Podcast
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Hosted by Jeremiah · EN
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.
37episodes
Episodes
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Contra Everyone On Taste
2w ago00:31:33Tap to summarizeLast year I wrote a piece on artistic taste, which got many good responses from (eg) Ozy, Frank Lantz, and Sympathetic Opposition. I tastelessly forgot to respond to them until now, but I appreciate how they forced me to refine my thinking. In particular, they helped me realize that "taste" and "good art" are hard to talk about, because the discussions conflate many different things: 1: Sensory Delight. Ode To Joy makes the listener feel joyful. Michelangelo's David fills the viewer with awe at the human figure. The great cathedrals are impressive buildings, in a way that hits you like a punch to the gut. These judgments are preconscious, widespread, and don't necessarily require artistic sophistication. 2: Novelty and Innovation: Someone gets credit for doing art in a way that has never been done before. The early Impressionists invented a new way of looking at the world and explored all of its little corners. A modern Impressionist painter may be able to match their technical skill, but not their novelty; therefore, the modern would be a mere curiosity while the originals were great artists. For a modern person to be a great artist, they would have to explore entirely new media - hence the surprising and transgressive nature of modern art. 3: Paying Attention / Pattern Language: Tasteful people, viewing art over the generations and paying deep attention to it, have developed a sense of balance, composition, contrast, and what should and shouldn't be done. We can debate how predetermined the exact grammar of this language was a priori, but for better or worse people are sensitized to it and will judge works with it in mind. A good work of art should either conform to this language, or defy it deliberately and thoughtfully (that is, in a way that transcends it rather than ignores it). Along with these three big ones, here are smaller ones that might or might not be combinations or subvarieties of these: 4: Context And Discussion: Some great art raises questions, and subsequent great art proposes answers, or variations on the questions, or further elucidates the subject. The great artists of any given time are in conversation with their peers and the great artists of all past ages; new art can be judged on whether it shows awareness of, and contributes to, this conversation. Other forms of context are more personal - is a book about human evil more aesthetic if its author survived the Holocaust? 5: Literal Ability To Understand A Work: You can't fully appreciate Animal Farm unless you know the history of Soviet communism and recognize the book as an allegory for that history. If someone who knew nothing about this liked it as a cute story about talking animals, their appreciation would be different from (inferior to?) that of more knowledgeable people. 6: Changing Fashions: In 1940, Beaux-Arts and Frank Lloyd Wright were the heights of American architecture. By 1950, nobody who was anybody was doing Beaux-Arts or Prairie; it was all International Style. One could very charitably attribute this to the novelty-seeking drive above; but it's implausible that Prairie style architecture was novel and beloved in 1940, a few houses completely exhausted its potential, but the explosion of International Style buildings didn't restore the balance such that the low-hanging-fruit level level was lower in Prairie style again. More likely this was just a fashion effect where Prairie style was cool in 1940, then uncool in 1950. 7: Political And Ideological Point-Making: Great art may convey some truth about the world. This could be a purely aesthetic truth. But in the case of Uncle Tom's Cabin, the truth was "slavery is bad". Other truths are conveyed symbolically (for example, cathedrals being shaped like crosses) or through design choices (for example, the austerity of Bauhaus architecture making it more suitable for socialist housing). 8: Ability To Profoundly Affect Or Transform You: Maybe this one is emergent from some combination of sensory delight, novelty and point-making. But some people say they come away from art transformed, in a way which is neither just sensory delight nor just political ideology. Philosophers have argued for millennia about exactly what way this is, but hopefully we've all had this experience and can accept an extensional definition. These people enumerated these things to defend taste. I will instead take the bold stand that conflating many different things is bad: it frees people from thinking too hard about any particular one of them, or the ways they interact. Here are my arguments for deliberately ignoring about half of these. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-everyone-on-taste
Transcribe →What Deontological Bars?
