Why Should Intelligence Be Related To Neuron Count?

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

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תוכן מסופק על ידי Jeremiah Prophet. כל תוכן הפודקאסטים כולל פרקים, גרפיקה ותיאורי פודקאסטים מועלים ומסופקים ישירות על ידי Jeremiah Prophet או שותף פלטפורמת הפודקאסט שלהם. אם אתה מאמין שמישהו משתמש ביצירה שלך המוגנת בזכויות יוצרים ללא רשותך, אתה יכול לעקוב אחר התהליך המתואר כאן https://he.player.fm/legal.

We Have The Receipts

1
Battle Camp: Final 5 Episodes with Dana Moon + Interview with the Winner! 1:03:29

לפני 3 ימים1:03:29

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1:03:29

Finally, we find out who is unbeatable, unhateable, and unbreakable in the final five episodes of Battle Camp Season One. Host Chris Burns is joined by the multi-talented comedian Dana Moon to relive the cockroach mac & cheese, Trey’s drag debut, and the final wheel spin. The Season One Winner joins Chris to debrief on strategy and dish on game play. Leave us a voice message at www.speakpipe.com/WeHaveTheReceipts Text us at (929) 487-3621 DM Chris @FatCarrieBradshaw on Instagram Follow We Have The Receipts wherever you listen, so you never miss an episode. Listen to more from Netflix Podcasts.…

לפני שנה 9:18

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Intelligence seems to correlate with total number of neurons in the brain.

Different animals’ intelligence levels track the number of neurons in their cerebral cortices (cerebellum etc don’t count). Neuron number predicts animal intelligence better than most other variables like brain size, brain size divided by body size, “encephalization quotient”, etc. This is most obvious in certain bird species that have tiny brains full of tiny neurons and are very smart (eg crows, parrots).

Humans with bigger brains have on average higher IQ. AFAIK nobody has done the obvious next step and seen whether people with higher IQ have more neurons. This could be because the neuron-counting process involves dissolving the brain into a “soup”, and maybe this is too mad-science-y for the fun-hating spoilsports who run IRBs. But common sense suggests bigger brains increase IQ because they have more neurons in humans too.

Finally, AIs with more neurons (sometimes described as the related quantity “more parameters”) seem common-sensically smarter and perform better on benchmarks. This is part of what people mean by “scaling”, ie the reason GoogBookZon is spending $500 billion building a data center the size of the moon.

All of this suggests that intelligence heavily depends on number of neurons, and most scientists think something like this is true.

But how can this be?

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-should-intelligence-be-related

1041 פרקים

#Science #Tech #Jeremiah The Prophet #Book Review

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

Why Should Intelligence Be Related To Neuron Count?

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

39 subscribers

published לפני שנה

שתפו

MP3•בית הפרקים

Intelligence seems to correlate with total number of neurons in the brain.

All of this suggests that intelligence heavily depends on number of neurons, and most scientists think something like this is true.

But how can this be?

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-should-intelligence-be-related

1041 פרקים

#Science #Tech #Jeremiah The Prophet #Book Review

כל הפרקים

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

1
Come On, Obviously The Purpose Of A System Is Not What It Does 8:30

לפני 4 weeks8:30

8:30

(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 for a while, then cave in after slightly larger protests and agree not to pass the policy after all. The purpose of the New York bus system is to emit four billion tons of carbon dioxide. These are obviously false. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpose-of…

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

1
My Takeaways From AI 2027 20:39

לפני 4 weeks20:39

20:39

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 story to research-backed debate contribution. These are my opinions only, and not necessarily endorsed by the rest of the team. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-takeaways-from-ai-2027…

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

1
AI 2027 (Full Recording with Footnotes and Text Boxes) 4:11:40

לפני 4 weeks4:11:40

4:11:40

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 version with footnotes and text boxes removed is available at the above link.)…

