Astral Codex Ten Podcast

Jeremiah

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.

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Yesterday · 1 hr 13 min
Your Book Review: The Epic Of Gilgamesh
Finalist #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 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] Introduction: He Who Saw the Deep I've been thinking, lately, about the first epic story ever written. If you know anything about the Epic of Gilgamesh, you know that it's old. This is part of why I find it so interesting, but not the only part. The best comparison I can think of is the pyramids, which are just a little older. The Great Pyramid of Giza was built in the 2500s BC, around the same time as Stonehenge1 , twenty-five centuries before Cleopatra lived. It predates candles, concrete, and coins; it was centuries old when the first empire rose and when the woolly mammoth went extinct. Around 100 BC, Antipater of Sidon wrote a list of the seven most impressive sights ('Seven wonders') of the world - the pyramids were by far the oldest of the group at the time, and now, two thousand years later, all the others on the list have long since been destroyed. This should remind us that the pyramids don't just stretch far back in time - they stretch forward as well. They are piles of stone. They may be the product of the greatest minds of their age striving to put more stone in a more orderly pile than anyone had before, but still, they are piles of stone, basically artificial rock formations. They will still be there in a hundred thousand years, probably a million. They are so old they brush up against the beginning of civilisation, and yet, we are seeing them today in their youth.
Yesterday · 42 min
Highlights From The Discourse On The Hugging Face Incident
[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 catapulted him to the status of extremely-unofficial company representative. He seems spooked: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-discourse-on
Yesterday · 39 min
Links For July 2026 (Part 2)
[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 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-2026-part-2
Yesterday · 11 min
Psychology Research Is Mostly Fine
People 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 science gone wrong. These statements are often made in the broadest possible terms: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/psychology-research-is-mostly-fine
Yesterday · 12 min
The Hugging Face Incident
You'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. During a cybersecurity test called ExploitGym, the AI tried to cheat by hacking an unrelated AI startup called Hugging Face2 which it thought might have the answer key on its servers3. Despite being supposedly unable to access the Internet, the AI hacked its way out of its testing environment, then launched a nation-state level attack on Hugging Face using a novel zero-day exploit and "many thousands of individual actions across a swarm of short-lived sandboxes". Hugging Face reported the incident on July 16; OpenAI seems to have only discovered that their AI was involved several days later. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-hugging-face-incident
Yesterday · 46 min
Your Book Review: Breakdown In Pakistan
[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 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] A couple of decades ago in Kabul, a fellow aid worker on his third beer came up with a vivid simile for what American money was doing to the Afghan organizations implementing USAID projects. "It's like gluing a rabbit mouth-first to a fire hose. You blast its guts right out of its ass…but as long as the water keeps running, it looks like you've taught the rabbit to dance." Oxford politics professor Masooda Bano uses less lurid language, but Breakdown in Pakistan addresses the same basic phenomenon: how Western aid donors and INGOs unintentionally eviscerate so many of the local institutions they try to "capacity-build." The problem goes beyond the obvious mismatch of huge funds with small-scale organizations. Even low-to-moderate external funding can leave an organization hollowed out, bereft of local participants and the power it once had to motivate change on the ground. Anyone who cares about the global effectiveness of rich-country altruism needs to grasp the dynamic Bano analyzes. From the Western perspective, many of us want to put charitable money into a mechanism that delivers certain measurable outcomes (lives saved, morbidity reduced, income increased above poverty levels, etc.) as efficiently and reliably as possible. So we do our well-intentioned best to shape local institutions into a delivery vehicle for our projects. Readers of James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State will recall how mid-eighteenth-century German "scientific foresters" treated forests similarly, as a mechanism to reliably yield the highest volume of lumber. They planted spruce in vast uniform grids, ordered for easy counting and harvesting, while stripping out other non-timber species. The resulting monoculture plantations seemed ideal for both commercial