Astral Codex Ten Podcast

[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] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-islamic-geometric-patterns

I. A thought I had throughout reading L.R. Hiatt's Arguments About Aborigines was: What are anthropologists even doing? The book recounts two centuries' worth of scholarly disputes over questions like whether aboriginal tribes had chiefs. But during those centuries, many Aborigines learned English, many Westerners learned Aboriginal languages, and representatives of each side often spent years emb...

[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] "The scientific paper is a ' fraud ' that creates "a totally misleading narrative of the processes of t...

Steven Byrnes is a physicist/AI researcher/amateur neuroscientist; needless to say, he blogs on Less Wrong. I finally got around to reading his 2024 series giving a predictive processing perspective on intuitive self-models . If that sounds boring, it shouldn't: Byrnes charges head-on into some of the toughest subjects in psychology, including trance, amnesia, and multiple personalities. I found h...

  In June 2022, I bet a commenter $100 that AI would master image compositionality by June 2025. DALL-E2 had just come out, showcasing the potential of AI art. But it couldn't follow complex instructions; its images only matched the "vibe" of the prompt. For example, here were some of its attempts at "a red sphere on a blue cube, with a yellow pyramid on the right, all on top of a green table". At...

[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. It was originally given an Honorable Mention, but since last week's piece was about an exciting new experimental school, I decided to promote this more conservative review as a counterpoint.] "Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other f...

[Original thread here: Missing Heritability: Much More Than You Wanted To Know ] 1: Comments From People Named In The Post 2: Very Long Comments From Other Very Knowledgeable People 3: Small But Important Corrections 4: Other Comments https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-missing-ed5

[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-july-2025

Stephen Skolnick is a gut microbiome expert blogging at Eat Shit And Prosper . His most recent post argues that contra the psychiatric consensus, schizophrenia isn't genetic at all - it's caused by a gut microbe. He argues: Scientists think schizophrenia is genetic because it obviously runs in families But the twin concordance rates are pretty low - if your identical twin has schizophrenia, there'...

[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] "Just as we don't accept students using AI to write their essays, we will not accept districts using AI...

The Story So Far The mid-20th century was the golden age of nurture. Psychoanalysis, behaviorism, and the spirit of the '60s convinced most experts that parents, peers, and propaganda were the most important causes of adult personality. Starting in the 1970s, the pendulum swung the other way. Twin studies shocked the world by demonstrating that most behavioral traits - especially socially relevant...

Related to: ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-questions-for-future-acx-grants

The first cohort of ACX Grants was announced in late 2021 , the second in early 2024 . In 2022, I posted one-year updates for the first cohort. Now, as I start thinking about a third round, I've collected one-year updates on the second and three-year updates on the first. Many people said my request for updates went to their spam folder; relatedly, many people have not yet sent in their updates. I...

This is a reported phenomenon where if two copies of Claude talk to each other, they end up spiraling into rapturous discussion of spiritual bliss, Buddhism, and the nature of consciousness. From the system card : Anthropic swears they didn't do this on purpose; when they ask Claude why this keeps happening, Claude can't explain. Needless to say, this has made lots of people freak out / speculate...

This is another heuristic from the same place as If It's Worth Your Time To Lie, It's Worth My Time To Correct You . If someone proves you are absolutely, 100% wrong about something, it's polite to say "Oh, I guess I was wrong, sorry" before launching into your next argument. That is, instead of: https://readscottalexander.com/posts/acx-but-vs-yes-but

People don't like nitpickers. "He literally did the WELL AKTUALLY!" If you say Joe Criminal committed ten murders and five rapes, and I object that it was actually only six murders and two rapes, then why am I "defending" Joe Criminal? Because if it's worth your time to lie, it's worth my time to correct it. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/if-its-worth-your-time-to-lie-its

There's a long-running philosophical argument about the conceivability of otherwise-normal people who are not conscious, aka "philosophical zombies" . This has spawned a shorter-running (only fifteen years!) rationalist sub-argument on the topic. The last time I checked its status was this post , which says: 1. Both Yudkowsky and Chalmers agree that humans possess "qualia". 2. Chalmers argues that...

It's time to narrow the 141 entries in the Non-Book Review Contest to about a dozen finalists. I can't read 141 reviews alone, so I need your help. Please pick as many as you have time for, read them, and rate them using this form . Don't read them in order! If you read them in order, I'll have 1,000 votes on the first review, 500 on the second, and so on to none in the second half. Either pick a...

A guest post by Brandon Hendrickson [Editor's note: I accept guest posts from certain people, especially past Book Review Contest winners. Brandon Hendrickson, whose review of The Educated Mind won the 2023 contest, has taken me up on this and submitted this essay. He writes at The Lost Tools of Learning and will be at LessOnline this weekend, where he and Jack Despain Zhou aka TracingWoodgrains w...

Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution continues to disagree with my Contra MR On Charity Regrants . Going through his response piece by piece, slightly out of order: Scott takes me to be endorsing Rubio's claim that the third-party NGOs simply pocket the money. In reality my fact check with o3 found (correctly) that the money was "channelled through" the NGOs, not pocketed. Scott lumps my claim toget...

Consciousness is the great mystery. In search of answers, scientists have plumbed every edge case they can think of - sleep, comas, lucid dreams, LSD trips, meditative ecstasies, seizures, neurosurgeries, that one pastor in 18th century England who claimed a carriage accident turned him into a p-zombie . Still, new stuff occasionally turns up. I assume this tweet is a troll (source: the guy has a...

I often disagree with Marginal Revolution, but their post today made me a new level of angry: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-mr-on-charity-regrants

Many commenters responded to yesterday's post by challenging the claim that 1.2 million Americans died of COVID... https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-evidence-that-a-million-americans

Five years later, we can't stop talking about COVID. Remember lockdowns? The conflicting guidelines about masks - don't wear them! Wear them! Maybe wear them! School closures, remote learning, learning loss, something about teachers' unions. That one Vox article on how worrying about COVID was anti-Chinese racism. The time Trump sort of half-suggested injecting disinfectants. Hydroxychloroquine, i...

Bryan Caplan's Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids is like the Bible. You already know what it says. You've already decided whether you believe or not. Do you really have to read it all the way through? But when you're going through a rough patch in your life, sometimes it helps to pick up a Bible and look for pearls of forgotten wisdom. That's where I am now. Having twins is a lot of work. My wife...