AI Article Readings

In this post, Gwern argues for “Guardian Angels”: deeply personalized LLMs designed not as generic chatbots, but as trusted extensions of a specific person’s values, style, preferences, and goals. It’s a wide-ranging essay about productivity, security, AI-mediated work, and what it might take for future AI systems to genuinely amplify individuals rather than merely replace or manipulate them. * 00...

In this post, Alice I. Cecile argues that hating AI is understandable but insufficient: the harms are real, the technology works well enough to matter, and neither boycotts nor bans are likely to make it disappear. Instead, she makes a case for “bitter hope”: targeted regulation, decentralised access, harm reduction, and a politics aimed at redistributing the gains rather than pretending the machi...

In this post Scott Alexander investigates whether whole-body screening is really as irrational as many doctors say, walking through the rough cost-benefit maths behind false positives, missed cancers, anxiety, follow-up tests, and the value of early detection. He ends up in a characteristically uncomfortable middle ground: the standard medical caution may be justified, but the case against screeni...

In this post, Gwern argues that realistic interstellar warfare would be less like romantic space-navy fiction and more like an even colder, more unstable version of nuclear first-strike logic. Starting from Ender’s Game and Cold War doctrine, he suggests that vast distances, three-dimensional attack routes, asteroid-scale weapons, and weak attribution could make space conflict terrifyingly offense...

In this post, Beren Millidge argues that intergalactic warfare between mature Kardashev Type Three civilizations would probably be strongly defense-dominant. Although galaxy-scale attackers could use devastating beam weapons, relativistic kill vehicles, and self-replicating invasion probes, the sheer distances involved create enormous targeting delays, warning times, and energy costs. A sufficient...

In this post, Scott Alexander investigates the “sun miracles” associated with Fatima and Medjugorje, travelling to Bosnia in search of firsthand evidence and ending up with something stranger than either simple faith or simple debunking. Part travelogue, part epistemic self-experiment, and part perceptual psychology essay, it follows his attempt to explain how crowds of people can sincerely report...

In this article Gevorg Yeghikyan explores why some Western cities became worlds of apartment blocks while others became landscapes of row houses. Using Paris and London as the central contrast, he moves beyond familiar explanations about walls, density, culture, and zoning to build a deeper political-economic account of urban form: one shaped by inheritance law, land ownership, building codes, fin...

In this short story, Max Harms tells the strange, funny, and quietly moving tale of Pemberton, an elderly butler who has spent fifty years keeping his dead master legally “alive” so that a fortune can continue flowing to a village in India. When Krishna arrives from the Office of the Preserver to audit the household’s dharmic account, Pemberton’s elaborate machinery of forgery, puppetry, and moral...

In this post, Scott Alexander lays out his current views on AI timelines, safety, geopolitics, and possible futures, offering probabilistic forecasts for AGI, superintelligence, diffusion, doom risk, AI pauses, and post-scarcity outcomes. He presents himself as worried but not maximally pessimistic: expecting transformative AI within decades, seeing serious alignment and misuse risks, but also lea...

In this post, Dario Amadei argues that AI’s exponential progress is now moving far faster than political institutions can comfortably respond, creating an urgent need for serious policy action. He sets out five areas where governments need to rethink their approach: frontier-model safety regulation, job displacement and macroeconomic policy, accelerating beneficial scientific uses of AI, protectin...

In this post, 0xkato explains how modern transformer-based LLMs work, walking through the core machinery that turns text into token IDs, embeds them as vectors, tracks position, uses attention and feed-forward networks to process meaning, and then predicts the next token in a loop. The piece is pitched as an accessible, low-math introduction, showing how shared architecture, trained weights, model...

In this article, Anthropic argues that AI systems are already playing a growing role in building and improving AI, speeding up coding, experimentation, and research workflows inside the company while raising the possibility—though not the certainty—of future “recursive self-improvement,” where AI could help design its own successors. The piece presents this as both a major opportunity for science,...

In this article, John Psmith reviews Xenophon’s Anabasis as both a gripping ancient adventure story and a meditation on leadership under impossible pressure, using the retreat of the Ten Thousand to explore what it means to become an “operator”: someone who takes responsibility when institutions fail, keeps a fractious group alive, and cannot simply walk away once others depend on him. https://ope...