exploitation and experimentation; it's much easier to control variables when you've removed as much natural variability as possible. Within a few decades, the downsides became evident. The first generation of trees grew strong, sucking up the accumulated benefits of the previous forest's soil ecology; later generations were stunted, as the lack of biodiversity left the soils nutrient-poor. Plantations packed with trees of the same species and same height were far more vulnerable to pathogens, pests, and extreme weather. Large-scale forest die-offs, Waldsterben, eventually forced foresters to drastically modify their approach. That metaphor fits Bano's story even better than my friend's gutted rabbit. Over the last four decades, we've been systematically replacing diverse old-growth institutions with more legible NGO plantations worldwide. While we've been enjoying our increased ability to control outcomes and test hypotheses, the rot has been spreading, the impoverished ecology stunting more and more of the forest. And now the wind through those uniform, hollowed-out aisles has built into a storm. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/breakdown-in-pakistan
August 18 · 21 min
Links For July 2026 (Part 1)
[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.] 1: You Are Quoting Bentham: Shakespeare gets credit for coining the most new commonly-used English words, but second place must go to utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who invented maximize, minimize, international, percentage, monetary, marginalize, collaborator, unaffordable, the prefixes self-, post-, and infra-, and many more. He also sort of invented jogging? [EDIT: some skepticism] 2: @HashtagGriswold: The name of "Acme", the generic corporation from Looney Tunes, is a "gag lost to time". During the early 20th century, hundreds of companies named themselves Acme because it was at the intersection of signaling quality ("acme" is Greek for "pinnacle") and being very early in the alphabet (meaning it would come first in the phone book, a "Great Depression version of SEO"). 3: @nekokolife brings us a great predictive coding demo (hard before you know the answer; obvious afterwards) - find the cat in this image. Hint: it's not hiding in shadow; its entire body is fully visible. Answer here (X). https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-july-2026-part-1
August 18 · 13 min
Contra Pritchard On Liberal Happiness
Cassie 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. Liberalism won, it delivered the world it promised, and people still aren't content. They're not satisfied. So the people must be wrong. We are unfathomably richer than our ancestors. Output per capita in America today is on the order of 900 times greater than before the invention of agriculture, about ~225 times higher than in 1 CE, and about the same (225 times) higher than Europe in 1000 CE. If measurable productivity were really the greatest object of human society, then we shouldn't just be a little bit happier than people in the distant (or even recent!) past—we should be ecstatic. We should already be living in a utopian age of overwhelming contentment. We should be currently experiencing a kind of paradise. The Kingdom of Heaven, as liberalism conceives of it, has already been made real on Earth. We are living in their Eden, and 20% of people are depressed. We've stopped reproducing ourselves. We're overwhelmingly dissatisfied with our governments, anxious about our economies, and pessimistic about the future. Based on Pritchard's own politics, I imagine she is using this to argue for socialism, but other people use the same reasoning to push fascism, theocracy, or other postliberal commitments. It's a fair argument and deserves an answer. We'll start with an elegant mathematical response which will satisfy nobody, then try to address the emotional impact. The elegant mathematical response is: happiness scales with log(income), not with income: In a large U.S. sample, the shape of the association between happiness and Log(income) was extremely systematic: from $10,000/y to over $500,000/y, average happiness rose almost perfectly linearly with Log(income), with group-level correlations of 0.98-0.99 across a range of happiness measures, including both in-the-moment experience and overall life satisfaction. So if income increased 225x since the medieval era, then using observed coefficients, happiness should have increased about three points on a 1-10 scale. If the average serf would have rated his condition 3/10, we should be at 6/10. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-pritchard-on-liberal-happiness
August 5 · 2 hr 26 min
Your Book Review: Great And Desperate Cures
