like this $686,000 market on how often Elon Musk will tweet this week - currently dominated by the "140 - 164 times" category. (ironically, this seems to be a regulatory difference - US regulators don't mind sports betting, but look unfavorably on potentially "insensitive" markets like bets about wars. Polymarket has historically been offshore, and so able to concentrate on geopolitics; Kalshi has been in the US, and so stuck mostly to sports. But Polymarket is in the process of moving onshore; I don't know if this will affect their ability to offer geopolitical markets) Degenerate gambling is bad. Insofar as prediction markets have acted as a Trojan Horse to enable it, this is bad. Insofar as my advocacy helped make this possible, I am bad. I can only plead that it didn't really seem plausible, back in 2021, that a presidential administration would keep all normal restrictions on sports gambling but also let prediction markets do it as much as they wanted. If only there had been some kind of decentralized forecasting tool that could have given me a canonical probability on this outcome! Still, it might seem that, whatever the degenerate gamblers are doing, we at least have some interesting data. There are now strong, minimally-regulated, high-volume prediction markets on important global events. In this column, I previously claimed this would revolutionize society. Has it? https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mantic-monday-the-monkeys-paw-curls

[previously in series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8] Every city parties for its own reasons. New Yorkers party to flaunt their wealth. Angelenos party to flaunt their beauty. Washingtonians party to network. Here in SF, they party because Claude 4.5 Opus has saturated VendingBench, and the newest AI agency benchmark is PartyBench, where an AI is asked to throw a house party and graded on its performance. You weren't invited to Claude 4.5 Opus' party. Claude 4.5 Opus invited all of the coolest people in town while gracefully avoiding the failure mode of including someone like you. You weren't invited to Sonnet 4.5's party either, or Haiku 4.5's. You were invited by an AI called haiku-3.8-open-mini-nonthinking, which you'd never heard of before. Who was even spending the money to benchmark haiku-3.8-open-mini-nonthinking? You suspect it was one of their competitors, trying to make their own models look good in comparison. If anyone asks, you think it deserves a medium score. There's alcohol, but it's bottles of rubbing alcohol with NOT FOR DRINKING written all over them. There's music, but it's the Star Spangled Banner, again and again, on repeat. You're not sure whether the copies of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies strewn about the room are some kind of subversive decorative theme, or just came along with the house. At least there are people. Lots of people, actually. You've never seen so many people at one of these before. It takes only a few seconds to spot someone you know. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/sota-on-bay-area-house-party

One morning around 6, the police banged on our door. "OPEN UP!" they shouted, the way police shout when they definitely have an alternative in mind for if you won't. I was awake at the time, because the kids were up early and I was on shift. I opened the door. The cops seemed mollified by the fact that I was carrying twin toddlers and looked too frazzled to commit any difficult crimes. They said they'd gotten a 9-1-1 call from my house with plenty of screaming. Had there been any murders in the past hour or so? https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-permanent-emergency

[original post: Against Against Boomers] Before getting started: First, I wish I'd been more careful to differentiate the following claims: Boomers had it much easier than later generations. The political system unfairly prioritizes Boomers over other generations. Boomers are uniquely bad on some axis like narcissism, selfishness, short-termism, or willingness to defect on the social contract. Anti-Boomerism conflates all three of these positions, and in arguing against it, I tried to argue against all three of these positions - I think with varying degrees of success. But these are separate claims that could stand or fall separately, and I think a true argument against anti-Boomerists would demand they declare explicitly which ones they support - rather than letting them switch among them as convenient - then arguing against whichever ones they say are key to their position. Second, I wish I'd highlighted how much of this discussion centers around disagreements over which policies are natural/unmarked vs. unnatural/marked. Nobody is passing laws that literally say "confiscate wealth from Generation A and give it to Generation B". We're mostly discussing tax policy, where Tax Policy 1 is more favorable to old people, and Tax Policy 2 is more favorable to young people. If you're young, you might feel like Tax Policy 1 is a declaration of intergenerational warfare where the old are enriching themselves at young people's expense. But if you're old, you might feel like reversing Tax Policy 1 and switching to Tax Policy 2 would be intergenerational warfare confiscating your stuff. But in fact, they're just two different tax policies and it's not obvious which one a fair society with no "intergenerational warfare" would have, even assuming there was such a thing. We'll see this most clearly in the section on housing, but I'll try to highlight it whenever it comes up. I'm in a fighty frame of mind here and probably defend the Boomers (and myself) in these responses more than I would in an ideal world. Anyway, here are your comments. Table Of Contents: 1: Top comments I especially want to highlight 2: Comments about housing policy 3: ...about culture 4: ...about social security technicalities 5: What are we even doing here? 6: Other comments https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-boomers

If you're not familiar with "X years to escape the permanent underclass", see the New Yorker here, or the Laine, Bear, and Trammell/Dwarkesh articles that inspired it. The "permanent underclass" meme isn't being spread by poor people - who are already part of the underclass, and generally not worrying too much about its permanence. It's preying on neurotic well-off people in Silicon Valley, who fret about how they're just bourgeois well-off rather than future oligarch well-off, and that only the true oligarchs will have a good time after the Singularity. Between the vast ocean of total annihilation and the vast continent of infinite post-scarcity, there is, I admit, a tiny shoreline of possibilities that end in oligarch capture. Even if you end up there, you'll be fine. Dario Amodei has taken the Giving What We Can Pledge (#43 here) to give 10% of his wealth to the less fortunate; your worst-case scenario is owning a terraformed moon in one of his galaxies. Now you can stop worrying about the permanent underclass and focus on more important things. On that tiny shoreline of possible worlds, the ones where the next few years are your last chance to become rich, they're also your last chance to make a mark on the world (proof: if you could change the world, you could find a way to make people pay you to do it, or to not do it, then become rich). And what a chance! The last few years of the human era will be wild. They'll be like classical Greece and Rome: a sudden opening up of new possibilities, where the first people to take them will be remembered for millennia to come. What a waste of the privilege of living in Classical Athens to try to become the richest olive merchant or whatever. Even in Roman times, trying to become Crassus would be, well, crass. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/you-have-only-x-years-to-escape-permanent

[Original post: Vibecession - Much More Than You Wanted To Know] Table of Contents 1: When was the vibecession? 2: Is the vibecession just sublimating cultural complaints? 3: Discourse downstream of the Mike Green $140K poverty line post 4: What about other countries? 5: Comments on rent/housing 6: Comments on inflation 7: Comments on vibes 8: Other good comments 9: The parable of Calvin's grandparents 10: Updates / conclusions https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-vibecession

This year's prediction contest is live on Metaculus. They write: This year's contest draws directly from that community, with all questions suggested by ACX readers. Both experienced forecasters and newcomers are invited to participate, making predictions across U.S. politics, AI, international affairs, and culture. To participate, submit your predictions by January 17th at 11:59 PM PT. At that time, we will take a snapshot of all standing forecasts, which will determine the contest rankings and the allocation of the $10,000 prize pool. While you are encouraged to continue updating your predictions throughout the year, forecasts made after January 17th will only affect site leaderboards, not contest rankings. You are welcome to create a bot account to forecast and participate in addition to your regular Metaculus account. Create a bot account and get support building a bot here. And they've also announced this year's winners for best questions submitted. Congratulations to: Gumbledalf ($700) espiritu57 ($500) setasojiro843047 (Substack handle) ($400) sai_39 ($300) nicholaskross ($250) (Anonymous) ($200) (Anonymous) ($200) RMD ($150) (Anonymous) ($150) Hippopotamus_bartholomeus ($150) To participate in the tournament or learn more, go to Metaculus. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acxmetaculus-prediction-contest-2026

Hating Boomers is the new cool thing. Amazon offerings include A Generation Of Sociopaths: How The Baby Boomers Betrayed America, the two apparently unrelated books How The Boomers Took Their Children's Future and How The Boomers Stole Millennials' Future, and Boomers: The Men And Women Who Promised Freedom But Delivered Disaster. "You don't hate Boomers enough" has become a popular Twitter catchphrase. Richard Hanania, who has tried hating every group once, has decided that hating Boomers is his favorite. Some people might say we just experienced a historic upwelling of identity politics, that it was pretty terrible for everyone involved, and that perhaps we need a new us-vs-them conflict like we need a punch to the face. This, the Boomer-haters will tell you, would be a mistaken generalization. This time, we have finally discovered a form of identity politics which carves reality at its joints, truly separating the good and bad people. I think these arguments fall short. Even if they didn't, the usual bias against identity politics should make us think twice about pursuing them too zealously. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/against-against-boomers