In this post, ryan_b reviews Tamler Sommers’ Why Honor Matters , exploring the case for honor as a local, social, psychologically realistic ethical framework rather than an abstract universal theory. The review walks through honor’s links to courage, hospitality, shame, solidarity, violence, revenge, and community, while keeping sight of its darker associations and the costs of trying to do withou...

In this post, Ajeya Cotra expands on her claim that near-term AI timelines could make modern marriage “shorter” than we usually imagine, arguing that the Singularity could either cut lives off through catastrophic risk or transform them so radically that ordinary lifelong vows may no longer fit the world people find themselves in. The essay is less a rejection of marriage than a reframing of commi...

In this post, Ajeya Cotra offers a clear, unsentimental framework for deciding whether to marry a long-term partner, treating marriage as a commitment device that enables deeper investment, trust, and shared life-building while also forcing a real tradeoff against possible alternatives. The piece walks through when “waiting for more information” stops being useful, how to evaluate a partner as cof...

In this post, Scott Alexander reviews The Dialectical Imagination as a way into the strange, slippery world of the Frankfurt School: its origins, its relationship to Marxism, its suspicion of capitalism and mass culture, and its insistence that criticism itself can be a kind of philosophical work. The piece is a witty, sceptical, and surprisingly sympathetic attempt to understand a school of thoug...

In this article, johnswentworth reviews Uri Alon’s An Introduction to Systems Biology: Design Principles of Biological Circuits , using it to argue against the idea that biology is an incomprehensible tangle of evolutionary spaghetti. By exploring recurring network motifs, feedback loops, robustness mechanisms, and biological control systems, the article shows how evolution repeatedly converges on...

In this post, Max Harms reflects on using AI to produce full-cast audiobooks, weighing the creative empowerment it gives him against the fear that he is helping accelerate the replacement of human artists. Through his own experience with rapidly improving text-to-speech tools, he explores broader worries about AI’s growing ability to capture attention, reshape culture, and blur the line between us...

In this post Marcus Olang pushes back against the lazy idea that formal, polished prose is automatically a sign of AI, arguing that many so-called ChatGPT “tells” are also the marks of a very human education shaped by exams, colonial history, and the pressure to master English as a language of opportunity. It’s a sharp, personal defence of writers whose humanity is too easily misread by algorithmi...

In this post Scott Alexander uses AI fiction, school-essay “wow words,” children’s songs, poetry, architecture, and orange juice to build a theory of taste: bad taste as the overuse of cheap tricks that reliably delight unsophisticated audiences, and good taste as the difficult art of making space for subtler pleasures. It’s funny, wide-ranging, and unusually generous about why “lowbrow” joys can...

In this post Scott Alexander uses flags, movie plot holes, and tech-company names as “model organisms” for thinking about taste: small, familiar examples where broader arguments about rules, context, elegance, novelty, and cliché become easier to see. It’s a sharp, funny exploration of why some aesthetic rules feel obvious, when they may just be inherited habits, and why “easy wins” can sometimes...

In this post John Psmith reviews Aaron Reed’s 50 Years of Text Games , using the history of interactive fiction to explore why games made of words once felt magical, why they faded, and why AI might make them newly strange, powerful, and relevant. https://open.substack.com/pub/thepsmiths/p/review-50-years-of-text-games-by?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to A...

In this post Scott Alexander returns to the topic of artistic taste, responding to thoughtful replies from Ozy, Frank Lantz, and Sympathetic Opposition on a piece he wrote last year. He opens by unpacking eight distinct things people tend to bundle together under the heading of "good art" — from raw sensory delight to historical novelty to political point-making — and then sets out to argue, contr...

In this essay, Lee Sandlin reflects on how war is remembered, misunderstood, mythologised, and slowly lost to those who never experienced it directly, moving from private family mementos to the vast cultural memory of World War Two with a bleak, humane eye for the gap between history as story and history as lived catastrophe. https://www.leesandlin.com/articles/LosingTheWar.htm Get full access to...