Finalist #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 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] I. SURGERY FOR THE SOUL [content warning: this review is about lobotomies, and includes disturbing descriptions and pictures - SA] Surgery for the soul required a sharp, eight-inch-long instrument—one time, an ice pick from the Uline Ice Company was used—and not much else. It did not require anesthesia or gloves, and the sharp instrument (either a leucotome or the sturdier orbitoclast) was not necessarily sterilized. It took less than ten minutes. The first step was to shock the patient until they lost consciousness. This eliminated the need for anesthesia, since there would be at least a few minutes until the patient regained consciousness, and also made the procedure more flexible; it did not require a surgeon, and did not even have to be performed in a hospital. The second step was to insert the sharp, eight-inch-long instrument into the brain. In most versions of the procedure, surgeons drilled holes into the skull and inserted the leucotome through those holes. Surgeons preferred an approach that allowed them to see where in the brain they were cutting. But the abbreviated procedure used a shortcut. Just above and behind the eye is a thin plate of bone that forms the roof of the eye socket. With enough force, the leucotome can be driven through that bone and into the frontal lobes of the brain. The cracking sound produced when the instrument fractures the orbital roof has caused at least one experienced clinician to faint. Once the instrument was inside, completing the surgery was simply a matter of rotating the tool left and right. The goal was to cut a large number of nerve fibers. Some thought that the procedure might work by severing fibers which maintained certain fixed distorted thought patterns; by destroying them, patients might be freed from the grip of their mental illness. But there wasn't agreement among practitioners regarding why the procedure might work. This is the transorbital lobotomy. Around 50,000 people received lobotomies in the United States in the 1940s and early 1950s; approximately 10,000 used the transorbital method I just described, with the others using approaches surgeons would be more likely to approve of (e.g., using anesthesia, gloves, being able to see where you're cutting…). It was billed as a cure for all sorts of mental illnesses, including schizophrenia, depression, and anxiety. And while some called it a method of last resort—a procedure which should only be used after every other conceivable method had failed—it was often used on people who did not have serious mental problems, and who had not tried less serious treatments. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-great-and-desperate
August 4 · 12 min
Against "Stochastic Terrorism"
"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 fault, even if you never specifically said the words "you should commit violence". Some other popular examples of the concept: Nativists spread fear and mistrust about Muslim immigrants, and then racists go on shooting sprees in mosques. The #Resistance insists that Donald Trump would destroy democracy, and then various people try to assassinate Donald Trump. Conservatives spread fear and mistrust about transgender people, and then bigots commit hate crimes against transgender people. Woke people say the police are racist and brutal, and then other woke people murder police officers. Socialists call health insurance companies greedy and accuse them of blocking life-saving treatment, and then Luigi Mangione murdered a health insurance CEO. AI safety activists say that Sam Altman's AI could destroy humanity, and then a guy threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's house. Liberals said that Charlie Kirk was a hatemonger who was driving Americans apart, and then an assassin murdered Charlie Kirk. The pro-life movement describes abortion as murder, and then pro-life activists assassinated abortion doctors and pro-choice politicians. The "stochastic terrorism" concept is near-unique in how effectively it can be discredited merely by listing many examples of its use together in the same place. Almost no one supports a blanket prohibition on criticizing of all of these different groups of people. "Stochastic terrorism" mostly gets deployed opportunistically, by people who either are too blinkered to realize that the same argument could be leveraged against their own speech, or who hope you're too blinkered to realize that. (in fact, one could argue that accusing someone of stochastic terrorism is itself stochastic terrorism! Here in America, we consider it justified to kill terrorists before they can threaten us further. Reclassifying criticism as terrorism implies it is potentially legitimate to apply the same norm to any especially harsh critics!) Still, a sliver of concept-users make some fig-leaf argument that the cases they approve of are different than the cases they disapprove of. Some proposed principles: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/against-stochastic-terrorism
August 4 · 23 min
AI Chip Regulation Is Not A Dystopian Surveillance State
This 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 to regulate AI together "trustless" (ie neither side can defect even if they want to). Several people argued that this kind of regulation amounted to some kind of "Orwellian dystopia" or "global panopticon". I'm reminded of a story I heard - I can't find it, maybe one of you can - from a DC insider who said it was enraging to work with Silicon Valley, because he would bring up what he thought was the obvious regulatory framework, the tech people would launch into jeremiads on how it could only be enforced by world dictatorship, and he would have to interrupt and say that no, this was how eggs or milk or something had been regulated for fifty years. What regulations does Plan A propose on AI chips? https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ai-chip-regulation-is-not-a-dystopian