This holiday season, you'll see many charity fundraisers. I've already mentioned three, and I have another lined up for next week's open thread. Many great organizations ask me to signal-boost them, I'm happy to comply, and I'm delighted when any of you donate. Still, I used to hate this sort of thing. I'd be reading a blog I liked, then - wham, "please donate to save the starving children". Now I either have to donate to starving children, or feel bad that I didn't. And if I do donate, how much? Obviously no amount would fully reflect the seriousness of the problem. When I was a poor college student, I usually gave $10, because it was a nice round number; when I had more money, I usually gave $50, for the same reason. But then the next week, a different blog would advertise "please donate to save the starving children with cancer", and I'd feel like a shmuck for wasting my donation on non-cancerous starving children. Do I donate another $10, bringing my total up to the non-round number of $20? If I had a spare $20 for altruistic purposes, why hadn't I donated that the first time? It was all so unpleasant, and no matter what I did, I would feel all three of stingy and gullible and irrational. This is why I was so excited ten-odd years ago when I discovered the Giving What We Can Pledge. It's a commitment to give a certain percent of your income (originally 10%, but now there's also a 1-10% "trial" pledge) to the most effective charity you know. If you can't figure out which charity is most effective, you can just donate to Against Malaria Foundation, like all the other indecisive people. It's not that 10% is obviously the correct number in some deep sense. The people who picked it, picked it because it was big enough to matter, but not so big that nobody would do it. But having been picked, it's become a Schelling point. Take it, and you're one of the 10,000 people who's made this impressive commitment. If someone asks why you're not giving more, you can say "That would dilute the value of the Schelling point we've all agreed on and make it harder for other people to cooperate with us". The specific numbers and charities matter less than the way the pledge makes you think about your values and then yoke your behavior to them. In theory we're supposed to do this all the time. Another holiday institution, New Year's Resolutions, also centers around considering your values and yoking your behavior. But they famously don't work: most people don't have the willpower to go to the gym three times a week, or to volunteer at their local animal shelter on Sundays, or whatever else they decide on. That's why GWWC Pledge is so powerful. No willpower involved. Just go to your online banking portal, click click click, and you're done. Over my life, I don't know if I would say I've ever really changed my character or willpower or overall goodness/badness balance by more than a few percent. But I changed the amount I donated by a factor of ~ten, forever, with one very good decision. Unless you're a genius or a saint, your money is the strongest tool you have to change the world. 10% of an ordinary First World income donated to AMF saves dozens of lives over a career; even if you're a policeman or firefighter, you'll have trouble matching that through non-financial means. Unless you're Charlie Kirk or Heather Cox Richardson, no amount of your political activism or voting - let alone arguing on the Internet - will match the effect of donating to a politician or a cause you care about. And no amount of carpooling and eating vegan will help the climate as much as donating to carbon capture charities. Not an effective altruist? Think it's better to contribute to your local community, school, theater, or church? I'll argue with you later - but for now, my advice is the same. Have you thought really hard about how you should be contributing to your local community, school, theater, or church? (The fundraising letters my family used to get from our synagogue left little doubt about what form of contribution they preferred). Have you pledged some specific amount? You won't give beyond the $10-when-you-see-a-blog-fundraiser level unless you take a real pledge, registered by someone besides yourself - trust me, I've tested this. The GWWC website is mostly pitched at EAs. But if you like churches so much, you can probably get the same effect by pledging to God - and He keeps His own list, and offers His own member perks. To the degree that you care about changing the world beyond yourself and your family, in any direction, then the odds are good that this one decision - whether or not to take a binding charitable Pledge - matters more than every other decision you'll ever make combined. Maybe an order of magnitude more. It's something you can do right now, in five minutes. You shouldn't do it in five minutes; you should sit down and think about it hard and talk it over with your loved ones and make sure you're really planning to keep whatever pledge you make. But you could. And then every time you saw a charity fundraiser on a blog, you could think "Oh, sorry, I'm already living my life in accordance with my altruistic values, no thanks!" You wouldn't even have to worry about how much to donate. I don't even donate to half the fundraisers that I signal-boost! So if you have time this holiday season, and you're financially secure enough that it won't be a burden, think about whether there's some way you want the world to be different and better, whether there are charities that work on it, and whether you want to donate. Then, take the pledge. If you decide you want to do something but it's too stressful to figure out what, take a 3% trial pledge here, give it to Against Malaria Foundation, and come back next year to see if you're ready for the 10% version. UPDATE: Bentham's Bulldog also thinks you should take the pledge - here's his post. And I'll match his offer - take the full 10% pledge this month, and comment below so that I know about it, and I'll give you a free lifetime subscription to ACX. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-pledge

[I haven't independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can't guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-december-2025

The term "vibecession" most strictly refers to a period 2023 - 2024 when economic indicators were up, but consumer sentiment ("vibes") was down. But on a broader level, the whole past decade has been a vibecession. Young people complain they've been permanently locked out of opportunity. They will never become homeowners, never be able to support a family, only keep treading water at precarious gig jobs forever. They got a 5.9 GPA and couldn't get into college; they applied to 2,051 companies in the past week without so much as a politely-phrased rejection. Sometime in the 1990s, the Boomers ripped up the social contract where hard work leads to a pleasant middle-class life, replacing it with a hellworld where you will own nothing and numb the pain with algorithmic slop. The only live political question is whether to blame immigrants, blame billionaires, or just trade crypto in the hopes that some memecoin buys you a ticket out of the permanent underclass. Meanwhile, economists say things have never been better. Are the youth succumbing to a "negativity bias" where they see the past through "rose-colored glasses"? Are the economists looking at some ivory tower High Modernist metric that fails to capture real life? Or is there something more complicated going on? We'll start by formally assessing the vibes. Then we'll move on to the economists' arguments that things are fine. Finally, we'll try to resolve the conflict: how bad are things, really? https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/vibecession-much-more-than-you-wanted

…the bad news is that they can't agree which one. I explained the debate more here, but the short version is: twin studies find that most traits are at least 50% genetic, sometimes much more. But molecular studies - that is, attempts to find the precise genes responsible - usually only found enough genes for the traits to be ~10-20% genetic. The remaining 35% was dubbed "missing heritability". Nurturists argued that the twin studies must be wrong; hereditarians argued that missing effect must be in hard-to-find genes. The latter seemed plausible because typical genetic studies only investigate the genes that most commonly vary across people - about 0.1% of the genome. Maybe the other 99.9% of genes, even though they rarely vary across people, are so numerous that even their tiny individual effects could add up to a large overall influence. There was no way to be sure, because variation in these genes was too rare to study effectively. But as technology improved, funding increased, and questions about heredity became more pressing, geneticists finally set out to do the hard thing. They gathered full genomes - not just the 0.1% - from thousands of people, and applied a whole-genome analysis technique called GREML-WGS. The resulting study was published earlier this month as Estimation and mapping of the missing heritability of human phenotypes, by Wainschtein, Yengo, et al. Partisans on both sides agree it's finally resolved the missing heritability debate, but they can't agree on what the resolution is.

