Astral Codex Ten

25 Sept 2026 · 10 min

Fall Meetups 2026 - Call For Meetup Organizers

Didn’t we just do this? No, that was college effective altruist group meetups. These are the normal meetups for ineffective selfish people of all ages. So here is your regularly-scheduled message from Meetups Czar Skyler: Short version! If

Astral Codex Ten

25 Sept 2026 · 34 min

Your Book Review: Lee Kuan Yew's Memoirs

[ 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

Astral Codex Ten

24 Sept 2026 · 17 min

The Specter Of Neuralese

I. At Long Last, We Have Created Neuralese Recurrence, From The Classic Sci-Fi Novel “Don’t Create Neuralese Recurrence” In the public debates after the release of AI 2027 , some people accused us of misleading readers by positing “ neurale

Astral Codex Ten

24 Sept 2026 · 41 min

Does Georgism Work? Five Years Later

Hi, this is Lars Doucet, author of the book review of Henry George’s Progress and Poverty that won the first ACX book review contest , as well as the three-part follow-up guest post series, “ Does Georgism Work? ” A lot has happened since t

Astral Codex Ten

23 Sept 2026 · 12 min

Mysteries Of AI Generalization

I. Owain Evans In 2025, Owain Evans et al published a paper on “emergent misalignment” . They trained a previously-aligned AI to do one immoral thing: write insecure code full of vulnerabilities and backdoors. To their surprise, the AI beca

Astral Codex Ten

26 Jan 2022 · 12 min

Bounded Distrust

I.Suppose you're a liberal who doesn't trust FOX News. One day you're at the airport, waiting for a plane, ambiently watching the TV at the gate. It's FOX News, and they're saying that a mass shooter just shot twenty people in Yankee Stadiu

Astral Codex Ten

29 Sept 2021 · 23 min

Book Review: The Scout Mindset

I.You tried Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset, but the replication crisis crushed your faith. You tried Mike Cernovich’s Gorilla Mindset, but your neighbors all took out restraining orders against you. Yet without a mindset, what separates you f

Astral Codex Ten

10 Mar 2021 · 20 min

Trapped Priors As A Basic Problem Of Rationality

Introduction and reviewLast month I talked about van der Bergh et al’s work on the precision of sensory evidence, which introduced the idea of a trapped prior. I think this concept has far-reaching implications for the rationalist project a