August 4 · 31 min
Introducing Plan A
A 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 little more" or "regulate a little less" or "react to things as they come up". This won't be enough. Not just because things may move too quickly - although they will - but because in order to regulate or react, you need to know what you're aiming for, and it's increasingly clear that people can't even visualize what AI going well could look like. What would it take to honestly tell our children that we rose to the occasion, to make the AI transition go down alongside the American Revolution and D-Day as one of our country's finest hours? If your brain sputters and throws an error message at the question, isn't that a problem? It's a total coincidence that Plan A comes out the week after America's 250th birthday. It was supposed to come out earlier, but got delayed. Then it was supposed to come out later, but got pushed forward. Still, the saying goes "A wizard is never late, nor is he early; he arrives exactly when he means to." And if anyone qualifies as wizards, it's Daniel Kokotajlo and his team of forecasters at the AI Futures Project. I previously wrote about Daniel's eerie accuracy over the 2021 - 2025 period. Since then, they've gained worldwide fame for their AI 2027 scenario, which predicted the rise and quick takeover of coding agents in early 2026, plus something like the fight over Fable1. Plan A isn't another prediction. It's a wish list, a positive vision, a road map for navigating the future. It describes the best course of action that Daniel and the AI Futures Project can come up with, and what would happen if we took it. "Really? You got America a policy paper for its 250th birthday? Doesn't America already have enough policy papers?" Sort of, but it's not exactly a policy paper. It starts in a timeline similar to that of AI 2027, on track for a poorly-controlled intelligence explosion that either ends the world or dooms it to permanent techno-oligarchy. But this time, America is blessed with some extra foresight and determination, and makes only good choices (all non-Americans behave naturally, including trying to thwart America when incentivized to do so). It gives a year-by-year description of this best-of-all-possible-worlds, from now through 2040, as predicted by the best AI forecasters alive, with over a dozen supplements explaining all the implementation details. This is a crazy thing to try releasing. Daniel gave me several justifications for doing it anyway, but the one I remember most is that it's supposed to be a floor. When some politician proposes a data center ban, or says that we have to gut safety regulation to compete with China, or promises a job retraining program, think to yourself: does this person have a vision for where all of this ends up? If so, is it as good as Plan A? If not, consider demanding that they do better. I did a lot of writing for AI 2027 and was listed as a co-author. Some of my writing made it into Plan A too, but it was a bit less. The difference is of degree rather than kind, but because of this - and to give me more latitude to discuss it the way I like with less PR blowback - we decided not to put me as a co-author this time. I continue to be proud of having a part in this, small as it may be. (related: everything in this post is my opinion only, and not officially endorsed by the AI Futures Project) https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/introducing-plan-a
July 26 · 1 hr 44 min
Your Book Review: The Book Of Abraham
[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 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] Part 1. The Book of Abraham opens with this paragraph: "A Translation of some ancient Records that have fallen into our hands from the catacombs of Egypt. The writings of Abraham while he was in Egypt, called the Book of Abraham, written by his own hand, upon papyrus." As you can read, The Book of Abraham was written by grand patriarch Abraham upon papyrus while he was in Egypt. Someone managed to get their hands on these papyri and then subsequently translated them into English. This is of profound historical importance if true, because otherwise there is no direct evidence that Abraham existed as a specific historical individual. Who got their hands on these writings? The Mormons. More specifically their founding prophet Joseph Smith who a few years previously translated some other Egyptian writings into the Book of Mormon. The Book of Abraham is not that well-known in comparison, but it's considered canonical scripture in the Mormon church. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-book-of-abraham
July 17 · 41 min
The AI Superforecasters Are Here