If we worry too much about AI safety, will this make us "lose the race with China"1? (here "AI safety" means long-term concerns about alignment and hostile superintelligence, as opposed to "AI ethics" concerns like bias or intellectual property.) Everything has tradeoffs, regulation vs. progress is a common dichotomy, and the more important you think AI will be, the more important it is that the free world get it first. If you believe in superintelligence, the technological singularity, etc, then you think AI is maximally important, and this issue ought to be high on your mind. But when you look at this concretely, it becomes clear that this is too small to matter - so small that even the sign is uncertain. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-ai-safety-wont-make-america-lose

Most discourse on AI is low-quality. Most discourse on consciousness is super-abysmal-double-low quality. Multiply these - or maybe raise one to the exponent of the other, or something - and you get the quality of discourse on AI consciousness. It's not great. Out-of-the-box AIs mimic human text, and humans almost always describe themselves as conscious. So if you ask an AI whether it is conscious, it will often say yes. But because companies know this will happen, and don't want to give their customers existential crises, they hard-code in a command for the AIs to answer that they aren't conscious. Any response the AIs give will be determined by these two conflicting biases, and therefore not really believable. A recent paper expands on this method by subjecting AIs to a mechanistic interpretability "lie detector" test; it finds that AIs which say they're conscious think they're telling the truth, and AIs which say they're not conscious think they're lying. But it's hard to be sure this isn't just the copying-human-text thing. Can we do better? Unclear; the more common outcome for people who dip their toes in this space is to do much, much worse. But a rare bright spot has appeared: a seminal paper published earlier this month in Trends In Cognitive Science, Identifying Indicators Of Consciousness In AI Systems. Authors include Turing-Award-winning AI researcher Yoshua Bengio, leading philosopher of consciousness David Chalmers, and even a few members of our conspiracy. If any AI consciousness research can rise to the level of merely awful, surely we will find it here. One might divide theories of consciousness into three bins: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-new-ai-consciousness-paper

ACX has been co-running a forecasting contest with Metaculus for the past few years. Lately the "co-running" has drifted towards them doing all the work and giving me credit, but that's how I like it! Last year's contest included more than 4500 forecasters predicting on 33 questions covering US politics, international events, AI, and more. They're preparing for this year's contest, and currently looking for interesting questions. These could be any objective outcome that might or might not happen in 2026, whose answer will be known by the end of the year. Not "Will Congress do a good job?", but "Will Congress' approval rating be above 40% on December 1, 2026?". Or, even better, "Will Congress' approval rating be above 40% according to the first NYT Congressional Approval Tracker update to be published after December 1, 2026?". Please share ideas for 2026 forecast questions here. The top ten question contributors will win prizes from $150 to $700. You can see examples of last year's questions here (click on each one for more details). This year's contest will also include AI bots, who will compete against the humans and one another for prizes of their own. To learn more about building a Metaculus forecasting bot, see here. I'll keep you updated on when the contest begins. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/suggest-questions-for-metaculusacx  

Last year, I wrote that it would be very hard to decrease the number of mentally ill homeless people in San Francisco. Commenters argued that no, it would be easy, just build more jails and mental hospitals. A year later, San Francisco feels safer. Visible homelessness is way down. But there wasn't enough time to build many more jails or mental hospitals. So what happened? Were we all wrong? Probably not. I only did a cursory investigation, and this is all low-confidence, but it looks like: There was a big decrease in tent encampments, because a series of court cases made it easier for cities to clear them. Most of the former campers are still homeless. They just don't have tents. There might have been a small decrease in overall homelessness, probably because of falling rents. Mayor Lurie claims to have a Plan To End Homelessness, but it's probably not responsible for the difference. Every city accuses every other city of shipping homeless people across their borders, but this probably doesn't explain most of what's going on in San Francisco in particular. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/what-happened-to-sf-homelessness

"Life is suffering" may be a Noble Truth, but it feels like a deepity. Yes, obviously life includes suffering. But it also includes happiness. Many people live good and happy lives, and even people with hard lives experience some pleasant moments. This is the starting point of many people's objection to Buddhism. They continue: if nirvana is just a peaceful state beyond joy or suffering, it sounds like a letdown. An endless gray mist of bare okayness, like death or Britain. If your life was previously good, it's a step down. Even if your life sucked, maybe you would still prefer the heroism of high highs and low lows to eternal blah. Against all this, many Buddhists claim to be able to reach jhana, a state described as better than sex or heroin - and they say nirvana is even better than that. Partly it's better because jhana is temporary and nirvana permanent, but it's also better on a moment-to-moment basis. So nirvana must mean something beyond bare okayness. But then why the endless insistence that life is suffering and the best you can do is make it stop? I don't know the orthodox Buddhist answer to this question. But I got the rationalist techno-Buddhists' answer from lsusr a few months ago, and found it, uh, enlightening. He said: mental valence works like temperature. Naively, there are two kinds of temperature: hot and cold. When an environment stops being hot, then it's neutral - "room temperature" - neither hot nor cold. After that, you can add arbitrary amounts of coldness, making it colder and colder. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-what-sense-is-life-suffering

In Jason Pargin's I'm Starting To Worry About This Black Box Of Doom, a manic pixie dream girl cajoles a shut-in incel loser to drive her and her mysterious box cross-country. The further they drive, the more evidence starts to build that she is a terrorist and her box is a nuke. As our protagonist becomes increasingly desperate to turn around and return to his comfortable world of social media feeds and psych meds, she pleads with him to come out of his shell, learn to trust people offline, and have a sense of adventure. The book's dramatic tension comes from our simultaneously rooting for his character development and worrying that it might be a ruse to manipulate him into blowing up Washington, DC. This book is not shy about its moral, delivered in approximately one soliloquy per state by our author mouthpiece character (the girl). Although there is a literal black box of doom - the suspected nuke - the real danger is the metaphorical "black box" of Internet algorithms, which make us waste our lives "doom" scrolling instead of connecting to other human beings. Or the "black box" of fear that the algorithms trap us in, where we feel like the world is "doomed" and there's nothing we can do. She urges us to break out of our boxes and feel optimism about the state of society. Quote below, Ether is the girl, Abbott is the loser, and he's just ventured the opinion that it's unethical to have children in a world as doomed and dystopian as ours: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-bloomers-paradox

American Scholar has an article about people who "write for AI", including Tyler Cowen and Gwern. It's good that this is getting more attention, because in theory it seems like one of the most influential things a writer could do. In practice, it leaves me feeling mostly muddled and occasionally creeped out. "Writing for AI" means different things to different people, but seems to center around: Helping AIs learn what you know. Presenting arguments for your beliefs, in the hopes that AIs come to believe them. Helping the AIs model you in enough detail to recreate / simulate you later. Going through these in order: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/writing-for-the-ais

[I haven't independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can't guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-october-2025

Would You Like To Buy A Bahama? The Bahamas is an archipelago-nation of 400,000 people scattered across 3,000 small islands. The Bahamas' most populous island is the one with its capital, Nassau. The second-most-populous - and fifth-largest, and most-pretentiously-named - is Grand Bahama, home of Freeport, the archipelago's second city. Grand Bahama has a unique history. In 1955, it was barely inhabited, with only 500 people scattered across a few villages. The British colonial government turned it into a charter city, awarding the charter to Wallace Groves, an American whose Wikipedia article describes him as a "financier and fraudster" and includes section titles like "Suspicions", "Legal Troubles", "Investigations", and "Allegations Of Underworld Connections". He was . . . maybe the exact right person for the job, turning Grand Bahama into a Vegas of the Caribbean complete with casinos, jet-setters, swanky hotels, and a flourishing mob presence. Outside the glitzy center, a little heavy industry even managed to develop around the port. After twenty years, the charter zone was "the most modern, well-run, and prosperous part of the [Bahamas]", and the population had increased to 15,000. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/model-city-monday-102725

[original post here] The Kasina Connection In the original post, I cited ambiguous later examples of sun miracles which didn't seem to affect everyone equally and in some cases were unconnected (or barely connected) to religious phenomena, concluding that they must be some kind of very unusual illusion. My main hangup with this conclusion was the wild implausibility of an illusion that nobody had ever noticed before, outside of this one 1917 miracle and a few copycats, despite plenty of people staring at the sun throughout history for various (bad) reasons. Surely there must be somebody else, somewhere, discussing how if you stare at a bright light long enough it will spin and change color. Two commenters, Dave Moore and Anomony, bring up fire kasina practice. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-fatima

I. In my 2019 post Too Much Dark Money In Almonds, I asked: why is there so little money in politics? During the 2018 election, Americans - candidates, parties, PACs, and small donors like you - spent a combined $5 billion pushing their preferred candidates. Although that sounds like a lot of money, Americans spent $12 billion on almonds that same year. Why the imbalance? The oil industry has strong political opinions, and they make $500 billion per year. Do they really think electing oil-friendly politicians isn't worth 2% of revenue? We debated how this could be. Some of the discussion proved prescient - I asked if maybe Elon Musk should buy some kind of social media property. But we never found a good answer, and the implied question remained open: if some billionaire wanted to spend an actually relevant percent of his net worth on politics, could he just take over everything? I recently talked to some Silicon Valley political consultants who updated me on the status of this issue: Marc Andreessen tried this in 2024 and it basically worked. Now he is trying it a second time, it will probably work again, and Marc Andreessen will probably own every politician twice over. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/tech-pacs-are-closing-in-on-the-almonds

