[This is one of the finalists in the 2025 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] “The scientific paper is a ‘ fraud ’ that creates “a totally misleading narrative of the processes of thought that go into the making of scientific discoveries.” This critique comes not from a conspiraci...
Jul 15, 2025•48 min
Steven Byrnes is a physicist/AI researcher/amateur neuroscientist; needless to say, he blogs on Less Wrong. I finally got around to reading his 2024 series giving a predictive processing perspective on intuitive self-models . If that sounds boring, it shouldn’t: Byrnes charges head-on into some of the toughest subjects in psychology, including trance, amnesia, and multiple personalities. I found his perspective enlightening (no pun intended; meditation is another one of his topics) and thought I...
Jul 11, 2025•24 min
In June 2022, I bet a commenter $100 that AI would master image compositionality by June 2025. DALL-E2 had just come out, showcasing the potential of AI art. But it couldn’t follow complex instructions; its images only matched the “vibe” of the prompt. For example, here were some of its attempts at “a red sphere on a blue cube, with a yellow pyramid on the right, all on top of a green table”. At the time, I wrote: I’m not going to make the mistake of saying these problems are inherent to AI art....
Jul 11, 2025•16 min
[This is one of the finalists in the 2025 review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. It was originally given an Honorable Mention, but since last week’s piece was about an exciting new experimental school, I decided to promote this more conservative review as a counterpoint.] “Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” - Winston Churchill “There exists in such a case a cer...
Jul 11, 2025•46 min
[Original thread here: Missing Heritability: Much More Than You Wanted To Know ] 1: Comments From People Named In The Post 2: Very Long Comments From Other Very Knowledgeable People 3: Small But Important Corrections 4: Other Comments https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-missing-ed5...
Jul 07, 2025•1 hr
[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-2025
Jul 07, 2025•31 min
Stephen Skolnick is a gut microbiome expert blogging at Eat Shit And Prosper . His most recent post argues that contra the psychiatric consensus, schizophrenia isn’t genetic at all - it’s caused by a gut microbe. He argues: Scientists think schizophrenia is genetic because it obviously runs in families But the twin concordance rates are pretty low - if your identical twin has schizophrenia, there’s only about a 30%-40% chance that you get it too. Is that really what we would expect from a geneti...
Jul 07, 2025•10 min
[This is one of the finalists in the 2025 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] “Just as we don’t accept students using AI to write their essays, we will not accept districts using AI to supplant the critical role of teachers.” — Arthur Steinberg, American Federation of Teachers‑PA,...
Jul 04, 2025•1 hr 48 min
The Story So Far The mid-20th century was the golden age of nurture. Psychoanalysis, behaviorism, and the spirit of the ‘60s convinced most experts that parents, peers, and propaganda were the most important causes of adult personality. Starting in the 1970s, the pendulum swung the other way. Twin studies shocked the world by demonstrating that most behavioral traits - especially socially relevant traits like IQ - were substantially genetic. Typical estimates for adult IQ found it was about 60% ...
Jul 01, 2025•1 hr 2 min
Related to: ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-questions-for-future-acx-grants
Jul 01, 2025•5 min
The first cohort of ACX Grants was announced in late 2021 , the second in early 2024 . In 2022, I posted one-year updates for the first cohort. Now, as I start thinking about a third round, I’ve collected one-year updates on the second and three-year updates on the first. Many people said my request for updates went to their spam folder; relatedly, many people have not yet sent in their updates. If you’re a grantee who didn’t see my original email, but you do see this post, please fill in the up...
Jun 29, 2025•1 hr 14 min
This is a reported phenomenon where if two copies of Claude talk to each other, they end up spiraling into rapturous discussion of spiritual bliss, Buddhism, and the nature of consciousness. From the system card : Anthropic swears they didn’t do this on purpose; when they ask Claude why this keeps happening, Claude can’t explain. Needless to say, this has made lots of people freak out / speculate wildly. I think there are already a few good partial explanations of this (especially Nostalgebraist...
Jun 18, 2025•15 min
This is another heuristic from the same place as If It’s Worth Your Time To Lie, It’s Worth My Time To Correct You . If someone proves you are absolutely, 100% wrong about something, it’s polite to say “Oh, I guess I was wrong, sorry” before launching into your next argument. That is, instead of: https://readscottalexander.com/posts/acx-but-vs-yes-but...
Jun 18, 2025•4 min
People don’t like nitpickers. “He literally did the WELL AKTUALLY!” If you say Joe Criminal committed ten murders and five rapes, and I object that it was actually only six murders and two rapes, then why am I “defending” Joe Criminal? Because if it’s worth your time to lie, it’s worth my time to correct it. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/if-its-worth-your-time-to-lie-its
Jun 14, 2025•5 min
There’s a long-running philosophical argument about the conceivability of otherwise-normal people who are not conscious, aka “philosophical zombies” . This has spawned a shorter-running (only fifteen years!) rationalist sub-argument on the topic. The last time I checked its status was this post , which says: 1. Both Yudkowsky and Chalmers agree that humans possess “qualia”. 2. Chalmers argues that a superintelligent being which somewhow knew the positions of all particles in a large region of th...
