The "cultural Christianity" argument says that atheists might not like Christianity, but they like a culture which depends on Christianity. They like open, free, thoughtful, liberal, beautiful, virtuous societies. Unmoored from a connection to Christanity, a society will gradually have less of those goods, until even atheists are unhappy. Therefore (continues the argument), atheists should be cultural Christians. While they can continue to privately disbelieve, they should support an overall Chr...
Oct 26, 2024•6 min
How is Javier Milei, the new-ish libertarian president of Argentina doing? According to right-wing sources , he’s doing amazing, inflation is vanquished , and Argentina is on the road to First World status. According to left-wing sources , he’s devastating the country, inflation has ballooned , and Argentina is mired in unprecedented dire poverty . I was confused enough to investigate further. Going through various topics in more depth: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/preliminary-milei-report-c...
Oct 26, 2024•17 min
Exegi monumentum aere perennius There’s a Twitter meme on how men constantly think about the Roman Empire. Some feminist friends objected that women think about Rome a lot too. To settle the matter, I included a question about this on this year’s ACX survey , “Have you thought about the Roman Empire in the past 24 hours?” (the Byzantine Empire also counted). Here are responses from 607 cis women and 4,925 cis men: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-often-do-men-think-about-rome...
Oct 19, 2024•9 min
Finalist #14 in the Book Review Contest [ This is one of the finalists in the 2024 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 The Ballad of the White Horse is a 2,684 line poem about conservatism, and it is brilliant. It has been called the last great epic poem written...
Oct 19, 2024•38 min
Sakana ( website , paper ) is supposed to be “an AI scientist”. Since it can’t access the physical world, it can only do computer science. Its human handlers give it a computer program. It prompts itself to generate hypotheses about the program (“if I change this number, the program will run faster”). Then it uses an AI coding submodule to test its hypotheses. Finally, it uses a language model to write them up in typical scientific paper format. Is it good? Not really. Experts who read its paper...
Oct 16, 2024•17 min
Probably No Superintelligent Forecaster Yet FiveThirtyNine (ha ha) is a new forecasting AI that purports to be “superintelligent”, ie able to beat basically all human forecasters. In fact, its creators go further than that: they say it beats Metaculus, a site which aggregates the estimates of hundreds of forecasters to generate estimates more accurate than any of them. You can read the announcement here and play with the model itself here . (kudos to the team for making the model publicly availa...
Oct 16, 2024•18 min
Finalist #13 in the Book Review Contest [ This is one of the finalists in the 2024 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 ] Cats have nine lives but they don’t get involved in jungle wars in the Philippines Aimen Dean (pseudonym) compares himself to the proverbial cat: he has nin...
Oct 14, 2024•46 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.] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-september-2024
Oct 01, 2024•28 min
Freddie deBoer has a post on what he calls “the temporal Copernican principle.” He argues we shouldn’t expect a singularity, apocalypse, or any other crazy event in our lifetimes. Discussing celebrity transhumanist Yuval Harari, he writes: What I want to say to people like Yuval Harari is this. The modern human species is about 250,000 years old, give or take 50,000 years depending on who you ask. Let’s hope that it keeps going for awhile - we’ll be conservative and say 50,000 more years of huma...
Oct 01, 2024•14 min
[ This is one of the finalists in the 2024 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 ] For the longest time, I avoided reading The Pale King . It wasn’t the style—in places thick with the author’s characteristic footnotes, 1 sentences that run for pages, and spasms of dense technica...
Oct 01, 2024•46 min
[Original post here .] Aeon writes : The main complaint about this expression is that it’s “not a real apology,” and that’s true, it isn’t. The error is in thinking it is therefore a fake apology. But it isn’t, because “I’m sorry” is not a statement of contrition, it’s a statement of sorrow. Somehow everyone has gotten confused into thinking an apology is the only correct use for that phrase despite the plain meaning of the words. This is the comment that best expresses what I wished I’d said at...
Sep 22, 2024•8 min
You look up from your massive mahogany desk. “Tom, right? Thank you for coming…hmm…I see you’re applying for the role of Vice-President Of Sinister Plots. Your resume looks very impressive - I didn’t even know any of the masterminds behind the Kennedy assassination were still alive.” “That’s what we want you to think,” says Tom. “Of course. Then just one question for you. What’s something you believe, that very few people agree with you on?” “I think we’re in a simulation.” “Hm, yes, that was ve...
Sep 22, 2024•15 min
Finalist #11 in the Book Review Contest [ This is one of the finalists in the 2024 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 ] 1. The Supernatural is Dead April, 1861 was a cruel month. The American Civil War had just started, and across the Atlantic, high in a remote valley in the ...
Sep 22, 2024•16 min
And its cousin, "I'm sorry if you're offended" People hate this phrase . They say it’s a fake apology that only gets used to dismiss others’ concerns. Well, I’m sorry they feel that way. People sometimes get sad or offended by appropriate/correct/reasonable actions: Maybe one of your family members makes an unreasonable demand (“Please lend me lots of money to subsidize my drug addiction”), you say no, and they say they feel like you don’t love them. Maybe you speak out against a genocidal aggre...