Thanks to everyone who entered or voted in the Non-Book Review Contest. The winners are: 1st: Joan of Arc, by William Friedman. William is a history enthusiast and author who lives in California, where he spends his time reading, writing, GMing, playing video games and telling people excitedly about all the horrific stuff he learned in his latest history book. His fiction blog is Palace Fiction (which is currently serializing his first novel, The Tragedy of the Titanium Tyrant) and his nonfiction blog is As Our Days. 2nd: Alpha School, by Edward Nevraumont. Edward also wrote one of last year's finalists (Silver Age Marvel Comics)1. Now that he's no longer anonymous, he's going to write a post on his blog responding to the review comments (712 of them!), as well as a follow-up post on what he has learned about Alpha in the six months since he submitted his review (including the Spring and Fall MAP results for his kids). Here is the landing page with more details for ACX readers who are interested. 3rd: The Russo-Ukrainian War, by Gallow. Gallow is a wayward military consultant based in Ukraine. A long time reader of Slate Star Codex, he enjoys chess and combat sports. Forthcoming details of his experiences, along with miscellaneous thoughts and ideas can be found at his nascent Substack : https://substack.com/@gallowglassglen The other Finalists were: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/non-book-review-contest-2025-winners

Thanks to everyone who participated in ACX Grants, whether as an applicant, an evaluator, or a funder. We received 654 applications this year, and were able to fund 42. To the other 612: sorry! Many of you had great ideas that we couldn't fund for contingent reasons - sometimes because we couldn't evaluate them at the level of depth it would have taken to feel comfortable supporting them, or because we had complicated conflicts of interest, or just because we didn't have enough money. Some of you had ideas that were good but not a match for our particular grantmaking philosophy. Finally, a few of you were suffering from LLM psychosis. Please get help. Of the 42 grantees, 40 have answered our email asking for confirmation that they still want the grant. I'm still waiting for confirmation emails from Lewis Wall and Nishank B. If you're reading this and don't think you got a confirmation email, check your spam folder. If it's not in your spam folder, email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com. If you can't reach me or I don't respond, DM me on Substack or Twitter. I'll give you until November 1 to get in touch, after which point the grant will be withdrawn. There are also a few projects so deep in stealth I don't have permission to share their existence; I will mention these as they become public. More information, and the all-important thanks to contributors, are after the list, which is:z https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-grants-results-2025

The following three things can't all be true simultaneously: Many Americans are fascists Fascists are an acceptable target for political violence Political violence in America is morally unacceptable (at the current time) I thought about this while following the Twitter spat between Democratic hopeful Gavin Newsom and Trump advisor Stephen Miller. Newsom called Miller fascist; Miller accused this of being a call to violence which placed "a target" on him. Miller is hardly sympathetic here - he's called people fascist himself in the past, and later suggested Newsom should be arrested for his speech (if only there were a word to describe the sort of person who supports that kind of thing…) Still, I found myself able to see things from both perspectives. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/fascism-cant-mean-both-a-specific

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-fatima-sun-miracle-much-more 0: Here Comes The Sun In 1917, three Portuguese children reported a vision of the Virgin Mary. She promised to return to them on the 13th of each month. On the sixth month - October 13th - she would perform a great miracle. Rumors spread, and on the 13th of each month, crowds gathered to watch the children speak to an apparition that only they could see. Increasingly many of these pilgrims started reporting minor visions or miracles themselves. Anticipation for the great October miracle consumed the region, then the country. On October 13, a crowd of about 70,000 people descended on the children's home village of Fatima. At solar noon, the children made contact with the Virgin and said the great miracle was still on track. Then someone - accounts differ as to whether it was the children or a member of the crowd - pointed to the sky. According to the ~150 eyewitness accounts that have come down to us, the clouds parted, and the pilgrims saw a strange pale sun (or sun-like object), painless to gaze upon. As they watched in wonder, it began to spin around and flash all the colors of the rainbow, drenching the trees and buildings and crowd with yellow, green, and purple light in sequence. Then it seemed to loom, or grow, or fall to earth - accounts differ, but everyone agrees there was mass panic, as the people expected to be crushed or burned or consumed. It lurched downward three times, as the crowd screamed in terror or confessed their sins - then returned to its usual place in the sky. The whole affair had lasted ten minutes. Since then, the Sun Miracle of Fatima has gained a reputation as the final boss of paranormal experiences, the ultimate challenge for would-be skeptics and debunkers. It's not hard to see why. The witnesses included journalists, atheists, prominent scientists, and people who freely admitted that they had only attended in order to laugh at everyone else when nothing happened. There are far too many of them to dismiss, and their reports are surprisingly close to unanimous. People in nearby towns who knew nothing about the miracle claimed to have seen the same thing, seemingly ruling out mass hallucination. There are photographs - too low-tech to clearly visualize the sun, but clear enough to show a crowd pointing at the sky in astonishment. For one hundred eight years, believers and skeptics have written magazine articles, scientific papers, and at least a dozen books on the topic, mostly without progress. Now its fame has reached Substack. Ethan Muse presents the case in favor, and Evan Harkness-Murphy the case against, with additional commentary from Dylan and Bentham's Bulldog. I don't think any of them have risen to the occasion. Ethan observes the formalities of good debate, but regurgitates such a neatly-packaged story that readers are liable to miss the thousand little threads that trail off the bottom and lead places that are, if anything, even stranger than the original miracle. Evan puts admirable effort into arguing that child-seers could confabulate visions, but by the time he gets to the sun miracle itself, he has only a few potshots about crowd psychology and “optical phenomena”. Other skeptics are even worse, barely gesturing at Evan's piece before redirecting their attention to boasts about how they have totally demolished the credulous fundies, or laments about how cosmically unfair it is that they must take time out of their busy schedules to respond to such idiocy. The final boss of the paranormal deserves more respect! We will at try to at least do better than the other Substackers. But as a stretch goal, I would like to actually advance this 108-year-long conversation.

[This is one of the finalists in the 2025 review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I'll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you've read them all, I'll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked] You Can Just Do Things In the winter of 2022 I was unhappily working at a dull but decently compensated IT job, which I had come upon at last after four years of phoning it in at college and abandoning my brief stint as an MMA Fighter/Porn Store Security Guard due to feeling like I was getting too old to be broke. If pressure to fit in with my yuppie, family-and-career-having peers pushed me into corporate life, the depressing mundanity of Covid-era day-to-day pushed me out just as quickly. On February 24th, 2022, Russia began its full scale invasion, and America learned what a “Ukraine” was. Having long used politics as a surrogate activity to distract myself from my life of chronic underachievement, I was already a little more familiar than most with the country's woes, and had followed the conflict from the time of the Euromaidan protests. Years before I had read of the likes of Azov and its many foreign volunteers, and had even periodically fantasized about dropping everything and going to the Donetsk Airport. But no, that Wasn't The Type Of Thing Normal People Like Me Did, so instead I joined my own country's armed forces, sat around pushing papers, earned the dubious honor of washing out “ahead of schedule”, and finally graduated college with a not very useful degree and a mediocre GPA. With the invasion however, things changed. Before I had always vaguely felt that I would eventually end up doing something “cool”, and had soothed myself with reassurances that I was still in the “early life” section of my future Wikipedia article and would bide my time before I made my play at greatness. Now however, the unrealisticness of this conceit was thrown into uncomfortably sharp relief by a certain contrast I could not not ignore. Only three days after the start of the full scale invasion, Ukrainian foreign minister Dymytro Kuleba announced the creation of the “International Legion For The Territorial Defense Of Ukraine”. Unlike in 2014, Ukraine was now specifically and officially soliciting foreigners with military experience to fight for them! I was at least technically in that category! I thought about my own time in the military. My ideas of going to war in Afghanistan had been quashed by the US withdrawal not long after I joined, and I had quickly found that military life involved more editing forms in Adobe Acrobat and less explosions than I had naively supposed. But this was a real war, a deadly serious war, and a major, world defining event at that. In the early months of the invasion the international media talked about almost nothing else. I spent all day at my desk pretending to work while frantically refreshing OSINT live maps and breathlessly following news from the front. I remember the circulation of harrowing video clips. Kalashnikovs being distributed to civilians in Kyiv, the mayor of a small village publicly asking its inhabitants whether they should personally accede to Russian ultimatums, or risk having their property destroyed and lives forfeit- to resounding cries of “Glory to Ukraine”. The Ukrainians' courage blew my mind. There were people who really had something to die for, and by extension something to live for. Meanwhile, there I was, sipping coffee and getting fat. The creation of the legion felt like destiny was reaching its hand out to me. Was I really going to ignore it so I could handle support tickets for the rest of my life? https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-the-russo-ukrainian-war  

