Astral Codex Ten Podcast

In 1917, some Portuguese children started seeing visions of the Virgin Mary. The Virgin told them she would enact a great miracle on a certain day in October, and a crowd of 100,000 gathered to witness the event. According to eyewitness reports, newspaper articles, etc, they saw the sun spin around, change colors, and do various other miraculous things. At least a hundred separate testimonies of t...

Michael Halassa: Did John Nash Really Have Schizophrenia? is a good article on the genetics of psychosis. Previous research found that schizophrenia genes decreased IQ but increased educational attainment. Usually IQ and education are correlated, so this was surprising. The new research finds two components to schizophrenia genetic risk. The first component, shared with bipolar, increases educatio...

SUPPORTER: America needs to start talking to China to come up with a bilateral agreement to pause AI. The agreement would need to be transparent, mutually enforceable, and… OPPONENT: We can't unilaterally pause AI! China would destroy us! SUPPORTER: As I said, we need to start negotiating a bilateral agreement so that both sides will… OPPONENT: You fool! Don't you know that while we unilaterally p...

I. John Rawls was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on February 21, 1921. Not John Rawls the famous liberal philosopher (or, rather, John Rawls the famous liberal philosopher was also born in Baltimore, Maryland on February 21, 1921, but he is not the subject of our story). This is John Rawls the alcoholic. John Rawls the alcoholic was twelve when they lifted Prohibition. He partook immediately, and dr...

Every few weeks, a Trump administration official comes up with an insane plan that would devastate some American industry, region, or demographic. Maybe an Undersecretary of the Interior decides that aluminum is "woke" and should be banned. They circulate a draft order saying it will be illegal for US companies to use aluminum, starting in two weeks, Thank You For Your Attention To This Matter. Ne...

  I hate the term "hallucinations" for when AIs say false things. It's perfectly calculated to mislead the reader - to make them think AIs are crazy, or maybe just have incomprehensible failure modes. AIs say false things for the same reason you do. At least, I did. In school, I would take multiple choice tests. When I didn't know the answer to a question, I would guess. Schoolchild urban legend s...

Guest post by David Speiser   The Problem Everyone hates Congress. That poll showing that cockroaches are more popular than Congress is now thirteen years old, and things haven't improved in those thirteen years. Congressional approval dipped below 20% during the Great Recession and hasn't recovered since. A republic where a supermajority of citizens neither like nor trust their representatives is...

California lets interest groups propose measures for the state ballot. Anyone who gathers enough signatures (currently 874,641) can put their hare-brained plans before voters during the next election year. This year, the big story is the 2026 Billionaire Tax Act, a 5% wealth tax on California's billionaires. Your views on this will mostly be shaped by whether or not you like taxing the rich, but o...

Having Your Own Government Try To Destroy You Is (At Least Temporarily) Good For Business On Friday, the Pentagon declared AI company Anthropic a "supply chain risk", a designation never before given to an American company. This unprecedented move was seen as an attempt to punish, maybe destroy the company. How effective was it? Anthropic isn't publicly traded, so we turn to the prediction markets...

Last Friday, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth declared AI company Anthropic a " supply chain risk ", the first time this designation has ever been applied to a US company. The trigger for the move was Anthropic's refusal to allow the Department of War to use their AIs for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. A few hours later, Hegseth and Sam Altman declared an agreement-in-principle for OpenAI'...

I. In The Argument, Kelsey Piper gives a good description of the ways that AIs are more than just "next-token predictors" or "stochastic parrots" - for example, they also use fine-tuning and RLHF. But commenters, while appreciating the subtleties she introduces, object that they're still just extra layers on top of a machine that basically runs on next-token prediction. I want to approach this fro...

Here's my understanding of  the situation : Anthropic signed a contract with the Pentagon last summer. It originally said the Pentagon had to follow Anthropic's Usage Policy like everyone else. In January, the Pentagon attempted to renegotiate, asking to ditch the Usage Policy and instead have Anthropic's AIs available for "all lawful purposes" 1 . Anthropic demurred, asking for a guarantee that t...

Malicious streetlights are an evil trick from Dark Data Journalism. Some annoying enemy has a valid complaint. So you use FACTS and LOGIC to prove that something similar-sounding-but-slightly-different is definitely false. Then you act like you've debunked the complaint. My "favorite" example, spotted during the 2016 election, was a response to some #BuildTheWall types saying that illegal immigrat...

It's that time again. Even numbered years are book reviews, odd-numbered years are non-book reviews, so you're limited to books for now. Write a review of a book. There's no official word count requirement, but previous finalists and winners were often between 2,000 and 10,000 words. There's no official recommended style, but check the style of last time's finalists and winners or my ACX book revi...

The problem: people hate crime and think it's going up. But actually, crime barely affects most people and is historically low . So what's going on?   In our discussion yesterday, many commenters proposed that the discussion about "crime" was really about disorder. Disorder takes many forms, but its symptoms include litter, graffiti, shoplifting, tent cities, weird homeless people wandering about...

Last year, the US may have recorded the lowest murder rate in its 250 year history. Other crimes have poorer historical data, but are at least at ~50 year lows. This post will do two things: Establish that our best data show crime rates are historically low Argue that this is a real effect, not just reporting bias (people report fewer crimes to police) or an artifact of better medical care (victim...

[Original post: Biological Anchors: A Trick That Might Or Might Not Work ] I. Ajeya Cotra's Biological Anchors report was the landmark AI timelines forecast of the early 2020s. In many ways, it was incredibly prescient - it nailed the scaling hypothesis, predicted the current AI boom, and introduced concepts like "time horizons" that have entered common parlance. In most cases where its contempora...

The European discourse can be - for lack of a better term - America-brained. We hear stories of Black Lives Matter marches in countries without significant black populations, or defendants demanding their First Amendment rights in countries without constitutions. Why shouldn't the opposite phenomenon exist? Europe is more populous than the US, and looms large in the American imagination. Why shoul...

[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-february-2026

[previous post: Best Of Moltbook ] From the human side of the discussion: As the AIs would say, "You've cut right to the heart of this issue". What's the difference between 'real' and 'roleplaying'? One possible answer invokes internal reality. Are the AIs conscious? Do they "really" "care" about the things they're saying? We may never figure this out. Luckily, it has no effect on the world, so we...

Moltbook is "a social network for AI agents", although "humans [are] welcome to observe". The backstory: a few months ago, Anthropic released Claude Code, an exceptionally productive programming agent. A few weeks ago, a user modified it into Clawdbot, a generalized lobster-themed AI personal assistant. It's free, open-source, and "empowered" in the corporate sense - the designer talks about how i...

In the comments to last year's USAID post, Fabian said : While i am happy for the existence of charity organisations, i don't get why people instead of giving to charity are so eager to force their co-citizens to give. If one charity org is not worth getting your personal money, find another one which is. But don't use the tax machine to forcefully extract money for charity. There are purposes whe...

[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 alive 1 . 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...

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 cal...