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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Saturday · 26 min
The Quest For Caffeine You Can Have At Night
Since 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 pandering to this absurd fantasy. Here's a simplified diagram of caffeine metabolism: Caffeine is converted to a different stimulating chemical called paraxanthine by a liver enzyme called CYP1A2, over a half-life of ~5 hours. Then the same enzyme converts paraxanthine into other non-stimulating chemicals that don't matter, over a half-life of about three hours. Kman on Less Wrong has graphed the total effective concentration over time: Over the course of hours, the liver converts caffeine into paraxanthine. These are (by assumption) equally potent, so total effective concentration (the dashed red line) goes down slowly. (Why does it go down at all? Because of the simplification in the diagram above: only about 80% of caffeine is converted to paraxanthine; the rest is converted to other, less active metabolites.) By hour ten, paraxanthine predominates, the liver is mostly converting paraxanthine to other non-stimulating chemicals, and effective concentration continues to decrease. In this model, we see that the effective half-life of caffeine is close to ten hours1! What if we want it to be less? There are three levers we can pull: the enzyme, the metabolite, and the starting chemical. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-quest-for-caffeine-you-can-have
Saturday · 21 min
The Foothills Of Bay Area House Party
[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 better. Boston says you should be smarter. People shouldn't decide on a permanent residence until they've lived in several cities and understand their differing psychological effects. San Francisco sends a message too. It speaks it in a cacophony of dissonant voices, some sounding like the hissing of snakes, others like the chittering of insects. "You should pierce the veil," it says, with a faint accent which you are not scholarly enough to recognize as ancient Sumerian. "You should rip through the flimsy screen that separates your world from the infinite, and witness what lies behind. Because you'd like what you saw there? Oh no, nothing like that. But aren't you curious? The thirst for knowledge that moved Eve, Faust, Pandora - don't you have it too?" There's also a second message from a second voice, one which sounds like a deranged carnival barker, constantly shouting "STONKS! STONKS! STONKS! STONKS!" Which of the two voices you hear depends on your personality, and maybe how many psychedelics you took in college. According to legend, Sam Altman hears both voices simultaneously all the time, like those Tibetan throat singers who can harmonize with themselves. But when the demonic babble becomes too much to tolerate, the San Franciscans drown it out with alcohol, loud music, and various forms of tedious socialization. Thus the famous Bay Area house parties, one of which you will be attending this very night. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-foothills-of-bay-area-house-party
Saturday · 6 min
MacGregor The Bridge Builder
Old 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 five beautiful children! But do they call me 'MacGregor The Child-Raiser'? No! But, you fuck one sheep . . ." Has MacGregor been treated unfairly? https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/macgregor-the-bridge-builder
Saturday · 10 min
Open Questions On Open Weights
Last 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 raw code publicly available for free download. It's good insofar as it's the only way an AI can truly be the user's property, as opposed to something that companies like OpenAI or Anthropic temporarily let you use subject to their corporate guidelines and increasingly-nanny-state-like restrictions. 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. It's bad insofar as it removes the possibility of gatekeeping and lets criminals commit crimes with it. Open weights AI could be used for hacking, child pornography, harassment, or terrorism (the weights can't commit the terrorism themselves, but they could give bomb-making or bioweapon-making advice). Since AIs have gotten very good - maybe superhuman - at hacking lately, the specter of a world where anyone can hack any site has gotten people grumbling that maybe open weights should be banned. It doesn't help that China produces the best open weights AI, making the idea seem foreign and almost unpatriotic. Proponents counter that "when AI is outlawed, only outlaws will have AI", arguing that bad people will get open weights AI regardless, and good people can use open weights AI to defend themselves. With the recent open letter, companies including Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Intel, Amazon, Meta, Hugging Face, and over a hundred others have come out in favor of this position. Who's leading the other side? Nobody's admitted to it. Some parts of the Trump administration lean anti-open-weights on China hawk grounds, but have stopped short of explicitly asking for a full ban. Anthropic, the most notable omission on the pro-open-weights letter, made an ambiguous statement supporting "open-weights models that don't have dangerous capabilities" - but the industry expects open weights models to have dangerous hacking capabilities within a year, and AFAICT the letter didn't address that beyond inviting readers to draw the obvious conclusion. In the absence of a more obvious opponent, some open weights supporters suspect our conspiracy - the loose band of AI safety advocates, effective altruists, rationalists, and pause activists who worry about existential risk from superintelligence. This is a reasonable inference. By design, open weights AI is outside centralized control, and so impossible to permanently align against either human misuse (eg terrorism) or loss of control (eg AI turning against humans). Even if its creator trains it not to hack, anybody in the world can download the weights and retrain the AI to hack all day long. But in fact, most AI safety organizations have remained quietly neutral, and I don't know of any who make this a centerpiece of their activism1 (though I'm not 100% up-to-date on the whole landscape; if you know of one, tell me). A few have proposed policies that are contingently incompatible with open weights AI existing, but they all frame it as collateral damage rather than something they're excited about eliminating. I'm also neutral about open weights AI. I think it probably won't be long-term sustainable, but I'm happy to wait for this to become clear in the normal course of things rather than expend effort and political capital to ban it immediately. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-questions-on-open-weights
Saturday · 12 min
The Beauty Of Settled Science
Commenters 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, but that many other subfields of psychology hadn't. This naturally led commenters to point to failed replications in other subfields. Although none of these were as bad as social priming, few or none were entirely problem-free. Instead of emphasizing the difference between social priming and other subfields, I should have emphasized the difference between settled science and novel research. Here are some of my favorite psychology findings: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-beauty-of-settled-science
Saturday · 23 min
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. Over the past few years, it went from an obscure academic subfield to a multibillion dollar industry in the form of prediction markets. More recently, AI superforecasters have come close to the accuracy of top humans, and their performance is rising rapidly. In a year or two, we'll see one of the following patterns: Either humans have already come close to some fundamental limit on the predictability of world events - in which case AIs will plateau at or slightly above the human level - or the trend line will continue until AIs are far beyond top humans. By analogy to superintelligence, the natural term for the second situation would be "superforecasting"; since that's already in use, we can cringely call it "ultraforecasting". Daniel Reeves1 makes the case for scenario A here. He describes a study he coauthored in 2010, which found that, on a variety of questions related to sports games and movie box office receipts2, prediction markets only outperformed simple boring statistical models by 3-6%. Maybe those statistical models are close to the best that it's possible to do; the rest is what the mathematicians call aleatoric uncertainty - irreducible complexity downstream of chaotic systems that entirely resist modeling. He could be right. This post isn't meant to be a decisive refutation, but rather a description of why I'm still about 70-30 expecting Scenario B. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-forecasting-have-room-at-the
August 28 · 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.
August 28 · 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
August 28 · 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
August 28 · 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
August 28 · 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
August 28 · 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

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