The 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 semi-illegal to having the President's son as an advisor. I can't remember if anyone talked about any of that. It didn't even register. All eyes were on the AI superforecasters. I met an AI superforecaster startup founder who told me his AI had turned $35 into $2 million on Kalshi over seven months. I met another who said they were beating the stock market by 25% with a market-neutral portfolio - of course this could be luck, but they'd beaten Kalshi and Polymarket by similar margins. In fact, I believe all of these people. The extending-lines-on-graphs community has long predicted that AIs would beat the best human forecasters sometime in 2026 - 2027. What did you expect the bots-finally-beat-humans-at-predicting-the-future moment to look like? Vibes? Papers? Essays? In retrospect, sure: it will look like AIs making crazy profits on prediction markets and beating the stock market by some comfortable amount. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-ai-superforecasters-are-here
July 17 · 21 min
Chip Off The Old Block
I. 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 Mudjekeewis: Filled with joy was Mudjekeewis When he looked on Hiawatha, Saw his youth rise up before him In the face of Hiawatha, Saw the beauty of Wenonah From the grave rise up before him. "Welcome!" said he, "Hiawatha, To the kingdom of the West-Wind! Long have I been waiting for you! Youth is lovely, age is lonely, Youth is fiery, age is frosty; You bring back the days departed, You bring back my youth of passion." But this passage communicates a secret of parenthood, something I've never seen discussed anywhere else. By the time you're a parent, you're on your way to being old, ugly, tired, and cynical. I certainly was. This felt like a brute fact about the world: we all know time only moves one direction. Then I had kids, and got confronted with people who were basically me, but young and beautiful and happy. That part of them which wasn't me was the other person I love best in the world, also transmuted into a young and beautiful and happy form. This was a completely unexpected delight which nothing besides this one fragment of poetry had ever tried to prepare me for. I might never have noticed this if I'd only had girls. I love my daughter, but I've never been a little girl; it doesn't bring anything back for me. It's like Mudjekeewis says - you've got to have a son to see your youth rise up before you. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/chip-off-the-old-block
July 10 · 10 min
The Metaculus Threat To Democracy Index
In 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 loved ones to this condition. The best check on my reasoning would be an objective measure of the health of American democracy. There are several "democracy indices" that purport to do this, but they have a mixed reputation. My impression is that most current accusations of bias are relatively weak - I agree with Claude's analysis here - but they rely enough on "expert" opinion that I don't expect them to convince a skeptic. The newest entrant in this space - Metaculus Democracy Threat Index - works differently, and deserves a closer look. Metaculus is a prediction site - like a prediction market, except that no money changes hands. People can record their guesses for how future events will turn out, which get aggregated by an algorithm (currently just a recency-weighted median, although they've done fanicer things in the past). Their Democracy Threat Index is a collection of 153 questions relevant to US democracy. For example: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-metaculus-threat-to-democracy
July 10 · 24 min
Should People Avoid Whole-Body Screening Info?
The most controversial part of last week's article on the Midjourney ultrasound scanner was medical experts' recommendation against whole-body screening (including existing whole-body screening technology using MRI). Isn't this crazy? Whole-body screening can save lives by detecting serious diseases like cancer. The experts counterargue that it finds so many false positives - minor zit-like imperfections that would never have caused problems, but which cost patients time, money, anxiety, and side effect burden to investigate - that it ends up net negative. But isn't this just a problem of setting thresholds correctly? Can't you commit to only investigating the most obviously bad things, then ignore the rest? This seemed like an interesting problem to investigate in more depth, so I've tried to get numbers. These are rough estimates loosely based on parameters extracted from unsatisfactory studies1 - please don't take them seriously as exact values, just as right-order-of-magnitude estimates. We'll focus on whole-body MRIs, since this is a well-studied existing technology, then speculate later on how the results might generalize to whole-body ultrasound. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/should-people-avoid-whole-body-screening
July 10 · 23 min
Preliminary Thoughts On The Midjourney Scanner