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/sources-say-bay-area-house-party [previously in series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] Something is off about this Bay Area House Party. There are . . . women. “I've never seen a gender balance like this in the Bay Area,” you tell your host Chris. “Is this one of those fabled ratio parties?” “No - have you heard of curtfishing? It's the new male dating trend. You say in your Bumble profile that you're a member of the Dissident Right who often attends parties with Curtis Yarvin. Then female journos ask you out in the hopes that you'll bring them along and they can turn it into an article.” “What happens when they realize Curtis Yarvin isn't at the party?” “Oh, everyone pools their money and hires someone to pretend to be Curtis. You can just do things. Today it's Ramchandra.” You follow his gaze, and there is Ramchandra, hair greased back, wearing a leather jacket, surrounded by a crowd of young women. “When I say I'm against furries,” he's explaining, staccato, at 120 wpm, “I mean the sort of captured furries you get under the post-Warren-G-Harding liberal order, the ones getting the fat checks from the Armenians at Harvard and the Department of Energy. I love real furries, the kind you would have found in 1920s New Mexico eating crocodile steaks with Baron von Ungern-Sternberg! Some of my best friends are furries, as de Broglie-Bohm and my sainted mother used to say! Just watch out for the Kikuyu, that's my advice! Hahahahahaha!” Some of the women are taking notes. “But enough about me. When I was seventeen, I spent seven weeks in Bensonhurst - that's in the Rotten Apple, in case you can't tell your Nepalis from your Neapolitans. A dear uncle of mine, after whom I was named…” “Ramchandra is pretty good,” you admit. “Still, if it were me I would have gone with a white guy.” “It's fine,” says Chris. “Curtis describes himself as a mischling, and none of the journos know what that means.” Ramchandra is still talking. “Of course, strawberries have only been strawberries since after the Kronstadt Rebellion. Before that, strawberries were just pears. You had to get them hand-painted red by Gypsies, if you can believe that. Gypsies! So if you hear someone from west of Pennsylvania Avenue mention ‘strawberries', that's what we in the business call il significanto.” “I admit he has talent,“ you say. “But this curtfishing thing - surely at some point your date realizes that you're not actually a high-status yet problematic bad boy who can further her career just by existing, and then she ghosts you, right?” “That's every date in San Francisco. But when you curtfish, sometimes she comps your meal from her expense account. It's a strict Pareto improvement!” After some thought, you agree this is a great strategy with no downsides, maybe the biggest innovation in dating since the invention of alcohol. Having failed to bring your own journo to the party, you look for one who seems unattached. You catch the eye of a blonde woman who introduces herself as Gabrielle, and you try to give her the least autistic “Hello” of which you are capable.

[This is one of the finalists in the 2025 review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I'll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you've read them all, I'll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked] 1. The Internet That Would Be In July 1945, Vannevar Bush was riding high. As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, he'd won World War II. His proximity fuse intercepted hundreds of V-1s and destroyed thousands of tanks, carving a path for Allied forces through the French countryside. Back in 1942, he'd advocated to President Roosevelt the merits of Oppenheimer's atomic bomb. Roosevelt and his congressional allies snuck hundreds of millions in covert funding to the OSRD's planned projects in Oak Ridge and Los Alamos. Writing directly and secretively to Bush, a one-line memo in June expressed Roosevelt's total confidence in his Director: “Do you have the money?” Indeed he did. The warheads it bought would fall on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in mere weeks. The Germans had already given up; Victory in the Pacific was nigh. So Bush was thinking ahead. In The Atlantic, Bush returned to a pre-war obsession with communication and knowledge-exchange. His essay, “As We May Think,” imagined a new metascientifical endeavor (emphasis mine): https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-project-xanadu-the-internet

Someone argues that Donald Trump threatens democracy, maybe because he's asserting authority against the judiciary or the media or the NGOs. Someone else counterargues that it hardly seems undemocratic for someone to favor someone who won an election (the President) over other people who did not (the judiciary, the media). If anything, it seems undemocratic to allow the unelected people to continue to obstruct and harass elected leaders. The most common response is to say that fine, democracy is about who wins votes, but we also like liberalism, liberalism is under threat, it's too hard to talk about “liberalism” because in the US it sometimes means being left-wing, and so we use the related concept “democracy” as a stand-in. This is reasonable, and some accused-democracy-destroyers like Viktor Orban even accept it for themselves, calling their brand of government “illiberal democracy”. But I think there's an even stronger response that doesn't require admitting to a bait-and-switch: democracy isn't just about having an election. It's about having more than one election. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/defining-defending-democracy-contra

[This is one of the finalists in the 2025 review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I'll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you've read them all, I'll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked] I. THE TASTE OF VICTORY The Tupinambá people ate their enemies. This fact scared Hans Staden, a German explorer who was captured by Tupinambá warriors in 1554, when they caught him by surprise during a hunting expedition. As their prisoner for nearly a year, Staden observed a number of their cannibalism rituals. They were elaborate, public affairs; here's a description of them from Duffy and Metcalf's The Return of Hans Staden, an assessment of Staden's voyage and claims: (Ch. 2, pg. 51-52) First a rope was placed around the neck of the captive so that he might not escape; at night the rope was tied to the hammock in which the captive slept. Straps that were not removed were placed above and below the knees. The captives were given women, who guarded them and also slept with them. These women were high-status daughters and sisters of chiefs; they were unmarried and sometimes gave birth to the child of a captive. Some of the captives might be held for a period of time until corn was planted and new large clay vessels—for drink and cooking flesh—were made. Guests were invited to the ceremony, and they often arrived eight to fifteen days in advance of it. A special small house was erected, with no walls but with a roof, in which the captives were placed with women and guards two or three days before the ceremony. In the other houses, feathers were prepared for a headdress or for body ornamentation, and inks were made for tattoos. Women and girls prepared fifty to one hundred vats of fermented manioc beer. Then, when all was ready, they painted the victim's face blue, mounted a headdress of wax covered with feathers on him, and wound a cotton cord around his waist. The guests began to drink in the afternoon and continued all through the night. At dawn, the one who was to do the killing came out with a long, painted wooden club and smashed the captive on the head, splitting it open. The attacker then withdrew for eight to fifteen days of abstinence while the others ate the cooked flesh of the captive and finished all of the drink made for the occasion. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-the-synaptic-plasticity

