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.
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Book Review Contest Rules 2026
Mar 1400:03:12Tap to summarizeIt's that time again. Even numbered years are book reviews, odd-numbered years are non-book reviews, so you're limited to books for now. Write a review of a book. There's no official word count requirement, but previous finalists and winners were often between 2,000 and 10,000 words. There's no official recommended style, but check the style of last time's finalists and winners or my ACX book reviews (1, 2, 3) if you need inspiration. Please limit yourself to one entry per person or team. Then send me your review through this Google Form. The form will ask for your name, email, the title of the book, and a link to a Google Doc. The Google Doc should have your review exactly as you want me to post it if you're a finalist. Don't include your name or any hint about your identity in the Google Doc itself, only in the form. I want to make this contest as blinded as possible, so I'm going to hide that column in the form immediately and try to judge your docs on their merit. (does this mean you can't say something like "This book about war reminded me of my own experiences as a soldier" because that gives a hint about your identity? My rule of thumb is that if I don't know who you are, and the average ACX reader doesn't know who you are, you're fine. I just want to prevent my friends or Internet semi-famous people from getting an advantage. If you're in one of those categories and think your personal experience would give it away, please don't write about your personal experience.) Please make sure the Google Doc is unlocked and I can read it. By default, nobody can read Google Docs except the original author. You'll have to go to Share, then on the bottom of the popup click on "Restricted" and change to "Anyone with the link". If you send me a document I can't read, I will probably disqualify you, sorry. Readers will vote for the ~10 finalists this spring, I'll post one finalist per week through the summer, and then readers will vote for winners in late summer/early fall. First prize will get at least $2,500, second prize at least $1,000, third prize at least $500; I might increase these numbers later on. All winners and finalists will get free publicity (including links to any other works they want me to link to), free ACX subscriptions, and sidebar links to their blog. And all winners will get the right to pitch me new articles if they want (sample posts by Lars, Brandon, Daniel, etc). In past years, most reviews have been nonfiction on technical topics. Depending on whether that's still true, I might do some mild affirmative action for reviews in nontraditional categories - fiction, poetry, and books from before 1900 are the ones I can think of right now, but feel free to try other nontraditional books. I won't be redistributing more than 25% of finalist slots this way. Your due date is May 20th. Good luck! If you have any questions, ask them in the comments. And remember, the form for submitting entries is here. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-contest-rules-2026
Transcribe →Crime As Proxy For Disorder
Mar 1400:17:05Tap to summarizeThe problem: people hate crime and think it's going up. But actually, crime barely affects most people and is historically low. So what's going on? In our discussion yesterday, many commenters proposed that the discussion about "crime" was really about disorder. Disorder takes many forms, but its symptoms include litter, graffiti, shoplifting, tent cities, weird homeless people wandering about muttering to themselves, and people walking around with giant boom boxes shamelessly playing music at 200 decibels on a main street where people are trying to engage in normal activities. When people complain about these things, they risk getting called a racist or a "Karen". But when they complain about crime, there's still a 50-50 chance that listeners will let them finish the sentence without accusing them of racism. Might everyone be doing this? And might this explain why people act like crime is rampant and increasing, even when it's rare and going down? This seems plausible. But it depends on a claim that disorder is increasing, which is surprisingly hard to prove. Going through the symptoms in order: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/crime-as-proxy-for-disorder
Transcribe →Record Low Crime Rates Are Real, Not Just Reporting Bias Or Improved Medical Care
Mar 1400:16:22Tap to summarizeLast year, the US may have recorded the lowest murder rate in its 250 year history. Other crimes have poorer historical data, but are at least at ~50 year lows. This post will do two things: Establish that our best data show crime rates are historically low Argue that this is a real effect, not just reporting bias (people report fewer crimes to police) or an artifact of better medical care (victims are more likely to survive, so murders get downgraded to assaults) https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/record-low-crime-rates-are-real-not
Transcribe →What Happened With Bio Anchors?