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

1
Introducing AI 2027 8:10

לפני 4 weeks8:10

8:10

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 categories of outcome, then beg our listeners to forgive us the inevitable surprises. Daniel knew all this and resigned himself to it. But even he didn’t expect what happened next. He got it all right. Okay, not literally all. The US restricted chip exports to China in late 2022, not mid-2024. AI first beat humans at Diplomacy in late 2022, not 2025. And of course the mid-2025 to 2026 period remains to be seen. But to put its errors in context, Daniel’s document was written two years before ChatGPT existed. Nobody except researchers and a few hobbyists had ever talked to an AI. In fact, talking to AI was a misnomer. There was no way to make them continue the conversation; they would free associate based on your prompt, maybe turning it into a paragraph-length short story. If you pulled out all the stops, you could make an AI add single digit numbers and get the right answer more than 50% of the time. Yet if you read Daniel’s blog post without checking the publication date, you could be forgiven for thinking it was a somewhat garbled but basically reasonable history of the last four years. I wasn’t the only one who noticed. A year later, OpenAI hired Daniel to their policy team. While he worked for them, he was limited in his ability to speculate publicly. “What 2026 Looks Like” promised a sequel about 2027 and beyond, but it never materialized. Unluckily for Sam Altman but luckily for the rest of us, Daniel broke with OpenAI mid-2024 in a dramatic split covered by the New York Times and others. He founded the AI Futures Project to produce the promised sequel, including: Eli Lifland, a superforecaster who is ranked first on RAND’s Forecasting initiative. You can read more about him and his forecasting team here . He cofounded and advises AI Digest and co-created TextAttack , an adversarial attack framework for language models. Jonas Vollmer, a VC at Macroscopic Ventures, which has done its own, more practical form of successful AI forecasting: they made an early stage investment in Anthropic, now worth $60 billion. Thomas Larsen, the former executive director of the Center for AI Policy, a group which advises policymakers on both sides of the aisle. Romeo Dean, a leader of Harvard’s AI Safety Student Team and budding expert in AI hardware. …and me! Since October, I’ve been volunteering part-time, doing some writing and publicity work. I can’t take credit for the forecast itself - or even for the lion’s share of the writing and publicity - but it’s been an immense privilege to work alongside some of the smartest and most epistemically virtuous people I know, trying to absorb their worldview on a level deep enough to do it justice. We have no illusions that we’ll get as lucky as last time, but we still think it’s a valuable contribution to the discussion. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/introducing-ai-2027 https://ai-2027.com/…

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

1
The Colors Of Her Coat 23:04

לפני 4 weeks23:04

23:04

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 famously used literal gold, hammered into ultrathin sheets, to make golden highlights. Blue was another tough one. You could do mediocre, half-faded blues with azurite. But if you wanted perfect blue, the color of the heavens on a clear evening, you needed ultramarine. Here is the process for getting ultramarine. First, go to Afghanistan. Keep in mind, you start in England or France or wherever. Afghanistan is four thousand miles away. Your path takes you through tall mountains, burning deserts, and several dozen Muslim countries that are still pissed about the whole Crusades thing. Still alive? After you arrive, climb 7,000 feet in the mountains of Kuran Wa Munjan until you reach the mines of Sar-i-Sang. There, in a freezing desert, the wretched of the earth work themselves to an early grave breaking apart the rocks of Badakhshan to produce a few hundred kilograms per year of blue stone - the only lapis lazuli production in the known world. Buy the stone and retrace your path through the burning deserts and vengeful Muslims until you’re back in England or France or wherever. Still alive? That was the easy part. Now you need to go through a chemical extraction process that makes the Philosopher's Stone look like freshman chem lab. "The lengthy process of pulverization, sifting, and washing to produce ultramarine makes the natural pigment … roughly ten times more expensive than the stone it came from." Finally you have ultramarine! How much? I can’t find good numbers, but Claude estimates that the ultramarine production of all of medieval Europe was around the order of 30 kg per year - not enough to paint a medium-sized wall. Ultramarine had to be saved for ultra-high-value applications. In practice, the medievals converged on a single use case - painting the Virgin Mary’s coat. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-colors-of-her-coat…

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

1
"Deros And The Ur-Abduction" In Asterisk 34:39

לפני 6 weeks34:39

34:39

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 place, where all of these novel mythemes about aliens, psychics, and lost civilizations were hitting a naive population certain that there must be something beyond the world they knew. This made them easy prey not just for grifters like Hubbard, but also for random schizophrenics who could write about their hallucinations convincingly. …but I didn’t think of that framing in time, so instead you get several sections of why it’s evil cave dwarves in particular, and why that theme seems to recur throughout all lands and ages: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/deros-and-the-ur-abduction-in-asterisk https://asteriskmag.com/issues/09/deros-and-the-ur-abduction…

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

1
More Drowning Children 21:22

לפני 7 weeks21:22

21:22

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. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/more-drowning-children…