2w ago00:10:01Tap to summarizeConstraint consequentialists believe that you should try to do good things that improve the world, unless those break hard-and-fast rules ("deontological bars"). For example, you shouldn't assassinate democratically-elected leaders, even very bad ones. Why not? Since bad leaders set bad policy, and bad policy can kill many thousands of people, wouldn't it be for the greater good? Because there's always one gun-owner who thinks any given leader's policies are bad, so without the rule, every leader would face constant assassination attempts, probably some of them would succeed, and the nation would either crumble or degenerate into a security state. This explanation combines two sub-explanations. In the first, you are wrong about whether assassinating the leader would produce good consequences - you think it would, but actually it would produce instability, tyranny, etc. In the second, you're right - maybe you're a brilliant forecaster who can see that this particular assassination would end with an orderly succession by a superior ruler. But you know that there are far more people who think they are such brilliant forecasters than who actually are, and you either use the Outside View to suspect that you are also deceiving yourself, or at least realize that the only stable bright-line equilibrium is for everyone - true brilliant forecasters and wannabes alike - to refuse to act upon their apparent foreknowledge. "Don't kill people" is a gimme. What other deontological bars constrain our actions? https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/what-deontological-bars
Transcribe →Your Attempt To Solve Debate Will Not Work
2w ago00:08:45Tap to summarizeAs a blogger, I hear about lots of projects to "solve debate", or "disagree better", or "map arguments". Often these are ACX grant applications. I always turn them down. They're well-intentioned, sophisticated, and doomed. I appreciate that Internet arguments usually don't go well, that there are lots of ways to improve them, and that this is a worthy cause. But I've also seen a dozen projects of this sort fail. Here's why I think yours will too: "Debate" almost never corresponds to mappable arguments. The simplest "solve debate" proposal is the argument map. Some technology helps people decompose arguments into premises and conclusions, then lets skeptics point out where the premises are wrong, or where the conclusion doesn't follow from the premise. But almost no real argument works that way. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-attempt-to-solve-debate-will
Transcribe →Links For April 2026
4w ago00:46:14Tap to summarize[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-april-2026
Transcribe →Half A Month Of Consolation Writing Advice
4w ago00:32:55Tap to summarizeThis month, rationalist institution Lighthaven is running their second Inkhaven, a bootcamp for aspiring bloggers. Participants have to publish a post a day, or they get kicked out. You can read their posts here. I'm too old to manage that pace, but agreed to participate as an advisor. Then I missed the first half of the month because I was on a trip. As compensation, here are fifteen pieces of writing advice for the fifteen days I was absent. 1: Against microdishonesty Sasha Chapin has a piece If You Have Writer's Block, Maybe Stop Lying To Yourself. Maybe lying gives Sasha writer's block, but for my last set of mentees it more often just made things sound awkward and unclear. The English language hates the slightest whiff of dishonesty, even levels so small you wouldn't naturally notice them yourself. It punishes you by making your writing worse. I remember asking one of my mentees to take out a tangential paragraph that didn't really connect to the rest of the argument. They refused, and awkwardly admitted that it was the one thing they really wanted to say with the essay. They'd written the essay about something else, because the other thing was more presentable. Then they'd smuggled their actual point in as a payload. Clever plan, but your readers will notice. There are countless reasons to lie when you're writing. Maybe you thought of a really clever introduction, but the thing it introduces is 5% different from the thing you really want to say, so you need to be a little vague and smush them together. Maybe you have a really great perspective on something which is almost like the topic du jour, and you need to make it sound like it's exactly the topic du jour to get it published. Maybe you can rebut 99 out of 100 arguments for some stupid evil position that you want to debunk, but it would be embarrassing to leave one hanging, so you smudge it together into the other 99 arguments. English will punish you for all these things. Sometimes there's no better solution and you have to settle, but your readers will notice. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/half-a-month-of-consolation-writing
Transcribe →Orban Was Bad, Even Though We Don't Have A Perfect Word For His Badness
4w ago00:16:46Tap to summarizeViktor Orban, __________ of Hungary for sixteen years, lost his re-election bid earlier this week. The simplest phrase to put in the blank is "prime minister". Some people have proposed more loaded terms like "strongman", "autocrat", and "dictator". But he did lose his re-election bid earlier this week, prompting comments that these more loaded terms, especially the d-word, might have been hyperbolic. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/orban-was-bad-even-though-we-dont
Transcribe →Against The Concept Of Telescopic Altruism
Apr 2100:10:33Tap to summarizeI. "Telescopic altruism" is a supposed tendency for some people to ignore those close to them in favor of those further away. Like its cousin "virtue signaling", it usually gets used to own the libs. Some lib cares about people in Gaza - why? Shouldn't she be thinking about her friends and neighbors instead? The only possible explanation is that she's an evil person who hates everyone around her, but manages to feel superior to decent people by pretending to "care" about foreigners who she'll never meet. This collapses upon five seconds' thought. Okay, so the lib is angry about the Israeli military killing 50,000 people in Gaza. Do you think she would be angry if the Israeli military killed 50,000 of her neighbors? Probably yes? Then what's the problem? "But vegetarians care about animals more than humans!" Okay, yeah, they sure do get mad about a billion pigs kept for their entire lives in cages too small to turn around in, then murdered and eaten. Do you think they'd care if a billion of their closest friends were kept for their entire lives in cages too small to turn around in, then murdered and eaten? I dunno, seems bad. Maybe there is some possible comparison where some altruist cares about some set of foreigners more than a comparable set of countrymen? The war in Gaza killed 50,000 people, but the opioid crisis kills a bit over 50,000 Americans per year - is everyone who cares about Gaza exactly equally concerned about the opioid crisis? No, but there's a better explanation - people care about dramatic deaths in big explosions more than boring health crises, regardless of where they happen. Everyone, lib and con alike, cared more about 9-11 than about a hundred opioid crises, even though the former only killed 4% as many people as the latter. And even the people who care about the opioid crisis usually can't bring themselves to care about anything on the List Of Top US Causes Of Death, which are all extra-boring things like diabetes. Once you match like to like, nope, it's pretty hard to find a "telescopic altruism" example that stands out from the general background of people having weird priorities. Nearly everyone cares about people close to them more than people far away. If there's a lib who would attend a Gaza protest instead of getting their deathly-ill kid emergency medical care, I haven't met them - and the "telescopic altruism" crowd certainly hasn't provided evidence of their existence. Instead, the people who care about their neighbors 1,000,000x times more than Gazans point to the people who 'only' care about their neighbors 1,000x times more than Gazans and say "Look! Those guys care about Gazans more than their neighbors! Get 'em!" in order to avoid any debate about whether a million or a thousand or whatever is the right multiplier. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/against-the-concept-of-telescopic
Transcribe →A Buddhist Sun Miracle?