Jun 14, 2025•10 min
It's time to narrow the 141 entries in the Non-Book Review Contest to about a dozen finalists. I can't read 141 reviews alone, so I need your help. Please pick as many as you have time for, read them, and rate them using this form . Don’t read them in order! If you read them in order, I’ll have 1,000 votes on the first review, 500 on the second, and so on to none in the second half. Either pick a random review (thanks to Taymon for making a random-review-chooser script here ) or scroll through t...
Jun 14, 2025•6 min
A guest post by Brandon Hendrickson [Editor’s note: I accept guest posts from certain people, especially past Book Review Contest winners. Brandon Hendrickson, whose review of The Educated Mind won the 2023 contest, has taken me up on this and submitted this essay. He writes at The Lost Tools of Learning and will be at LessOnline this weekend, where he and Jack Despain Zhou aka TracingWoodgrains will be doing a live conversation about education.] I began my book review of a couple years back wit...
Jun 14, 2025•29 min
Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution continues to disagree with my Contra MR On Charity Regrants . Going through his response piece by piece, slightly out of order: Scott takes me to be endorsing Rubio’s claim that the third-party NGOs simply pocket the money. In reality my fact check with o3 found (correctly) that the money was “channelled through” the NGOs, not pocketed. Scott lumps my claim together with Rubio’s as if we were saying the same thing. My very next words (“I do understand that not ...
Jun 14, 2025•28 min
Consciousness is the great mystery. In search of answers, scientists have plumbed every edge case they can think of - sleep, comas, lucid dreams, LSD trips, meditative ecstasies, seizures, neurosurgeries, that one pastor in 18th century England who claimed a carriage accident turned him into a p-zombie . Still, new stuff occasionally turns up. I assume this tweet is a troll (source: the guy has a frog avatar) 1 : https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/moments-of-awakening...
Jun 05, 2025•12 min
I often disagree with Marginal Revolution, but their post today made me a new level of angry: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-mr-on-charity-regrants
Jun 05, 2025•12 min
Many commenters responded to yesterday’s post by challenging the claim that 1.2 million Americans died of COVID... https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-evidence-that-a-million-americans
Jun 05, 2025•12 min
Five years later, we can’t stop talking about COVID. Remember lockdowns? The conflicting guidelines about masks - don’t wear them! Wear them! Maybe wear them! School closures, remote learning, learning loss, something about teachers’ unions. That one Vox article on how worrying about COVID was anti-Chinese racism. The time Trump sort of half-suggested injecting disinfectants. Hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, fluvoxamine, Paxlovid. Those jerks who tried to pressure you into getting vaccines, or th...
Jun 05, 2025•6 min
Bryan Caplan’s Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids is like the Bible. You already know what it says. You’ve already decided whether you believe or not. Do you really have to read it all the way through? But when you’re going through a rough patch in your life, sometimes it helps to pick up a Bible and look for pearls of forgotten wisdom. That’s where I am now. Having twins is a lot of work. My wife does most of it. My nanny does most of what’s left. Even so, the remaining few hours a day leave me ...
Jun 03, 2025•40 min
Ask Redditors what’s the worst subreddit , and a few names always come up. /r/atheism and /r/childfree are unpopular, but if I read them with an open mind, I always end up sympathetic - neither lifestyle is persecuted in my particular corner of society, but the Redditors there have usually been through some crazy stuff, and I don’t begrudge them a place to vent. The one that really floors me is /r/petfree . The denizens of /r/petfree don’t like pets. Their particular complaints vary, but most co...
Jun 03, 2025•9 min
Thanks to everyone who commented on the original post . https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-ai
Jun 03, 2025•16 min
Some of the more unhinged writing on superintelligence pictures AI doing things that seem like magic. Crossing air gaps to escape its data center. Building nanomachines from simple components. Plowing through physical bottlenecks to revolutionize the economy in months. More sober thinkers point out that these things might be physically impossible. You can’t do physically impossible things, even if you’re very smart. No, say the speculators, you don’t understand. Everything is physically impossib...
May 23, 2025•37 min
Cathy Young’s new hit piece on Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug) doesn’t mince words. Titled The Blogger Who Hates America , it describes him as an "inept", "not exactly coherent" "trollish, ill-informed pseudo-intellectual" notable for his "woefully superficial knowledge and utter ignorance". Yarvin’s fans counter that if you look deeper, he has good responses to Young’s objections: Both sides are right. The synthesis is that Moldbug sold out. In the late 2000s, Moldbug wrote some genuinely i...
May 23, 2025•43 min
President Trump’s approval rating has fallen to near-historic lows. With economic disruption from the tariffs likely to hit next month, his numbers will probably get even worse; this administration could reach unprecedented levels of unpopularity. If I were a far-right populist, I would be thinking hard about a strategy to prevent the blowback from crippling the movement. Such a strategy is easy to come by. Anger over DOGE and deportations has a natural floor. If Trump’s base starts abandoning h...
May 23, 2025•10 min
AI Futures Project is the group behind AI 2027 . I’ve been helping them with their blog . Posts written or co-written by me include: Beyond The Last Horizon - what’s behind that METR result showing that AI time horizons double every seven months? And is it really every seven months? Might it be faster? AI 2027: Media, Reactions, Criticism - a look at some of the response to AI 2027, with links to some of the best objections and the team’s responses. Why America Wins - why we predict that America...
May 23, 2025•4 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 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.] ttps://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-april-2025
May 22, 2025•26 min