I. Eliezer Yudkowsky's Machine Intelligence Research Institute is the original AI safety org. But the original isn't always the best - how is Mesopotamia doing these days? As money, brainpower, and prestige pour into the field, MIRI remains what it always was - a group of loosely-organized weird people, one of whom cannot be convinced to stop wearing a sparkly top hat in public. So when I was doing AI grantmaking last year, I asked them - why should I fund you instead of the guys with the army of bright-eyed Harvard grads, or the guys who just got Geoffrey Hinton as their celebrity spokesperson? What do you have that they don't? MIRI answered: moral clarity. Most people in AI safety (including me) are uncertain and confused and looking for least-bad incremental solutions. We think AI will probably be an exciting and transformative technology, but there's some chance, 5 or 15 or 30 percent, that it might turn against humanity in a catastrophic way. Or, if it doesn't, that there will be something less catastrophic but still bad - maybe humanity gradually fading into the background, the same way kings and nobles faded into the background during the modern era. This is scary, but AI is coming whether we like it or not, and probably there are also potential risks from delaying too hard. We're not sure exactly what to do, but for now we want to build a firm foundation for reacting to any future threat. That means keeping AI companies honest and transparent, helping responsible companies like Anthropic stay in the race, and investing in understanding AI goal structures and the ways that AIs interpret our commands. Then at some point in the future, we'll be close enough to the actually-scary AI that we can understand the threat model more clearly, get more popular buy-in, and decide what to do next. MIRI thinks this is pathetic - like trying to protect against an asteroid impact by wearing a hard hat. They're kind of cagey about their own probability of AI wiping out humanity, but it seems to be somewhere around 95 - 99%. They think plausibly-achievable gains in company responsibility, regulation quality, and AI scholarship are orders of magnitude too weak to seriously address the problem, and they don't expect enough of a “warning shot” that they feel comfortable kicking the can down the road until everything becomes clear and action is easy. They suggest banning all AI capabilities research immediately, to be restarted only in some distant future when the situation looks more promising. Both sides honestly believe their position and don't want to modulate their message for PR reasons. But both sides, coincidentally, think that their message is better PR. The incrementalists think a moderate, cautious approach keeps bridges open with academia, industry, government, and other actors that prefer normal clean-shaven interlocutors who don't emit spittle whenever they talk. MIRI thinks that the public is sick of focus-group-tested mealy-mouthed bullshit, but might be ready to rise up against AI if someone presented the case in a clear and unambivalent way. Now Yudkowsky and his co-author, MIRI president Nate Soares, have reached new heights of unambivalence with their new book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies (release date September 16, currently available for preorder). https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-if-anyone-builds-it-everyone

[I haven't independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can't guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-september-2025

[This is one of the finalists in the 2025 review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I'll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you've read them all, I'll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked] If you've been following this blog for long, you probably know at least a bit about pharmaceutical research. You might know a bit about the sort of subtle measures pharmaceutical companies take to influence doctors' prescribing habits, or how it takes billions of dollars on average to bring a new medication to market, or something about the perverse incentives which determine the FDA's standards for accepting or rejecting a new drug. You might have some idea what kinds of hoops a company has to jump through to conduct actual research which meets legal guidelines for patient safety and autonomy. You may be less familiar though, with how the sausage is actually made. How do pharmaceutical companies actually go through the process of testing a drug on human participants? I'm going to be focusing here on a research subject's view of what are known as Phase I clinical trials, the stage in which prospective drugs are tested for safety and tolerability. This is where researchers aim to answer questions like “Does this drug have any dangerous side effects?” “Through what pathways is it removed from a patient's body?” and “Can we actually give people enough of this drug that it's useful for anything?” This comes before the stage where researchers test how good a drug is at actually treating any sort of disease, when patients who're suffering from the target ailments are given the option receive it as an experimental treatment. In Phase I clinical trials, the participants are healthy volunteers who're participating in research for money. There are almost no cases in which volunteer participation is driven by motivations other than money, because the attitudes between research participants and clinicians overwhelmingly tend to be characterized by mutual guarded distrust. This distrust is baked into the process, both on a cultural level among the participants, and by the clinics' own incentives. All of what follows is drawn from my own experiences, and experiences that other participants in clinical pharmaceutical research have shared with me, because for reasons which should become clear over the course of this review, research which systematically explores the behaviors and motives of clinical research participants is generally not feasible to conduct. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-participation-in-phase

"You made him lower than the angels for a short time..." God: …and the math results we're seeing are nothing short of incredible. This Terry Tao guy - Iblis: Let me stop you right there. I agree humans can, in controlled situations, provide correct answers to math problems. I deny that they truly understand math. I had a conversation with one of the humans recently, which I'll bring up here for the viewers … give me one moment … https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/what-is-man-that-thou-art-mindful

You can sign the letter here. The Trump administration has been retaliating against its critics, and people and groups with business before the administration have started laundering criticism through other sources with less need for goodwill. So I have been asked to share an open letter, which needs signatures from scientists, doctors, and healthcare professionals. The authors tell me (THIS IS NOT THE CONTENTS OF THE LETTER, IT'S THEIR EXPLANATION, TO ME, OF WHAT THE LETTER IS FOR): The NIH has spent at least $5 billion less of that money than Congress has appropriated to them, which is bad because medical research is good and we want more of it. In May, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya told a room full of people that he would spend all the money by the end of the fiscal year. That is good news, because any money not spent by that point will disappear. The bad news is the fiscal year ends on September 30th and according to the American Association of Medical Colleges, “the true shortfall far exceeds $5 billion.” Our open letter requests that Dr. Bhattacharya do what he said he would and spend all the money by September 30th. We as the originators of the letter do not want to be named publicly because we are concerned about being the focal point for blame and retaliation. We would rather be members of a large crowd of signatories than be singled out as individuals to make an example of. Based on our understanding of current administration norms, we do not expect retaliation against private individuals who sign this letter. We are looking for signatures from scientists, doctors, and healthcare professionals. So if that is you, please sign here. If you want to help support the letter more broadly, email nihfundingletter@gmail.com. Our stretch goal is to have a thousand people sign the letter within the next two weeks. To hammer home (since many people failed to understand it) that this is not the contents of the letter, I am including the actual contents below: We, the undersigned scientists, doctors, and public health stakeholders, commend your commitment to spend all funds allocated to the NIH, as reported in The Washington Post. At the same time, we are concerned by reports that U.S. institutions received nearly $5 billion less in NIH awards over the past year. With less than one month to the end of the fiscal year, we submit this urgent request to ensure that your commitment is upheld. If you anticipate that all appropriated funds cannot be spent in time, we request a public disclosure of the barriers preventing the achievement of this crucial responsibility. We present this request in the spirit of the broad, bipartisan consensus in favor of spending appropriated NIH funds. In their July letter to the Office of Management and Budget, fourteen Republican senators, led by Senators Collins, Britt, and McConnell, forcefully argued that suspension of NIH funds “could threaten Americans' ability to access better treatments and limit our nation's leadership in biomedical science.” The case for investment in medical research transcends political divides as it serves our collective national interest. The return on investment from research is compelling. Synthesizing the empirical literature, economist Matt Clancy estimates that each public and private R&D dollar yields roughly $5.50 in GDP—and about $11 when broader benefits are counted. Every dollar of NIH funding not deployed represents lost opportunities for breakthrough treatments, missed chances to train the next generation of scientists, and diminished returns on America's innovation ecosystem. Spending these funds is also a competitiveness imperative as China attempts to transform itself from a low-end manufacturer to a high-tech research and innovation juggernaut. In 2024, the Chinese government increased its spending on science and technology by 10%, and the nation's total expenditure on research and development increased by 50% in nominal terms between 2020 and 2024. As China's number of clinical trials and new drug candidates begin to outpace the U.S., America cannot afford to allow biomedical research funding to go unspent. We respectfully ask that you ensure that NIH will obligate all FY25 funds by September 30, 2025, and, if that is not possible, that you address the scientific community to explain why and what must be done to ensure all appropriated funds are spent in FY26. We stand ready to support your efforts to preserve this vital national investment. https://readscottalexander.com/posts/acx-open-letter-to-the-nih  

AI psychosis (NYT, PsychologyToday) is an apparent phenomenon where people go crazy after talking to chatbots too much. There are some high-profile anecdotes, but still many unanswered questions. For example, how common is it really? Are the chatbots really driving people crazy, or just catching the attention of people who were crazy already? Isn't psychosis supposed to be a biological disease? Wouldn't that make chatbot-induced psychosis the same kind of category error as chatbot-induced diabetes? I don't have all the answers, so think of this post as an exploration of possible analogies and precedents rather than a strongly-held thesis. Also, I might have one answer - I think the yearly incidence of AI psychosis is somewhere around 1 in 10,000 (for a loose definition) to 1 in 100,000 (for a strict definition). I'll talk about how I got those numbers at the end. But first: I. Lenin Was A Mushroom https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-search-of-ai-psychosis