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

1
Misophonia: Beyond Sensory Sensitivity 12:03

לפני 7 weeks12:03

12:03

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 hypersensitivity, right? Maybe not. There’s increasing evidence - which I learned about from Jake, but which didn’t make it into the article - that misophonia is less about sound than it seems. Misophoniacs who go deaf report that it doesn’t go away . Now they get triggered if they see someone chewing. It’s the same with other noises. Someone who gets triggered by the sound of forks scraping against a table will eventually get triggered by the sight of the scraping fork. Someone triggered by music will eventually get triggered by someone playing a music video on mute. Maybe this isn’t surprising? https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/misophonia-beyond-sensory-sensitivity…

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

1
OpenAI Nonprofit Buyout: Much More Than You Wanted To Know 25:13

לפני 8 weeks25:13

25:13

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 amount of compute (and therefore money) it would take to build AI. DeepMind was the first victim; originally founded on high ideals of prioritizing safety and responsible stewardship of the Singularity, it hit a financial barrier and sold to Google. This scared Elon Musk, who didn’t trust Google (or any corporate sponsor) with AGI. He teamed up with Sam Altman and others, and OpenAI was born. To avoid duplicating DeepMind’s failure, they founded it as a nonprofit with a mission to “build safe and beneficial artificial general intelligence for the benefit of humanity”. But like DeepMind, OpenAI needed money. At first, they scraped by with personal donations from Musk and other idealists, but as the full impact of scaling laws became clearer, Altman wanted to form a forprofit arm and seek investment. Musk and Altman disagree on what happened next: Musk said he objected to the profit focus, Altman says Musk agreed but wanted to be in charge. In any case, Musk left, Altman took full control, and OpenAI founded a forprofit subsidiary. This subsidary was supposedly a “capped forprofit”, meaning that their investors were capped at 100x return - if someone invested $1 million, they could get a max of $100 million back, no matter how big OpenAI became - this ensured that the majority of gains from a Singularity would go to humanity rather than investors. But a capped forprofit isn’t a real kind of corporate structure; in real life OpenAI handles this through Profit Participation Units, a sort of weird stock/bond hybrid which does what OpenAI claims the capped forprofit model is doing. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/openai-nonprofit-buyout-much-more…

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

1
The Ozempocalypse Is Nigh 10:06

לפני 8 weeks10:06

10:06

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 $1000/month and are rarely covered by insurance, putting them out of reach for most Americans. …if you buy them from the pharma companies, like a chump. For the past three years, there’s been a shortage of these drugs. FDA regulations say that during a shortage, it’s semi-legal for compounding pharmacies to provide medications without getting the patent-holders’ permission. In practice, that means they get cheap peptides from China, do some minimal safety testing in house, and sell them online. So for the past three years, telehealth startups working with compounding pharmacies have sold these drugs for about $200/month. Over two million Americans have made use of this loophole to get weight loss drugs for cheap. But there was always a looming question - what happens when the shortage ends? Many people have to stay on GLP-1 drugs permanently, or else they risk regaining their lost weight. But many can’t afford $1000/month. What happens to them? Now we’ll find out. At the end of last year, the FDA declared the shortage over. The compounding pharmacies appealed the decision, but last month the FDA confirmed its decision was final. As of March 19 (for tirzepatide) and April 22 (for semaglutide), compounding pharmacies will no longer be able to sell cheap GLP-1 drugs. Let’s take a second to think of the real victims here: telehealth company stockholders. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-ozempocalypse-is-nigh…

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

1
What Happened To NAEP Scores? 9:31

לפני 8 weeks9:31

9:31

Most headlines have said something like New NAEP Scores Dash Hope Of Post-COVID Learning Recovery , which seems like a fair assessment. I feel bad about this, because during lockdowns I argued that kids’ educational outcomes don’t suffer long-term from missing a year or two of school . Re-reading the post, I still think my arguments make sense. So how did I get it so wrong? When I consider this question, I ask myself: do I expect complete recovery in two years? In 2026, we will see a class of fourth graders who hadn’t even started school when the lockdowns ended. They will have attended kindergarten through 4th grade entirely in person, with no opportunity for “learning loss”. If there’s a sudden switch to them doing just as well as the 2015 kids, then it was all lockdown-induced learning loss and I suck. But if not, then what? Maybe the downward trend isn’t related to COVID? On the graph above, the national (not California) trend started in the 2017 - 2019 period, ie before COVID. And the states that tried hardest to keep their schools open did little better than anyone else: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/what-happened-to-naep-scores…

