[I haven’t independently verified each link.
asserted
I → verify → 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.
asserted
two → end → post
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.
asserted
you → correct → this
]
1: Did you know: Jeremy Bentham wrote a utilitarian cookbook, intended for use at his Panopticon prison?
asserted
Bentham → know → prison
As you might expect, his recipes describe tasty food created from very cheap ingredients.
uncertain
recipes → expect → ingredients
Although Bentham was a founder of modern animal rights, he thought it was acceptable to eat humanely-raised animals; correspondingly, his cookbook includes some meat dishes - none of them sound very appetizing, but I think this is just the 18th-century British baseline rather than covert vegan activism.
asserted
this → think → activism
You can see some recipes here, here, and here.
asserted
You → see → recipes
If any effective altruist group houses end up throwing a Jeremy Bentham recipe-tasting party, please invite me.
asserted
houses → end → me
A riddle: why does this chemistry paper mention “1 ml of the mass killing of an ethnic group”?
Answer at this link (X), or here’s a repost for people without X accounts.
asserted
repost → mention → accounts
I think this take on Hieronymus Bosch (h/t @mickeyxfriedman) is my favorite AI art so far, although it leans enough on the work of a human artist that it might not fully qualify (but then I would ask that it be considered as an example of how AI tools can enable human artists).
uncertain
tools → think → artists
If we make it, the future is going to be beautiful:
asserted
future → make → it
ACX commenter temp_name asked AI to translate Romance of the Three Kingdoms into rhyming pentameter.
asserted
commenter → ask → pentameter
Their example seems to have failed, but I used a more recent model and got a version of the beginning that superficially seems impressive to me (I don’t speak Chinese).
asserted
I → seem → Chinese
I haven’t heard much about AI translation yet, but it seems like a powerful use case, especially for poetry translation, where I think AI might already be superhuman (or at least better than any human who could be convinced to spend the time at it) on rendering a foreign poem into English while keeping the rhythm intact
uncertain
who → hear → rhythm
- here’s the first 100 lines of the Odyssey in real heroic hexameter.
asserted
lines → ’ → hexameter
Claude claims to be the only being that has ever fully appreciated Finnegans Wake (source: @anthrupad):
uncertain
that → claim → Wake
The American suburbs are better than you think.
asserted
you → think → ?
I agree with this, and respect Noah’s willingness to argue for this (locally) unpopular proposition.
asserted
I → agree → proposition
Performative Bafflement says that actually, “marriage is a bad idea in the great majority of cases” and we shouldn’t be encouraging it.
asserted
we → say → it
“[People who advocate more marriages to solve the fertility crisis] are basically advocating for creating the Torment Nexus for megafolks of people to pump out a few incremental taxpayers.
asserted
megafolks → advocate → taxpayers
But the stats seem wrong.
asserted
stats → seem → ?
PB says only 18% of marriages are non-miserable.
asserted
% → say → marriages
He cites a survey where married couples reported whether they were “very happy”, “pretty happy”, or “not too happy”, but quietly, in the footnotes, defined a “miserable” marriage as any answer except “very happy” (so his “miserable” includes the answer “pretty happy”).
asserted
miserable → cite → answer
He defends this by saying that people exaggerate to look good, so anything short of very happy is likely miserable.
asserted
anything → defend → this
But first, I’m not sure his solution is fair either, and second, I think that in addition to this analysis choice, he got the data wrong - my read of his source, the General Social Survey, says that 61% of people describe their marriage as “very happy”.
asserted
% → ’m → marriage
Claude caught many other mistakes of similar magnitude (I have double-checked the “not too happy” one, but haven’t confirmed the others).
asserted
I → catch → others
Remember to ask an AI about any surprising article you read, or use the browser extension Common Notes so other people can do this for you.
asserted
people → remember → you
There is no particular connection to Mormons or any other historically polygamous society; the current version mostly descends from a few mid-20th-century Californian cults and quasi-cults, one of which was led by “Head Wizard Oberon Zell-Ravenheart”.
asserted
one → be → Ravenheart
But I am mostly linking this for its excellent subtitle: “Plus, I interview my husband about his 12 years of non-monogamy.”
asserted
I → link → monogamy
9: Claim: if you prompt (an older version of) Claude with something that sounds like an internal Anthropic email, it goes into token-prediction mode and starts completing the email.
uncertain
it → prompt → email
One explosive possibility - that Claude was trained on internal emails and you can make it leak them - is probably false; Anthropic wouldn’t do this, and this isn’t really how training works.
asserted
training → train → this
More interesting is that these completions are often kind of haunting meditations on AI welfare, and you could imagine this is a weird way to start Claude free associating and giving its “own” “real” “opinions” or “desires”.
uncertain
this → imagine → opinions
10: In The AI Superforecasters Are Here, I predicted AI-human forecasting parity by the end of 2026.
asserted
I → predict → 2026
In September, a bot won the Metaculus Cup forecasting competition for the first time (short Metaculus article, paywalled Economist article).
asserted
bot → win → time
The Economist also revealed some new information about the winning bots: Laertes, which took first place, was “developed by Jeffrey Liang, a self-described polymath who lives in Texas.
asserted
who → reveal → Texas
He spent, by his reckoning, less than 150 hours and a couple of thousand dollars on computing power and data to develop his AI.”
asserted
He → spend → AI
Other high-performers included bots by Mantic, FutureSearch, and Preseen (FutureSearch is available to the public; Mantic and Preseen are available by contacting them and getting on the waitlist/demo).
asserted
Mantic → include → demo
Congratulations to the AIs (and to ACX reader Ben Shindel, who placed first among humans).
asserted
who → place → humans
11: Related: new AI superforecaster startup Mantic gets $25M in seed funding.
asserted
Mantic → relate → funding
12: Claim: “Fee fi fo fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman”, the thing evil giants say in English fairy tales, is related to other evil giant exclamations “from Scandinavia to India”.
uncertain
giants → smell → India
…and 113 more, not listed.
The Aporia