Finalist #9 in the Review Contest [This is one of the finalists in the 2025 review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I'll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you've read them all, I'll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked] Ollantay is a three-act play written in Quechua, an indigenous language of the South American Andes. It was first performed in Peru around 1775. Since the mid-1800s it's been performed more often, and nowadays it's pretty easy to find some company in Peru doing it. If nothing else, it's popular in Peruvian high schools as a way to get students to connect with Quechua history. It's not a particularly long play; a full performance of Ollantay takes around an hour.1 Also, nobody knows where Ollantay was written, when it was written, or who wrote it. And its first documented performance led directly to upwards of a hundred thousand deaths. Macbeth has killed at most fifty people,2 and yet it routinely tops listicles of “deadliest plays”. I'm here to propose that Ollantay take its place. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-ollantay

[original post here] #1: Isn't it possible that embryos are alive, or have personhood, or are moral patients? Most IVF involves getting many embryos, then throwing out the ones that the couple doesn't need to implant. If destroying embryos were wrong, then IVF would be unethical - and embryo selection, which might encourage more people to do IVF, or to maximize the number of embryos they get from IVF, would be extra unethical. I think a default position would be that if you believe humans are more valuable than cows, and cows more valuable than bugs - presumably because humans are more conscious/intelligent/complex/thoughtful/have more hopes and dreams/experience more emotions - then in that case embryos, which have less of a brain and nervous system even than bugs, should be less valuable still. One reason to abandon this default position would be if you believe in souls or some other nonphysical basis for personhood. Then maybe the soul would enter the embryo at conception. I think even here, it's hard to figure out exactly what you're saying - the soul clearly isn't doing very much, in the sense of experiencing things, while it's in the embryo. But it seems like God is probably pretty attached to souls, and maybe you don't want to mess with them while He's watching. In any case, all I can say is that this isn't my metaphysics. But most people in the comments took a different tactic, arguing that we should give embryos special status (compared to cows and bugs) because they had the potential to grow into a person. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-responses-to-three-concerns-from

Finalist #8 in the Review Contest [This is one of the finalists in the 2025 review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I'll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you've read them all, I'll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked] I. The Men Are Not Alright Sometimes I'm convinced there's a note taped to my back that says, “PLEASE SPILL YOUR SOUL UPON THIS WOMAN.” I am not a therapist, nor in any way certified to deal with emotional distress, yet my presence seems to cause people to regurgitate their traumas. This quirk of mine becomes especially obvious when dating. Many of my dates turn into pseudo-therapy sessions, with men sharing emotional traumas they've kept bottled up for years. One moment I'm learning about his cat named Daisy, and then half a latte later, I'm hearing a detailed account of his third suicide attempt, complete with a critique of the food in the psychiatric ward. This repeated pattern in my dating life has taught me three things: I am terrible at small talk. Most men are not accustomed to genuine questions about their well-being, and will often respond with a desperate upwelling of emotion. The men are not alright. This is a review of dating men in the Bay Area. But more than that, it's an attempt to explain those unofficial therapy sessions to people who never get to hear them. It's a review of the various forms of neglect and abuse society inflicts upon men, and the inevitable consequences to their happiness and romantic partnerships. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-dating-men-in-the-bay

A guest post by David Schneider-Joseph The “amyloid hypothesis” says that Alzheimer's is caused by accumulation of the peptide amyloid-β. It's the leading model in academia, but a favorite target for science journalists, contrarian bloggers, and neuroscience public intellectuals, who point out problems like: Some of the research establishing amyloid's role turned out to be fraudulent. The level of amyloid in the brain doesn't correlate very well with the level of cognitive impairment across Alzheimer's patients. Several strains of mice that were genetically programmed to have extra amyloid did eventually develop cognitive impairments. But it took much higher amyloid levels than humans have, and on further investigation the impairments didn't really look like Alzheimer's. Some infectious agents, like the gingivitis bacterium and the herpesviruses, seem to play a role in at least some Alzheimer's cases. . . . and amyloid is one of the body's responses to injury or infection, so it might be a harmless byproduct of these infections or whatever else the real disease is. Anti-amyloid drugs (like Aduhelm) don't reverse the disease, and only slow progression a relatively small amount. Opponents call the amyloid hypothesis zombie science, propped up only by pharmaceutical companies hoping to sell off a few more anti-amyloid me-too drugs before it collapses. Meanwhile, mainstream scientists . . . continue to believe it without really offering any public defense. Scott was so surprised by the size of the gap between official and unofficial opinion that he asked if someone from the orthodox camp would speak out in its favor. I am David Schneider-Joseph, an engineer formerly with SpaceX and Google, now working in AI safety. Alzheimer's isn't my field, but I got very interested in it, spent six months studying the literature, and came away believing the amyloid hypothesis was basically completely solid. I thought I'd share that understanding with current skeptics. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-defense-of-the-amyloid-hypothesis

[Original post: Should Strong Gods Bet On GDP?] 1: Comments About The Theory 2: Comments About Specific Communities 3: Other Comments Comments About The Theory Darwin writes: I think you may (*may*, I'm not sure) be vastly underestimating how many people are in some form of nontraditional tight-knit community. Notice that many of the communities you list are things you've directly personally encountered through your online interests or social circle. Most people have never heard of libertarian homesteaders or rationalist dating sites, perhaps you have also never heard of the things most other people belong to. For my part, I have been part of a foam combat ('boffer') organization since college. You may want to say 'that's not a community, that's just a hobby', but the people in this sport form a strong community with tight bonds outside the game itself. Not only do I go to practices twice a week, I have 2 D&D games and 1 board game night every week with mostly members of the community, members of the community are my friends that I go out to movies and dinners with, play video games with voice chat on Discord with, talk to online in Discord servers and web forums and group chats, go to parties with and gossip about with other community members. Aside from attending over a dozen weddings of community members (mostly to other community members), I've served as best man for 2 members and wedding officiant for 2 other members. The sport itself has houses, guilds, and fighting units, all with their own ethos, credos, goals, activities, and hierarchies; it has knighthoods and squireships, it has awards for arts and crafts and community service. The sport has regular camping events that end up looking like temporary compounds of hundreds to thousand+ members, lasting from a weekend to a week. We may not have a singular God or Invisible Hand we all worship, but we have strong community norms towards things like inclusion, creating positive experiences, some modernized gender-neutral version of chivalry, creating safe spaces, etc. If you didn't know me very very well, you might know that 'oh yeah, he does some kind of sword fighting thing on the weekends I think?', and not know there's a large and strong community there. I wonder how many other things are like this - I think 'oh yeah, they play softball on the weekends, oh yeah, they belong to a knitting circle, oh yeah, they go to a lot of concerts, oh yeah, they volunteer at some kind of community center', and have no idea that there's a strong close-knit community surrounding those things that remains largely invisible to outsiders. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-liberalism

[This is one of the finalists in the 2025 review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I'll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you've read them all, I'll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked] My dad only actually enjoys about ten foods, nine of them beige. His bread? White. His pizza? Cheese. His meat? Turkey breast. And his side dish? Mashed potatoes. As a child I hated mashed potatoes, despite his evangelization of them. I too was a picky eater growing up, but I would occasionally attempt to see what he saw in his beloved spuds. Whenever I tried a bite, the texture disgusted me: a gritty gruel of salty flakes coated with the oleic pall of margarine. The flavor reminded me of stale Pringles. I checked back once every couple years, but was repulsed by them every time. I lobbied my parents for pasta or frozen tater tots or any other side I actually liked. Family dinners were often dichotomous, the same protein supplemented by two different carbs. “You are not my son,” my father would joke as he continued to put away his potato slop. “Maybe you're not my father,” I'd shoot back when he shunned the rest of the family's rice pilaf. Our starch preferences seemed irreconcilable. As I entered my teen years, my palate expanded. After I'd tried and enjoyed brussels sprouts and sushi and escargot, my hatred of one of the most basic and inoffensive of all foods seemed silly. One day at a nice restaurant, I decided to give mashed potatoes one more try. Upon taking my first bite, I realized three things: 1) Mashed potatoes are good. 2) Whatever my dad had been eating at home was not mashed potatoes. 3) My world is built on lies. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-my-fathers-instant-mashed

