Astral Codex Ten Podcast

Jan 20 2025 1003 ep. 25 mins 1.4k
Astral Codex Ten Podcast artwork

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.

  Technology  Science
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Highlights From The Comments On Prison

Jan 20 2025 55 mins  
[Original post here - Prison And Crime: Much More Than You Wanted To Know] Table of Contents: 1: Comments On Criminal Psychology 2: Comments On Policing 3: Comments On El Salvador 4: Comments On Probation 5: Comments That Say My Analysis Forgot Something 6: Comments With Proposed Solutions / Crazy Schemes 7: Other Comments

Indulge Your Internet Addiction By Reading About Internet Addiction

Dec 24 2024 10 mins  
Internet addiction may not be as bad as some other forms of addiction, but it’s more common (and more personal). I have young children now and wanted to learn more about it, so I included some questions in last year’s ACX survey. The sample was 5,981 ACX readers (obviously non-random in terms of Internet use level!). I don’t think the results were very helpful, but I post the

Friendly And Hostile Analogies For Taste

Dec 24 2024 15 mins  
Recently we’ve gotten into discussions about artistic taste (see comments on AI Art Turing Test and From Bauhaus To Our House). This is a bit mysterious. Many (most?) uneducated people like certain art which seems “obviously” pretty. But a small group of people who have studied the issue in depth say that in some deep sense, that art is actually bad (“kitsch”), and other

Book Review: From Bauhaus To Our House

Dec 24 2024 57 mins  
Like most people, Tom Wolfe didn’t like modern architecture. He wondered why we abandoned our patrimony of cathedrals and palaces for a million indistinguishable concrete boxes. Unlike most people, he was a journalist skilled at deep dives into difficult subjects. The result is From Bauhaus To Our House, a hostile history of modern architecture which addresses the question of: wh

Prison And Crime: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

Dec 05 2024 87 mins  
Do longer prison sentences reduce crime? It seems obvious that they should. Even if they don’t deter anyone, they at least keep criminals locked up where they can’t hurt law-abiding citizens. If, as the studies suggest, 1% of people commit 63% of the crime, locking up that 1% should dramatically decrease crime rates regardless of whether it scares anyone else. And blue state so

Against The Generalized Anti-Caution Argument

Dec 04 2024 11 mins  
Suppose something important will happen at a certain unknown point. As someone approaches that point, you might be tempted to warn that the thing will happen. If you’re being appropriately cautious, you’ll warn about it before it happens. Then your warning will be wrong. As things continue to progress, you may continue your warnings, and you’ll be wrong each time. Then people

How Did You Do On The AI Art Turing Test?

Dec 04 2024 15 mins  
Last month, I challenged 11,000 people to classify fifty pictures as either human art or AI-generated images. I originally planned five human and five AI pictures in each of four styles: Renaissance, 19th Century, Abstract/Modern, and Digital, for a total of forty. After receiving many exceptionally good submissions from local AI artists, I fudged a little and made it fifty. The fi

The Early Christian Strategy

Nov 28 2024 17 mins  
In 1980, game theorist Robert Axelrod ran a famous Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournament. He asked other game theorists to send in their best strategies in the form of “bots”, short pieces of code that took an opponent’s actions as input and returned one of the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma outputs of COOPERATE or DEFECT. For example, you might have a bot that COOPERATES a

Book Review: The Rise Of Christianity

Nov 28 2024 52 mins  
The rise of Christianity is a great puzzle. In 40 AD, there were maybe a thousand Christians. Their Messiah had just been executed, and they were on the wrong side of an intercontinental empire that had crushed all previous foes. By 400, there were forty million, and they were set to dominate the next millennium of Western history. Imagine taking a time machine to the year 2300 AD,

Congrats To Polymarket, But I Still Think They Were Mispriced

Nov 28 2024 17 mins  
I. Polymarket (and prediction markets in general) had an amazing Election Night. They called states impressively early and accurately, kept the site stable through what must have been incredible strain, and have successfully gotten prediction markets in front of the world (including the Trump campaign). From here it’s a flywheel; victory building on victory. Enough people heard o