Sep 20, 2024•4 min
Finalist #10 in the Book Review Contest [ This is one of the finalists in the 2024 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. Suppose you were a newcomer to English literature, and having heard of this artistic device called ‘poetry’, wondered what it was all about and where it ...
Sep 17, 2024•26 min
Now that we’ve gone over the pharmacology of the GLP-1 agonists , let’s get back to the economics. Last time , we asked - how will the economy handle a $12,000/year drug that everyone wants? Now we have an answer: the compounding loophole. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-compounding-loophole...
Sep 17, 2024•10 min
In a recent post , I said that part of opposing cancel culture is to rigorously define it. Greg Lukianoff, president of FIRE, took up the challenge . His definition, first mentioned in his book Cancelling Of The American Mind , is: Cancel Culture is the uptick, beginning around 2014 and accelerating in 2017 and after, of campaigns to get people fired, disinvited, deplatformed, or otherwise punished for speech that is — or would be — protected by First Amendment standards, and the climate of fear...
Sep 17, 2024•13 min
Finalist #9 in the Book Review Contest You are a serious person with serious interests. The last comic book you read was more likely by Bryan Caplan than Jonathan Hickman. You would prefer to be reading high quality book reviews on AstralCodexTen. You believe ACX book reviews are usually more insightful than the books themselves, and a far more efficient use of your time. But even book reviews take time to process, and there are a lot of book reviews to read. Why spend your valuable time reading...
Sep 09, 2024•1 hr 20 min
Fine, the title is an exaggeration. But only a small one. GLP-1 receptor agonist medications like Ozempic are already FDA-approved to treat diabetes and obesity. But an increasing body of research finds they’re also effective against stroke, heart disease, kidney disease , Parkinson’s , Alzheimer’s , alcoholism , and drug addiction . There’s a pattern in fake scammy alternative medicine. People get excited about some new herb. They invent a laundry list of effects: it improves heart health, soft...
Sep 09, 2024•27 min
[ This is one of the finalists in the 2024 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 ] To a first approximation, there are a million books about World War II. Why should you care about How the War Was Won (hereinafter “HtWWW”) by Phillips Payson O’Brien? It provides a new, transform...
Aug 26, 2024•43 min
[original post here ] Table Of Contents I. Comments About Master And Slave Morality II. Comments By People Named In The Post III . Comments Making Specific Points About One Of The Thinkers In The Post IV. Other Comments https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-nietzsche...
Aug 26, 2024•1 hr 21 min
Some commenters on the recent post accused me of misunderstanding the Nietzschean objection to altruism. We hate altruism, they said, not because we’re “bad and cruel”, but because we instead support vitalism . Vitalism is a moral system that maximizes life, glory and strength, instead of maximizing happiness. Altruism is bad because it throws resources into helping sick (maybe even dysgenic) people, thus sapping our life, glory, and strength. In a blog post (linked in the original post, discuss...
Aug 26, 2024•22 min
[ This is one of the finalists in the 2024 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 ] Content warning: body horror, existential devastation, suicide. This book is an infohazard that will permanently alter your view of paraplegia. The Death of a Newly-Paraplegic Philosopher For me, ...
Aug 26, 2024•55 min
I. Bentham’s Bulldog Blogger “Bentham’s Bulldog” recently wrote Shut Up About Slave Morality . Nietzsche’s concept of “slave morality” (he writes) is just a dysphemism for the usual morality where you’re not bad and cruel. Right-wing edgelords use “rejection of slave morality” as a justification for badness and cruelty: When people object to slave morality, they are just objecting to morality. They are objecting to the notion that you should care about others and doing the right thing, even when...
Aug 22, 2024•1 hr 12 min
[ This is one of the finalists in the 2024 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 ] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-real-raw-news
Aug 13, 2024•47 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.] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-july-2024
Aug 13, 2024•19 min
The “LibsOfTikTok” Twitter account found a random Home Depot employee who said she wished the Trump assassin hadn’t missed. Her followers mass-called Home Depot and got the employee fired . Moral of the story: despite everything, there’s apparently still a norm against assassinating politicians. But some on the right interpreted this as meaning something more. A sudden vibe shift, or impending Trump victory, has handed conservatives the levers of cancel culture! This sparked a right-wing blogosp...
Aug 13, 2024•31 min
Finalist #5 in the Book Review Contest https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-how-language-began [ This is one of the finalists in the 2024 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 ]...
Aug 13, 2024•1 hr 18 min
[ Original post here ] Table Of Contents 1: Responses To Broad Categories Of Objections 2: Responses To Specific Comments 3: Comments By People Who Have Relevant Experiences 4: Closing Thoughts https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-mentally...
Aug 10, 2024•52 min
A guest post by Daniel Böttger [Editor’s note: I accept guest posts from certain people, especially past Book Review Contest winners. Daniel Böttger, who wrote last year’s review of On The Marble Cliffs , has finally taken me up on this and submitted this essay. I don’t necessarily agree with or endorse all guest posts, and I’m still collecting my thoughts (ha!) on this one.] Nobody knows for sure how subjective experiences relate to objective physics. That is the main reason why there are serio...
Aug 02, 2024•42 min