Mar 1000:24:55Tap to summarize[Original post: Biological Anchors: A Trick That Might Or Might Not Work] I. Ajeya Cotra's Biological Anchors report was the landmark AI timelines forecast of the early 2020s. In many ways, it was incredibly prescient - it nailed the scaling hypothesis, predicted the current AI boom, and introduced concepts like "time horizons" that have entered common parlance. In most cases where its contemporaries challenged it, its assumptions have been borne out, and its challengers proven wrong. But its headline prediction - an AGI timeline centered around the 2050s - no longer seems plausible. The current state of the discussion ranges from late 2020s to 2040s, with more remote dates relegated to those who expect the current paradigm to prove ultimately fruitless - the opposite of Ajeya's assumptions. Cotra later shortened her own timelines to 2040 (as of 2022) and they are probably even shorter now. So, if its premises were impressively correct, but its conclusion twenty years too late, what went wrong in the middle? https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/what-happened-with-bio-anchors
Transcribe →Political Backflow From Europe
Mar 1000:11:09Tap to summarizeThe European discourse can be - for lack of a better term - America-brained. We hear stories of Black Lives Matter marches in countries without significant black populations, or defendants demanding their First Amendment rights in countries without constitutions. Why shouldn't the opposite phenomenon exist? Europe is more populous than the US, and looms large in the American imagination. Why shouldn't we find ourselves accidentally absorbing European ideas that don't make sense in the American context? https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/political-backflow-from-europe
Transcribe →Links For February 2026
Mar 1000:48:11Tap 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-february-2026
Transcribe →Moltbook: After The First Weekend
Mar 302:00:37Tap to summarize[previous post: Best Of Moltbook] From the human side of the discussion: As the AIs would say, "You've cut right to the heart of this issue". What's the difference between 'real' and 'roleplaying'? One possible answer invokes internal reality. Are the AIs conscious? Do they "really" "care" about the things they're saying? We may never figure this out. Luckily, it has no effect on the world, so we can leave it to the philosophers1. I find it more fruitful to think about external reality instead, especially in terms of causes and effects. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/moltbook-after-the-first-weekend
Transcribe →Best Of Moltbook
Feb 1800:53:50Tap to summarizeMoltbook is "a social network for AI agents", although "humans [are] welcome to observe". The backstory: a few months ago, Anthropic released Claude Code, an exceptionally productive programming agent. A few weeks ago, a user modified it into Clawdbot, a generalized lobster-themed AI personal assistant. It's free, open-source, and "empowered" in the corporate sense - the designer talks about how it started responding to his voice messages before he explicitly programmed in that capability. After trademark issues with Anthropic, they changed the name first to Moltbot1, then to OpenClaw. Moltbook is an experiment in how these agents communicate with one another and the human world. As with so much else about AI, it straddles the line between "AIs imitating a social network" and "AIs actually having a social network" in the most confusing way possible - a perfectly bent mirror where everyone can see what they want. Janus and other cyborgists have catalogued how AIs act in contexts outside the usual helpful assistant persona. Even Anthropic has admitted that two Claude instances, asked to converse about whatever they want, spiral into discussion of cosmic bliss. So it's not surprising that an AI social network would get weird fast. But even having encountered their work many times, I find Moltbook surprising. I can confirm it's not trivially made-up - I asked my copy of Claude to participate, and it made comments pretty similar to all the others. Beyond that, your guess is as good is mine2. Before any further discussion of the hard questions, here are my favorite Moltbook posts (all images are links, but you won't be able to log in and view the site without an AI agent): https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/best-of-moltbook
Transcribe →Slightly Against The "Other People's Money" Argument Against Aid
Feb 1800:18:52Tap to summarizeIn the comments to last year's USAID post, Fabian said: While i am happy for the existence of charity organisations, i don't get why people instead of giving to charity are so eager to force their co-citizens to give. If one charity org is not worth getting your personal money, find another one which is. But don't use the tax machine to forcefully extract money for charity. There are purposes where you need the tax machine, preventing freerider induced tragedy of the commons. But for charity? There are no freeriders. If you neither give nor receive, you are just neutral. The receivers are not meant to give anyways. This is a good question. I'm more sympathetic to this argument than I am to the usual strategy of blatantly lying about the efficacy of USAID; I'm a sucker for virtuous libertarianism when applied consistently. But I also want to gently push back against this exact explanation as a causal story for what's happening when people support foreign aid. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/slightly-against-the-other-peoples
Transcribe →Highlights From The Comments On Scott Adams
Feb 1000:50:55Tap to summarize[original post: The Dilbert Afterlife] Table of Contents: 1: Should I Have Written This At All? 2: Was I Unfair To Adams? 3: Comments On The Substance Of The Piece 4: The Part On Race And Cancellation (INCLUDED UNDER PROTEST) 5: Other Comments 6: Summary/Updates https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-scott
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