Astral Codex Ten Podcast
by Jeremiah
Latest episode
Your Book Review: Lee Kuan Yew's Memoirs
Your Book Review: Lee Kuan Yew's Memoirs
About this podcast
The official audio version of Astral Codex Ten, with an archive of posts from Slate Star Codex. It's just me reading Scott Alexander's blog posts.
Episodes
The newest 50 of 1,209 episodes
- Your Book Review: Lee Kuan Yew's Memoirs · 53 minFinalist #10 in the Book Review Contest [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…
- Does Georgism Work? Five Years Later · 56 minA guest post by Lars Doucet Hi, this is Lars Doucet, author of the book review of Henry George's Progress and Poverty that won the first ACX book review contest, as well as the…
- The Specter Of Neuralese · 23 minI. At Long Last, We Have Created Neuralese Recurrence, From The Classic Sci-Fi Novel "Don't Create Neuralese Recurrence" In the public debates after the release of AI 2027, some…
- Your Book Review: This Is Going To Hurt · 1 h 8 minFinalist #9 in the Book Review Contest [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…
- Mysteries Of AI Generalization · 19 minI. Owain Evans In 2025, Owain Evans et al published a paper on "emergent misalignment". They trained a previously-aligned AI to do one immoral thing: write insecure code full of…
- King Ludd · 18 minI. In the gods' great scramble for human followers, Nodens would seem to have lost decisively. We know him only from vague inscriptions at two archaeological sites near the…
- AI Superforecasting Should Transform The FDA · 9 minThis is a guest post by ACX grantee Josh Morrison of 1DaySooner. AI superforecasters are coming. Within a few years, the average person will have the equivalent of a Nate Silver…
- Royce On San Francisco · 15 minThese are all excerpts from Josiah Royce's 1886 book, A History Of California From Conquest In 1846 To The Second Vigilance Committee In San Francisco: A Study Of American…
- God Help Us, Let's Try To Learn About Mechanistic Interpretability Techniques · 36 minThe Story So Far Mechanistic interpretability is the science of "reading an AI's mind". Large language models are "grown, not built". Researchers run training data through a…
- Your Book Review: The Tale Of Genji · 56 minFinalist #8 in the Book Review Contest 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…
- Absurd Adventure And Amygdalectomy Advocacy · 28 minI am Daniel Böttger1. In 2023, my review of On The Marble Cliffs took second in the ACX book review contest, and Scott offered me the right to pitch him more essays. I have…
- Nicholas Decker In Hell · 32 minI. Econblogger Nicholas Decker is not a fan of AI 2040: One of the centerpieces of AI 2040 is the proposal that we pause the development of AI at a high level, use the AI to…
- Your Book Review: Thomas Urquhart's Translation Of Rabelais · 37 minFinalist #7 in the Book Review Contest [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…
- Highlights From The Comments On The Substack Religion Debate · 27 min[Original post: Why I'm Staying Out Of The Substack Religion Debate] Ben Smith writes: This post sure reads like participating in the object level debate, not just "writing a…
- Re: Re: Re: Pritchard On Liberal Happiness · 1 h 1 minIn early July, Cassie Pritchard argued on Twitter that liberalism had failed; it bet the farm on economic progress making people happier, but although it delivered impressive…
- Your Book Review: A Residence Of 21 Years In The Sandwich Islands · 54 min[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. I'll be posting about one of these a…
- Why I'm Staying Out Of The Substack Religion Debate · 21 minI. Matthew Adelstein (aka Bentham's Bulldog) and Richard Chappell debate the existence of God. So do JP Andrew, Benjamin Tettu, Sangwon Lee, Ethan Muse, other Ethan, and…
- Your Book Review: The Escape Artist · 59 min[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. I'll be posting about one of these a…
- The Quest For Caffeine You Can Have At Night · 26 minSince the beginning of time, mankind has yearned to drink a cup of coffee at 5 PM and go to sleep at 10. But now there's an entire scientific subfield and several companies…
- The Foothills Of Bay Area House Party · 21 min[previously in series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9] Paul Graham once said that every city sends a message. New York says you should make more money. Berkeley says you should live…
- MacGregor The Bridge Builder · 6 minOld Scottish joke: A man at the bar is complaining: "You see that bridge there? I built it with my own hands! But do they call me 'MacGregor The Bridge-Builder'? No! And I raised…
- Open Questions On Open Weights · 11 minLast month, some of Silicon Valley's biggest companies signed an open letter supporting open-weights AI. Open weights AI is like open-source software, where the creator makes the…
- The Beauty Of Settled Science · 12 minCommenters convinced me I made a subtle mis-step in my framing of Psychology Research Is Mostly Fine. My framing emphasized that social priming studies had failed to replicate…
- Does Forecasting Have Room At The Top? · 24 minSuperforecasting 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…