Apr 2100:11:12Tap to summarizeIn 1917, some Portuguese children started seeing visions of the Virgin Mary. The Virgin told them she would enact a great miracle on a certain day in October, and a crowd of 100,000 gathered to witness the event. According to eyewitness reports, newspaper articles, etc, they saw the sun spin around, change colors, and do various other miraculous things. At least a hundred separate testimonies of the event have come down to us, with only two or three people saying they didn't see it. Catholics continue to bring this up as one of the best-attested miracles and strongest empirical proofs of the faith - including here on Substack, where there was a spirited debate about the event last fall. I did my best to research the event, and the results were The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know and Highlights From The Comments On Fatima. The main thing I was able to add to the Substack discussion, if not the broader worldwide one, was a survey of similar events. There were apparent sun miracles at various other Catholic sites and apparitions of the Virgin, including a crowd of hundreds of thousands in Italy, and a small town in Bosnia where they seem to happen regularly. But also, people who "sungaze" - a weird alternative medicine practice where people stare at the sun in the hopes that maybe this will help something and they won't go blind - report sometimes seeing the sun spin and change color in similar ways. And Buddhist meditators report that concentrating very hard on any bright light will cause similar things to happen. Still, the Catholics - especially original Fatima-Substacker Ethan Muse - were not convinced. The other Catholic sightings could have been other real miracles, equally attributable to the Virgin. The sungazers were staring at the sun for a long time, unlike the Fatima pilgrims who just happened to glance up at it. And the meditators were doing sophisticated contemplative exercises, again different from the Fatima pilgrims who just looked up and saw it. These were suggestive, but there was no record of a miracle exactly like Fatima happening within a non-Catholic religious tradition. Until now! Substacker Arthur T, building on research from Sophia In The Shell, has found a 1990s Buddhist sun miracle very similar to Fatima. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/a-buddhist-sun-miracle
Transcribe →How Natural Tradeoff And Failure Components?
Apr 2100:05:38Tap to summarizeMichael Halassa: Did John Nash Really Have Schizophrenia? is a good article on the genetics of psychosis. Previous research found that schizophrenia genes decreased IQ but increased educational attainment. Usually IQ and education are correlated, so this was surprising. The new research finds two components to schizophrenia genetic risk. The first component, shared with bipolar, increases educational attainment. The second component, not shared with bipolar, decreases IQ. They average out to the observed full-spectrum genetic signal of constant-to-increased educational attainment paired with constant-to-decreased IQ. In 2021, I discussed tradeoff vs. failure models of psychiatric conditions, and said that most conditions were probably a mix of both. The new research seems to confirm this: the first genetic component of schizophrenia is a tradeoff: bad insofar as it gives you higher schizophrenia risk, good insofar as it gives you higher educational attainment. Most likely this has something to do with creativity or motivation. The second component is a failure: bad in every way, with no compensating advantage. Most likely this is detrimental mutations in genes for neurogenesis and synaptic pruning. I mostly wasn't thinking about schizophrenia when I wrote about tradeoffs vs. failures, so I was surprised to see the theory so nicely reflected there. But in retrospect, this is common sense. All multifactorial problems should naturally be combinations of tradeoffs and failures. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-natural-tradeoff-and-failure
Transcribe →Every Debate On Pausing AI
Apr 2100:07:30Tap to summarizeSUPPORTER: America needs to start talking to China to come up with a bilateral agreement to pause AI. The agreement would need to be transparent, mutually enforceable, and… OPPONENT: We can't unilaterally pause AI! China would destroy us! SUPPORTER: As I said, we need to start negotiating a bilateral agreement so that both sides will… OPPONENT: You fool! Don't you know that while we unilaterally pause AI, China will be racing ahead and using their lead to erode our fundamental rights and freedoms? How could you be so naive! SUPPORTER: Look, I promise this is about negotiating for a mutual pause. We don't think a unilateral pause would work any more than you would. But we think that if we negotiate… OPPONENT: And while we unilaterally pause, do you think China will just be twiddling their thumbs, doing nothing? Obviously not! This is about ceding the future to our rivals! SUPPORTER: I get the feeling you're not listening to me. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/every-debate-on-pausing-ai
Transcribe →