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

1
Why Should Intelligence Be Related To Neuron Count? 9:18

לפני 9 weeks9:18

9:18

Intelligence seems to correlate with total number of neurons in the brain. Different animals’ intelligence levels track the number of neurons in their cerebral cortices (cerebellum etc don’t count). Neuron number predicts animal intelligence better than most other variables like brain size, brain size divided by body size, “ encephalization quotient ”, etc. This is most obvious in certain bird species that have tiny brains full of tiny neurons and are very smart (eg crows, parrots). Humans with bigger brains have on average higher IQ . AFAIK nobody has done the obvious next step and seen whether people with higher IQ have more neurons. This could be because the neuron-counting process involves dissolving the brain into a “soup” , and maybe this is too mad-science-y for the fun-hating spoilsports who run IRBs. But common sense suggests bigger brains increase IQ because they have more neurons in humans too. Finally, AIs with more neurons (sometimes described as the related quantity “more parameters”) seem common-sensically smarter and perform better on benchmarks. This is part of what people mean by “scaling”, ie the reason GoogBookZon is spending $500 billion building a data center the size of the moon. All of this suggests that intelligence heavily depends on number of neurons, and most scientists think something like this is true. But how can this be? https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-should-intelligence-be-related…

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

1
Everything-Except-Book Review Contest 2025 3:41

לפני 9 weeks3:41

3:41

I enjoy the yearly book review contest, but it feels like last year’s contest is barely done, and I want to give you a break so you can read more books before we start over. So this year, let’s do something different. Submit an ACX-length post reviewing something, anything, except a book. You can review a movie, song, or video game. You can review a product, restaurant, or tourist attraction. But don’t let the usual categories limit you. Review comic books or blog posts. Review political parties - no, whole societies! Review animals or trees! Review an oddly-shaped pebble, or a passing cloud! Review abstract concepts! Mathematical proofs! Review love, death, or God Himself! (please don’t review human races, I don’t need any more NYT articles) Otherwise, the usual rules apply. 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 year’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 thing you’re reviewing, 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. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/everything-except-book-review-contest…

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

1
Links For February 2025 42:12

לפני 9 weeks42:12

42:12

[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-2025…

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

1
Why I Am Not A Conflict Theorist 26:28

לפני 10 weeks26:28

26:28

Conflict theory is the belief that political disagreements come from material conflict. So for example, if rich people support capitalism, and poor people support socialism, this isn’t because one side doesn’t understand economics. It’s because rich people correctly believe capitalism is good for the rich, and poor people correctly believe socialism is good for the poor. Or if white people are racist, it’s not because they have some kind of mistaken stereotypes that need to be corrected - it’s because they correctly believe racism is good for white people. Some people comment on my more political posts claiming that they’re useless. You can’t (they say) produce change by teaching people Economics 101 or the equivalent. Conflict theorists understand that nobody ever disagreed about Economics 101. Instead you should try to organize and galvanize your side, so they can win the conflict. I think simple versions of conflict theory are clearly wrong. This doesn’t mean that simple versions of mistake theory (the idea that people disagree because of reasoning errors, like not understanding Economics 101) are automatically right. But it gives some leeway for thinking harder about how reasoning errors and other kinds of error interact. https://readscottalexander.com/posts/acx-why-i-am-not-a-conflict-theorist…

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

1
Highlights From The Comments On Tegmark's Mathematical Universe 36:11

לפני 10 weeks36:11

36:11

[Original thread here: Tegmark’s Mathematical Universe Defeats Most Arguments For God’s Existence. ] 1: Comments On Specific Technical Points 2: Comments From Bentham’s Bulldog’s Response 3: Comments On Philosophical Points, And Getting In Fights https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-tegmarks…

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

1
Lives Of The Rationalist Saints 8:05

לפני 10 weeks8:05

8:05

St. Felix publicly declared that he believed with 79% probability that COVID had a natural origin. He was brought before the Emperor, who threatened him with execution unless he updated to 100%. When St. Felix refused, the Emperor was impressed with his integrity, and said he would release him if he merely updated to 90%. St. Felix refused again, and the Emperor, fearing revolt, promised to release him if he merely rounded up one percentage point to 80%. St. Felix cited Tetlock’s research showing that the last digit contained useful information, refused a third time, and was crucified. St. Clare was so upset about believing false things during her dreams that she took modafinil every night rather than sleep. She completed several impressive programming projects before passing away of sleep deprivation after three weeks; she was declared a martyr by Pope Raymond II. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/lives-of-the-rationalist-saints…