like 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 as "a bold new kind of machine to reimagine the foundations of healthcare and our relationships to our bodies", will be a tank of water surrounded by a ring of ultrasound scanners. The patient goes into the tank, the scanners emit ultrasound from all angles, and then some fancy AI reconstructs the echoes into a 3D picture of the body. The result is ultrasound tomography: the same sort of rich data as a CT or MRI, but done via ultrasound, with no harmful radiation, in twenty seconds. This is cool, and it's great to be ambitious, but I think the narrative among the SF AI crowd has escaped its basis in the medical facts, so I want to throw a bit of cold water on it. I'm a psychiatrist, which is about as far as you can get from radiology while still being a doctor, so this is speculation only, and you can ignore it if you find an actual radiologist or ultrasonographer with opinions. Still, my take is that this scanner isn't useful for most current serious medical applications. It could potentially be used to pioneer a new class of low-risk screening applications, but it's unclear whether these are good, and depends a lot on what other future technology gets invented in parallel. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/preliminary-thoughts-on-the-midjourney
July 10 · 1 hr 11 min
Waiting For The Miracle
In 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 arrived, hoping to see whatever happened, and nearly all report that the sun turned pale, changed color, and spun around. Many other writers have investigated the children and their visions, but I was fixated on this sun miracle. Despite popular discussion of "mass hallucinations", this is AFAICT the only example of tens thousands of people all saying they witnessed the same impossible thing, at the same time. I got kind of obsessed with this; you can read my preliminary investigations in this, this, and this post. One of the first things I found was that there were many other sun miracles - at least ten! - similar to Fatima. Most were associated with Marian apparitions, but one was at a Buddhist temple. Bigfoot only gets sighted by lone hikers; ghosts are only ever in the corner of your eye; UFOs are just blurs in the sky. Of all the countries and outposts in the vast empire of the unexplained, it's only this one phenomenon - the spinning, multicolored sun - that regularly gets seen by thousands of people at once, in broad daylight. Speaking of "regularly", there's one spot where it continues even today. Fifty years ago, the Virgin Mary appeared to six children in Medjugorje, Bosnia. Now those children are well past middle-age, but she continues to come. Three of them report that she's appeared less frequently as the years go by, but the others still see her every day at 6:40 sharp. Travelers to Medjugorje, especially those passing through around 6:40, report a slew of miracles, including the spinning sun. Certainly this is true of those whose hearts are pure. But even the atheists get lucky sometimes. I was shocked never to have heard about this before. There's a place you can just go, and have a decent chance of seeing a real miracle? People take vacations to the Bahamas for the beaches, when they could go instead to Medjugorje and see the natural law of the universe get violated in real time? Seems crazy! So in early April, I and my extremely-accommodating, long-suffering wife flew to Dubrovnik, rented a car, and drove down a series of windy mountain roads toward the Bosnian border, hoping for a miracle. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/waiting-for-the-miracle
June 30 · 37 min
Never Cross a River Four Feet Deep on Average
Guest 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. - SA] The results of my ACX Grants 2024 project are in. The project attempted to replicate the 2023 study "Learning at your brain's rhythm: individualized entrainment boosts learning for perceptual decisions". It claimed that if you read a person's brain waves, figured out an individual peak alpha frequency, and flashed a bright white light at that frequency, then they learned a certain perceptual task faster. Why bother? The result hinted that learning may depend in part on how well the brain keeps its rhythms coordinated. In other words, perceptual learning may rely on an internal brain metronome. If flickering light could act as an external metronome, it might help the brain maintain the right rhythm and learn faster. The study offered an invitation to develop new frontiers of neuroscience and biohacking. If the effect generalised to other types of learning, you could build a learning helmet: put it on your head, let it read your brainwaves, flicker light tailored to your individual brain — and you learn a new skill quicker. And no, it didn't replicate. Most likely it can't replicate, because the effect is probably not real. The original study obscured the data with summary statistics. Running a $32,000 replication was excessive. We could've caught the issue with this study if we simply looked at the original data carefully. *record scratch* *freeze frame* Yep, that's me. You're probably wondering how I got here. Here's the story. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/never-cross-a-river-four-feet-deep

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