- Your Book Review: The Epic Of Gilgamesh · 1 h 13 minFinalist #4 in the Book Review Contest [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…
- Highlights From The Discourse On The Hugging Face Incident · 43 min[Original here. Like a Highlights From The Comments post, but including discussion from around the Internet.] Roon is an OpenAI researcher whose popular Twitter presence has…
- Links For July 2026 (Part 2) · 40 min[continued from Part 1 here. 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…
- Psychology Research Is Mostly Fine · 11 minPeople act like the replication crisis has discredited psychology, that the field is now widely agreed to be a sham, that it can be uncontroversially held up as an example of…
- The Hugging Face Incident · 13 minYou've probably heard about this one by now. If not, you can get up to speed with OpenAI's statement, The story: OpenAI was testing an unreleased AI (rumored to be GPT-6)1…
- Your Book Review: Breakdown In Pakistan · 46 min[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. I'll be posting about one of these a…
- Links For July 2026 (Part 1) · 22 min[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…
- Contra Pritchard On Liberal Happiness · 14 minCassie Pritchard, on Twitter: I get why so many liberals are fundamentally disdainful of democracy these days—it's because liberalism is exhausted. It's out of answers…
- Your Book Review: Great And Desperate Cures · 2 h 26 minFinalist #2 in the Book Review Contest [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…
- Against "Stochastic Terrorism" · 12 min"Stochastic terrorism" is the idea that if you spread fear and mistrust against a target, then eventually people will commit violence against that target, and it will be your…
- AI Chip Regulation Is Not A Dystopian Surveillance State · 23 minThis was one of the most common objections to Plan A. The plan proposes AI chip regulation to ensure that both China and America know where all the chips are, making their deal…
- Introducing Plan A · 31 minA Is For America It's increasingly clear that nobody has a plan for if this AI thing turns out to be real. Some people have suggestions, but they're all things like "regulate a…
- Your Book Review: The Book Of Abraham · 1 h 44 min[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. I'll be posting about one of these a…
- The AI Superforecasters Are Here · 41 minThe annual prediction market conference was earlier this month. This was the year prediction markets went from an obscure hobby to a multi-billion dollar industry; from…
- Chip Off The Old Block · 21 minI. Having kids has given me new appreciation for old poetry. The first time I read Song of Hiawatha, I skimmed over the part in Book 3 where Hiawatha first meets his father…
- The Metaculus Threat To Democracy Index · 10 minIn recent posts on Trump and dictatorship, people have asked me - how do you know you're not suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome? I take this seriously; we've all lost…
- Should People Avoid Whole-Body Screening Info? · 25 minThe most controversial part of last week's article on the Midjourney ultrasound scanner was medical experts' recommendation against whole-body screening (including existing…
- Preliminary Thoughts On The Midjourney Scanner · 24 minlike that, except from a medium-sized startup instead of a tech giant. Earlier today, they announced a pivot to medical scanners. The new MidJourney Scanner, which they describe…
- Waiting For The Miracle · 1 h 11 minIn 1917, three children in Fatima, Portugal claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary. They promised she would perform a miracle on a certain day in October. Nearly 100,000 pilgrims…
- Never Cross a River Four Feet Deep on Average · 38 minGuest post by Alexander "Sasha" Putilin [This is a guest post by 2024 ACX grantee Sasha Putilin. I encourage any ACX grantees who are interested to write about their projects…
- My AI Opinions · 37 minI recently had a minor spat over someone misinterpreting my AI beliefs (see section marked "Update" at the bottom here), so I thought I would list them in one place, so I can…
- Book Review: The Dialectical Imagination · 47 minThe philosophers of the Frankfurt School practiced a technique called negative dialectics, where concepts are defined as much by what you can't say about them as what you can…
- Use AI This Election · 22 minI'm not saying AI is superintelligent or can decide better than you can. I'm saying that if you - like me - spend an hour or so doing research before voting on local seats, AI…
- New Paradigms Won't Save You · 6 minOne popular objection to AI concerns is to declare that LLMs can never be AGI. You need a "new paradigm". Therefore, AGI is so far in the future that it's not worth worrying…
- The Types Of Candidate You Find In The California Gubernatorial Race · 48 minSorry, I give up. In past elections, I've covered every single candidate for governor of California, from the incumbents all the way down to the cranks. In 2022 there were…
- The Sigmoids Won't Save You · 11 min"All exponentials eventually become sigmoids" is an annoying AI talking point. If someone presents a graph like this… ….and points out that it seems like AI capabilities could…