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

1
Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Defeats Most Proofs Of God's Existence 8:20

לפני 10 weeks8:20

8:20

It feels like 2010 again - the bloggers are debating the proofs for the existence of God . I found these much less interesting after learning about Max Tegmark’s mathematical universe hypothesis , and this doesn’t seem to have reached the Substack debate yet, so I’ll put it out there. Tegmark’s hypothesis says: all possible mathematical objects exist. Consider a mathematical object like a cellular automaton - a set of simple rules that creates complex behavior. The most famous is Conway’s Game of Life ; the second most famous is the universe. After all, the universe is a starting condition (the Big Bang) and a set of simple rules determining how the starting condition evolves over time (the laws of physics). Some mathematical objects contain conscious observers. Conway’s Life might be like this: it’s Turing complete, so if a computer can be conscious then you can get consciousness in Life. If you built a supercomputer and had it run the version of Life with the conscious being, then you would be “simulating” the being, and bringing it into existence. There would be something it was like to be that being; it would have thoughts and experiences and so on. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/tegmarks-mathematical-universe-defeats…

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

1
Only About 40% Of The Cruz "Woke Science" Database Is Woke Science 18:34

לפני 12 weeks18:34

18:34

From the Commerce Department : U.S. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz (R-Texas) released a database identifying over 3,400 grants, totaling more than $2.05 billion in federal funding awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) during the Biden-Harris administration. This funding was diverted toward questionable projects that promoted Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or advanced neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda. I saw many scientists complain that the projects from their universities that made Cruz’s list were unrelated to wokeness. This seemed like a surprising failure mode, so I decided to investigate. The Commerce Department provided a link to their database, so I downloaded it, chose a random 100 grants, read the abstracts, and rated them either woke, not woke, or borderline. Of the hundred: 40% were woke 20% were borderline 40% weren’t woke This is obviously in some sense a subjective determination, but most cases weren’t close - I think any good-faith examination would turn up similar numbers. https://readscottalexander.com/posts/acx-only-about-40-of-the-cruz-woke-science…

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

1
Deliberative Alignment, And The Spec 17:40

לפני 12 weeks17:40

17:40

In the past day, Zvi has written about deliberative alignment, and OpenAI has updated their spec . This article was written before either of these and doesn’t account for them, sorry. I. OpenAI has bad luck with its alignment teams. The first team quit en masse to found Anthropic, now a major competitor. The second team quit en masse to protest the company reneging on safety commitments. The third died in a tragic plane crash. The fourth got washed away in a flood. The fifth through eighth were all slain by various types of wild beast. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/deliberative-alignment-and-the-spec…

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

1
1DaySooner's Trump II Health Policy Proposals 11:42

לפני 12 weeks11:42

11:42

As RFK Jr. fights to be confirmed in Congress, the rest of Trump’s health team is already taking shape. 1DaySooner is an ACX grantee organization that advocates for innovative health policies. They’ve helped me write a list of who some of these people are, and some of the policies they could consider. For practical reasons, we focus on upside only, so consider these the Venn-diagram-union of the ideas we’re most excited about, and the ones we think they might be most excited about - the new health policy we might get get in our ~90th percentile best outcome. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/1daysooners-trump-ii-health-policy…

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

1
Money Saved By Canceling Programs Does Not Immediately Flow To The Best Possible Alternative 11:47

לפני 13 weeks11:47

11:47

I. PEPFAR - a Bush initiative to send cheap AIDS drugs to Africa - has saved millions of lives and is among the most successful foreign aid programs ever . A Trump decision briefly put it “on pause”, although this seems to have been walked back; its current status is unclear but hopeful. In the debate around this question, many people asked - is it really fair to spend $6 billion a year to help foreigners when so many Americans are suffering? Shouldn’t we value American lives more than foreign ones? Can’t we spend that money on some program that helps people closer to home? This is a fun thing to argue about - which, as usual, means it’s a purely philosophical question unrelated to the real issue. If you cancelled PEPFAR - the single best foreign aid program, which saves millions of foreign lives - the money wouldn’t automatically redirect itself to the single best domestic aid program which saves millions of American lives. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/money-saved-by-canceling-programs…

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

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Model City Monday 2/3/25 16:48

