The Aporia · Scott Alexander

2026-08-18 · Astral Codex Ten

🔮 [This is one of the finalists in the 2026 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. assertive

2026-08-18 · Astral Codex Ten

The Foothills Of Bay Area House Party

🔮 Which of the two voices you hear depends on your personality, and maybe how many psychedelics you took in college. assertive

2026-08-18 · Astral Codex Ten

The Quest For Caffeine You Can Have At Night

🔮 Feed it to rats, and their livers will go into overdrive, producing more and more CYP1A2 to tear up the intruder. assertive

2026-08-18 · Astral Codex Ten

Open Thread 446

🔮 1: Comments of the week: FutureSearch founder Dan Schwarz on what the correlation between accuracy and time horizon tells us about the ceiling on forecasting, and Frikgeek on chess engine handicapping. 2: assertive

2026-08-18 · Astral Codex Ten

MacGregor The Bridge Builder

🔮 For a while, the culture enforced conformity just by making sure that the slightest deviation would become 100% of your reputation. assertive

2026-08-18 · Astral Codex Ten

Open Questions On Open Weights

🔮 If AI becomes the linchpin of the future, open weights AI feels like the sort of thing that could be the difference between being free yeomen vs. corporate serfs. assertive

2026-08-18 · Astral Codex Ten

The Beauty Of Settled Science

🔮 Mental hospitalization can sometimes defuse immediate crises but work less well than mental hospitals would like, with some studies showing overall negative effects. assertive

2026-08-18 · Astral Codex Ten

Does Forecasting Have Room At The Top?

🔮 Superforecasting is the art/science/sport of predicting the future - for example, who will win elections, which countries will fight wars, when key technologies will be discovered. assertive

2026-08-18 · Astral Codex Ten

Open Thread 445

🔮 They ask me to advertise that they’re looking for a COO / operational co-founder, who will: ...work side-by-side with Geoffrey Irving on organisational strategy: how to prioritise hiring? assertive

2026-08-18 · Astral Codex Ten

Your Book Review: The Epic Of Gilgamesh

🔮 [This is one of the finalists in the 2026 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. assertive

2026-08-19 · Astral Codex Ten

Why I'm Staying Out Of The Substack Religion Debate

🔮 There are many reasons to believe in such assistance: Napoleon’s rise from Corsican nobody to Emperor and would-be world conqueror was a bizarre deviation from the usual pattern of history. assertive

2026-08-19 · Astral Codex Ten

Links For July 2026 (Part 2)

🔮 On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. assertive

2026-08-19 · Astral Codex Ten

Highlights From The Discourse On The Hugging Face Incident

🔮 I remember when arguments about AI were things like “Sure, if you could magically get billions of dollars of compute, and magically scale AI up a thousand times, and magically get rid of hallucinations…” and the whole implausibility hinged on the word “magic”! assertive

2026-08-21 · Astral Codex Ten

College EA Meetups Everywhere: Call For Organizers

🔮 We (ACX and an effective altruist organization called Nest who are sponsoring this) will give you free advertising and cover your costs. assertive

2026-08-24 · Astral Codex Ten

Open Thread 448

🔮 Matt says his highest priority colleges that don’t have an organizer yet are MIT, Claremont, Northwestern, Carnegie Mellon, Amherst, Notre Dame, Duke, CalTech, Georgetown, UCLA, Dartmouth, Vanderbilt, Harvard, NYU, Williams, GWU, American University, Rutgers, and UNC Chapel Hill. assertive

2026-08-24 · Astral Codex Ten

Your Book Review: A Residence Of 21 Years In The Sandwich Islands

🔮 [This is one of the finalists in the 2026 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. assertive

2026-08-25 · Astral Codex Ten

Re: Re: Re: Pritchard On Liberal Happiness

🔮 I don’t know, but he may have misinterpreted my original tweet as saying income doesn’t matter at all, in which case this data functions as an effective rebuttal. assertive

2026-08-26 · Astral Codex Ten

Highlights From The Comments On The Substack Religion Debate

🔮 It’s not necessarily wrong to deprioritize a topic because it vaguely reminds you of something that you have negative affect toward, but I would prefer these people admit they’re dismissing/ignoring it rather than claim to be engaging with it. assertive

