Astral Codex Ten Podcast

Apr 14 2025 1041 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.

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Come On, Obviously The Purpose Of A System Is Not What It Does

Apr 14 2025 8 mins

(see Wikipedia: The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does) Consider the following claims The purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure two-thirds of cancer patients. The purpose of the Ukrainian military is to get stuck in a years-long stalemate with Russia. The purpose of the British government is to propose a controversial new sentencing policy, stand firm in the face of protests f

My Takeaways From AI 2027

Apr 14 2025 20 mins

Here’s a list of things I updated on after working on the scenario. Some of these are discussed in more detail in the supplements, including the compute forecast, timelines forecast, takeoff forecast, AI goals forecast, and security forecast. I’m highlighting these because it seems like a lot of people missed their existence, and they’re what transforms the scenario from cool

AI 2027 (Full Recording with Footnotes and Text Boxes)

Apr 14 2025 251 mins

We predict that the impact of superhuman AI over the next decade will be enormous, exceeding that of the Industrial Revolution. We wrote a scenario that represents our best guess about what that might look like.1 It’s informed by trend extrapolations, wargames, expert feedback, experience at OpenAI, and previous forecasting successes. https://ai-2027.com/ (A condensed two-hour v

Introducing AI 2027

Apr 14 2025 8 mins

Or maybe 2028, it's complicated In 2021, a researcher named Daniel Kokotajlo published a blog post called “What 2026 Looks Like”, where he laid out what he thought would happen in AI over the next five years. The world delights in thwarting would-be prophets. The sea of possibilities is too vast for anyone to ever really chart a course. At best, we vaguely gesture at broad cate

The Colors Of Her Coat

Apr 14 2025 23 mins

In Ballad of the White Horse, G.K. Chesterton describes the Virgin Mary: Her face was like an open word When brave men speak and choose, The very colours of her coat Were better than good news. Why the colors of her coat? The medievals took their dyes very seriously. This was before modern chemistry, so you had to try hard if you wanted good colors. Try hard they did; they famous

"Deros And The Ur-Abduction" In Asterisk

Apr 02 2025 34 mins

Asterisk invited me to participate in their “Weird” themed issue, so I wrote five thousand words on evil Atlantean cave dwarves. As always, I thought of the perfect framing just after I’d sent it out. The perfect framing is - where did Scientology come from? How did a 1940s sci-fi writer found a religion? Part of the answer is that 1940s sci-fi fandom was a really fertile pla

More Drowning Children

Mar 27 2025 21 mins

People love trying to find holes in the drowning child thought experiment. This is natural: it’s obvious you should save the child in the scenario, but much less obvious that you should give lots of charity to poor people (as it seems to imply). So there must be some distinction between the two scenarios. But most people’s cursory and uninspired attempts to find these fail. htt

Misophonia: Beyond Sensory Sensitivity

Mar 27 2025 12 mins

Jake Eaton has a great article on misophonia in Asterisk. Misophonia is a condition in which people can’t tolerate certain noises (classically chewing). Nobody loves chewing noises, but misophoniacs go above and beyond, sometimes ending relationships, shutting themselves indoors, or even deliberately trying to deafen themselves in an attempt to escape. So it’s a sensory hypers

OpenAI Nonprofit Buyout: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

Mar 20 2025 25 mins

Last month, I put out a request for experts to help me understand the details of OpenAI’s forprofit buyout. The following comes from someone who has looked into the situation in depth but is not an insider. Mistakes are mine alone. Why Was OpenAI A Nonprofit In The First Place? In the early 2010s, the AI companies hadn’t yet discovered scaling laws, and so underestimated the a

The Ozempocalypse Is Nigh

Mar 20 2025 10 mins

Sorry, you can only get drugs when there's a drug shortage. Three GLP-1 drugs are approved for weight loss in the United States: Semaglutide (Ozempic®, Wegovy®, Rybelsus®) Tirzepatide (Mounjaro®, Zepbound®) Liraglutide (Victoza®, Saxenda®) …but liraglutide is noticeably worse than the others, and most people prefer either semaglutide or tirzepatide. These cost about $100