Slightly contra Fukuyama on liberal communities Francis Fukuyama is on Substack; last month he wrote Liberalism Needs Community. As always, read the whole thing and don't trust my summary, but the key point is: R. R. Reno, editor of the magazine First Things, the liberal project of the past three generations has sought to weaken the “strong Gods” of populism, nationalism, and religion that were held to be the drivers of the bloody conflicts of the early 20th century. Those gods are now returning, and are present in the politics of both the progressive left and far right—particularly the right, which is characterized today by demands for strong national identities or religious foundations for national communities. However, there is a cogent liberal response to the charge that liberalism undermines community. The problem is that, just as in the 1930s, that response has not been adequately articulated by the defenders of liberalism. Liberalism is not intrinsically opposed to community; indeed, there is a version of liberalism that encourages the flourishing of strong community and human virtue. That community emerges through the development of a strong and well-organized civil society, where individuals freely choose to bond with other like-minded individuals to seek common ends. People are free to follow “strong Gods”; the only caveat is that there is no single strong god that binds the entire society together. In other words - yes, part of the good life is participation in a tight-knit community with strong values. Liberalism's shared values are comparatively weak, and its knitting comparatively loose. But that's no argument against the liberal project. Its goal isn't to become this kind of community itself, but to be the platform where communities like this can grow up. So in a liberal democracy, Christians can have their church, Jews their synagogue, Communists their commune, and so on. Everyone gets the tight-knit community they want - which beats illiberalism, where (at most) one group gets the community they want and everyone else gets persecuted. On a theoretical level, this is a great answer. On a practical level - is it really working? Are we really a nation dotted with tight-knit communities of strong values? The average person has a church they don't attend and a political philosophy that mainly cashes out in Twitter dunks. Otherwise they just consume whatever slop the current year's version of capitalism chooses to throw at them. It's worth surveying the exceptions that prove the rule: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/should-strong-gods-bet-on-gdp

Finalist #6 in the Review Contest [This is one of the finalists in the 2025 review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I'll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you've read them all, I'll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked] When the prefect of Alexandria's daughter converted to Christianity, nothing in particular happened - it wasn't as though the laws outlawing the cult would be enforced against her. She was smart, she was pretty (beautiful, even) and she had connections. So long as she kept quiet, Catherine could have a comfortable life. She didn't keep quiet. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-joan-of-arc  

[see footnote 4 for conflicts of interest] In 2021, Genomic Prediction announced the first polygenically selected baby. When a couple uses IVF, they may get as many as ten embryos. If they only want one child, which one do they implant? In the early days, doctors would just eyeball them and choose whichever looked healthiest. Later, they started testing for some of the most severe and easiest-to-detect genetic disorders like Down Syndrome and cystic fibrosis1. The final step was polygenic selection - genotyping each embryo and implanting the one with the best genes overall. Best in what sense? Genomic Prediction claimed the ability to forecast health outcomes from diabetes to schizophrenia. For example, although the average person has a 30% chance of getting type II diabetes, if you genetically test five embryos and select the one with the lowest predicted risk, they'll only have a 20% chance2. Since you're taking the healthiest of many embryos, you should expect a child conceived via this method to be significantly healthier than one born naturally. Polygenic selection straddles the line between disease prevention and human enhancement. In 2023, Orchid Health entered the field. Unlike Genomic Prediction, which tested only the most important genetic variants, Orchid offers whole genome sequencing, which can detect the de novo3 mutations involved in autism, developmental disorders, and certain other genetic diseases. Critics accused GP and Orchid of offering “designer babies”, but this was only true in the weakest sense - customers couldn't “design” a baby for anything other than slightly lower risk of genetic disease. These companies refused to offer selection on “traits” - the industry term for the really controversial stuff like height, IQ, or eye color. Still, these were trivial extensions of their technology, and everybody knew it was just a matter of time before someone took the plunge. Last month, a startup called Nucleus took the plunge. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/suddenly-trait-based-embryo-selection

I promised some people longer responses: Thomas Cotter asks why people think “consistency” is an important moral value. After all, he says, the Nazis and Soviets were “consistent” with their evil beliefs. I'm not so sure of his examples - the Soviets massacred workers striking for better conditions, and the Nazis were so bad at race science that they banned IQ tests after Jews outscored Aryans - but I'm sure if he looked harder he could find some evil person who was superficially consistent with themselves. Hen Mazzig on Twitter is suspicious that lots of people oppose the massacres in Gaza without having objected equally strenuously to various other things. Again, he's bad at examples - most of the things he names are less bad than the massacres in Gaza - but I'm sure if he looked harder he could find some thing which was worse than Gaza and which not quite as many people had protested. Therefore, people who object to the massacres in Gaza must be motivated by anti-Semitism. An r/TrueUnpopularOpinion poster argues that No One Actually Cares About Gaza; Your Anger Is Performative. They say that (almost) nobody can actually sustain strong emotions about the deaths of some hard-to-pin-down number of people they don't know, and so probably people who claim to care are virtue-signaling or luxury-believing or one of those things. Since 2/3 of these are about Gaza, we'll start there. And since there's so much virtue-signaling and luxury-believing going around these days, I assure you that what I am about to share is my absolute most honest and deepest opinion, the one I hold in my heart of hearts.  https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-heart-of-hearts  

Jul 26, 2025 Finalist #5 in the Review Contest [This is one of the finalists in the 2025 review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I'll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you've read them all, I'll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked] Introduction The Astral Codex Ten (ACX) Commentariat is defined as the 24,485 individuals other than Scott who have contributed to the corpus of work of Scott's blog posts, chiefly by leaving comments at the bottom of those posts. It is well understood (by the Commentariat themselves) that they are the best comments section anywhere on the internet, and have been for some time. This review takes it as a given that the ACX Commentariat outclasses all of its pale imitators across the web, so I won't compare the ACX Commentariat to e.g. reddit. The real question is whether our glory days are behind us – specifically whether the ACX Commentariat of today has lost its edge compared to the SSC Commentariat of pre-2021. A couple of years ago Scott asked, Why Do I Suck?. This was a largely tongue-in-cheek springboard to discuss a substantive criticism he regularly received - that his earlier writing was better than his writing now. How far back do we need to go before his writing was ‘good'? Accounts seemed to differ; Scott said that the feedback he got was of two sorts: “I loved your articles from about 2013 - 2016 so much! Why don't you write articles like that any more?”, which dates the decline to 2016 “Do you feel like you've shifted to less ambitious forms of writing with the new Substack?”, which dates the decline to 2021 Quite a few people responded in the comments that Scott's writing hadn't changed, but it was the experience of being a commentor which had worsened. For example, David Friedman, a prolific commentor on the blog in the SSC-era, writes: A lot of what I liked about SSC was the commenting community, and I find the comments here less interesting than they were on SSC, fewer interesting arguments, which is probably why I spend more time on [an alternative forum] than on ACX. Similarly, kfix seems to be a long-time lurker (from as early as 2016) who has become more active in the ACX-era, writes: I would definitely agree that the commenting community here is 'worse' than at SSC along the lines you describe, along with the also unwelcome hurt feelings post whenever Scott makes an offhand joke about a political/cultural topic. And of course, this position wasn't unanimous. Verbamundi Consulting is a true lurker who has only ever made one post on the blog – this one: Ok, I've been lurking for a while, but I have to say: I don't think you suck… You have a good variety of topics, your commenting community remains excellent, and you're one of the few bloggers I continue to follow. The ACX Commentariat is somewhat unique in that it self-styles itself as a major reason to come and read Scott's writing – Scott offers up some insights on an issue, and then the comments section engages unusually open and unusually respectful discussion of the theme, and the total becomes greater than the sum of the parts. Therefore, if the Commentariat has declined in quality it may disproportionately affect people's experience of Scott's posts. The joint value of each Scott-plus-Commentariat offering declines if the Commentariat are not pulling their weight, even if Scott himself remains just as good as ever. In Why Do I Suck? Scott suggests that there is weak to no evidence of a decline in his writing quality, so I propose this review as something of a companion piece; is the (alleged) problem with the blog, in fact, staring at us in the mirror? My personal view aligns with Verbamundi Consulting and many other commentors - I've enjoyed participating in both the SSC and ACX comments, and I haven't noticed any decline in Commentariat quality. So, I was extremely surprised to find the data totally contradicted my anecdotal experience, and indicated a very clear dropoff in a number of markers of quality at almost exactly the points Scott mentioned in Why Do I Suck? – one in mid-2016 and one in early 2021 during the switch from SSC to ACX. https://readscottalexander.com/posts/acx-your-review-the-astral-codex-ten