2026-08-27 · Astral Codex Ten

Take The 2026 ACX Survey

🔮 This year’s survey will probably take 30 - 45 minutes. assertive

2026-08-31 · Astral Codex Ten

Your Book Review: Thomas Urquhart’s Translation Of Rabelais

🔮 [This is one of the finalists in the 2026 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. assertive

2026-09-03 · Astral Codex Ten

Absurd Adventure And Amygdalectomy Advocacy

🔮 Content warning: the first part of this review contains medical details that some people might find gruesome; I am bad at judging these things since I can no longer feel disgust or fear myself, and have tried to err on the side of completeness. assertive

2026-09-03 · Astral Codex Ten

Nicholas Decker In Hell

🔮 We don’t even need for there to be a crash to make improvements – we test proactively, we build in redundancy, and we monitor for deviations which could be a threat. assertive

2026-09-04 · Astral Codex Ten

Your Book Review: The Tale Of Genji

🔮 [This is one of the finalists in the 2026 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. assertive

2026-09-07 · Astral Codex Ten

Open Thread 450

🔮 At Ovelle, you will help make eggs abundant, thereby solving infertility, unlocking further advances in reproductive technology, and supporting the flourishing of future generations. assertive

2026-09-08 · Astral Codex Ten

God Help Us, Let’s Try To Learn About Mechanistic Interpretability Techniques

🔮 This would be scientifically useful: understand how AIs work, with possible relevance to human cognition. assertive

2026-09-10 · Astral Codex Ten

Royce On San Francisco

🔮 On housing prices: The San Franciscans at this moment, living in their rag palaces, or renting them at figures that would have sounded possible in the Arabian Nights . . . seemed more like madmen than ever. assertive

2026-09-14 · Astral Codex Ten

Open Thread 451

🔮 The book review posts will resume this week. assertive

2026-09-15 · Astral Codex Ten

King Ludd

🔮 I. In the gods’ great scramble for human followers, Nodens would seem to have lost decisively. assertive

2026-09-18 · Astral Codex Ten

Your Book Review: This Is Going To Hurt

🔮 [This is one of the finalists in the 2026 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. assertive

2026-09-21 · Astral Codex Ten

Open Thread 452

🔮 1: Josh Morrison, who wrote the guest post about how AI Superforecasting Will Transform The FDA, will be doing a panel on the subject with former FDA employee Adam Kroetsch in SF on October 1. assertive

2026-09-23 · Astral Codex Ten

Mysteries Of AI Generalization

🔮 If you trained an AI to give the 19th-century names for birds (eg identify the American Pipit by its 19th-century name “Brown Titlark”), then the AI would behave like a 19th-century person in general (for example, assert that a woman’s proper place is in the home). assertive

2026-09-24 · Astral Codex Ten

The Specter Of Neuralese

🔮 In the public debates after the release of AI 2027, some people accused us of misleading readers by positing “neuralese recurrence”, a hypothetical technology that would allow AIs to think dangerous thoughts without getting detected. assertive

2026-09-25 · Astral Codex Ten

Your Book Review: Lee Kuan Yew's Memoirs

🔮 [This is one of the finalists in the 2026 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. assertive

2026-09-28 · Astral Codex Ten

Open Thread 453

🔮 The challenger in that race, Jamie Joyce, contacted me and asked me to change my mind (both candidates will be facing off again in the general election). assertive

2026-10-02 · Astral Codex Ten

Our AI Midwife

🔮 My wife and I could make healthy embryos, but none of the transfers were sticking. assertive

2026-10-05 · Astral Codex Ten

Open Thread 454

🔮 I’m pretty busy and will try to make up for it after that changes. assertive

2026-10-06 · Astral Codex Ten

An Open Letter To Steven Pinker On AI

🔮 When I objected that maybe we should wait for you to accept before figuring out details, they all said great, that’s absolutely right, they would contact you right away. assertive

2026-10-10 · Astral Codex Ten

Your Book Review: We Present Television

🔮 [This is one of the finalists in the 2026 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. assertive

2026-10-15 · Astral Codex Ten

AI Safety Is Not A Corporate Plot

🔮 AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI have long mentioned the possibility that their products could be existentially dangerous, but this has recently crescendoed into even more dire warnings, including suggestions that we have to pace the frontier, ie coordinate to slow AI progress. assertive

Forward-looking sentences extracted from their articles, oldest first. Nothing here checks whether any of it turned out to be right.

👤 Scott Alexander

About this journalist

What they cover

Leaning

More from this journalist

What they said would happen