Astral Codex Ten Podcast

I enjoy the yearly book review contest, but it feels like last year’s contest is barely done, and I want to give you a break so you can read more books before we start over. So this year, let’s do something different. Submit an ACX-length post reviewing something, anything, except a book.

You can review a movie, song, or video game. You can review a product, restaurant, or tourist attraction. But don’t let the usual categories limi...

Conflict theory is the belief that political disagreements come from material conflict. So for example, if rich people support capitalism, and poor people support socialism, this isn’t because one side doesn’t understand economics. It’s because rich people correctly believe capitalism is good for the rich, and poor people correctly believe socialism is good for the poor. Or if white people are racist, it’s not because they have som...

It feels like 2010 again - the bloggers are debating the proofs for the existence of God. I found these much less interesting after learning about Max Tegmark’s mathematical universe hypothesis, and this doesn’t seem to have reached the Substack debate yet, so I’ll put it out there.

Tegmark’s hypothesis says: all possible mathematical objects exist.

Consider a mathematical object like a cellular automaton - a set of simple rules t...

From the Commerce Department:

U.S. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz (R-Texas) released a database identifying over 3,400 grants, totaling more than $2.05 billion in federal funding awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) during the Biden-Harris administration. This funding was diverted toward questionable projects that promoted Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or advanced neo-Marxist class wa...

In the past day, Zvi has written about deliberative alignment, and OpenAI has updated their spec. This article was written before either of these and doesn’t account for them, sorry.

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OpenAI has bad luck with its alignment teams. The first team quit en masse to found Anthropic, now a major competitor. The second team quit en masse to protest the company reneging on safety commitments. The third died in a tragic pl...

As RFK Jr. fights to be confirmed in Congress, the rest of Trump’s health team is already taking shape.

1DaySooner is an ACX grantee organization that advocates for innovative health policies. They’ve helped me write a list of who some of these people are, and some of the policies they could consider.

For practical reasons, we focus on upside only, so consider these the Venn-diagram-union of the ideas we’re most excited about, and ...

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PEPFAR - a Bush initiative to send cheap AIDS drugs to Africa - has saved millions of lives and is among the most successful foreign aid programs ever. A Trump decision briefly put it “on pause”, although this seems to have been walked back; its current status is unclear but hopeful.

In the debate around this question, many people asked - is it really fair to spend $6 billion a year to help foreigners when so many Americans are...

Prospera Declared Unconstitutional

The Honduras Supreme Court has declared charter cities, including Prospera, unconstitutional.

The background: in the mid-2010s, the ruling conservative party wanted charter cities. They had already packed the Supreme Court for other reasons, so they had their captive court declare charter cities to be constitutional.

In 2022, the socialists took po...