לפני 13 weeks16:48

16:48

Prospera Declared Unconstitutional The Honduras Supreme Court has declared charter cities , including Prospera, unconstitutional. The background: in the mid-2010s, the ruling conservative party wanted charter cities. They had already packed the Supreme Court for other reasons, so they had their captive court declare charter cities to be constitutional. In 2022, the socialists took power from the conservatives and got the chance to fill the Supreme Court with their supporters. In September, this new Supreme Court said whoops, actually charter cities aren’t constitutional at all. They added that this decision applied retroactively, ie even existing charter cities that had been approved under the old government were, ex post facto, illegal. Prospera’s lawyers objected, saying that the court is not allowed to make ex post facto rulings. But arguing that the Supreme Court is misinterpreting the Constitution seems like a losing battle - even if you’re right, who do you appeal to? So the city is pursuing a two-pronged strategy. The first prong is waiting. Prospera is a collection of buildings and people. The buildings can stay standing, the people can still live there - they just have to follow regular Honduran law, rather than the investment-friendly charter they previously used. There’s another election in November , which the socialists are expected to lose. Prospera hopes the conservatives will come in, take control of the Supreme Court again, and then they’ll say whoops, messed it up again, charter cities are constitutional after all. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/model-city-monday-2325…

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

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Why Recurring Dream Themes? 7:45

לפני 13 weeks7:45

7:45

An observant Jewish friend told me she has recurring dreams about being caught unprepared for Shabbat. (Shabbat is the Jewish Sabbath, celebrated every Saturday, when observant Jews are forbidden to work, drive, carry things outdoors, spend money, use electrical devices, etc.) She said that in the dreams, she would be out driving, far from home, and realize that Shabbat was due to begin in a few minutes, with no way to make it home or get a hotel in time. I found this interesting because my recurring dreams are usually things like being caught unprepared for a homework assignment I have due tomorrow, or realizing I have to catch a plane flight but I’m not packed and don’t have a plan to get to the airport. Most people attribute recurring nightmares to “fear”. My friend is “afraid” of violating Shabbat; childhood me was “afraid” of having the assignment due the next day. This seems wrong to me. Childhood me was afraid of monsters in the closet; adult me is afraid of heart attacks, AI, and something happening to my family. But I don’t have nightmares about any of these things, just homework assignments and plane flights. So maybe the “unprepared” aspect is more important. Here’s a story that makes sense to me: what if recurring dreams are related to prospective memory? https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-recurring-dream-themes…

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

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ACX Survey Results 2025 14:25

לפני 13 weeks14:25

14:25

Thanks to the 5,975 people who took the 2025 Astral Codex Ten survey. See the questions for the ACX survey See the results from the ACX Survey (click “see previous responses” on that page 1 ) I’ll be publishing more complicated analyses over the course of the next year, hopefully starting later this month. If you want to scoop me, or investigate the data yourself, you can download the answers of the 5500 people who agreed to have their responses shared publicly. Out of concern for anonymity, the public dataset will exclude or bin certain questions 2 . If you want more complete information, email me and explain why, and I’ll probably send it to you. You can download the public data here as an Excel or CSV file: http://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/ACXPublic2025.xlsx http://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/ACXPublic2025.csv Here are some of the answers I found most interesting: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-survey-results-2025…

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

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Everyone's A Based Post-Christian Vitalist Until The Grooming Gangs Show Up 9:59

לפני 13 weeks9:59

9:59

Whenever I talk about charity, a type that I’ll call the “based post-Christian vitalist” shows up in the comments to tell me that I’ve got it all wrong. The moral impulse tells us to help our family, friends, and maybe village. It’s a weird misfire, analogous to an auto-immune disease, to waste brain cycles on starving children in a far-off country who you’ll never meet. You’ve been cucked by centuries of Christian propaganda. Instead of the slave morality that yokes you to loser victims who wouldn’t give you the time of day if your situations were reversed, you should cultivate a master morality that lets you love the strong people who push forward human civilization. A younger and more naive person might think the based post-Christian vitalist and I have some irreconcilable moral difference . Moral argument can only determine which conclusions follow from certain premises. If premises are too different (for example, a intuitive feeling of compassion for others, vs. an intuitive feeling of strength and pitilessness), there’s no way to proceed. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/everyones-a-based-post-christian…

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

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Try The 2025 ACX/Metaculus Forecasting Contest 3:14

לפני 13 weeks3:14

3:14

This is normally when I would announce the winners of the 2024 forecasting contest, but there are some complications and Metaculus has asked me to wait until they get sorted out. But time doesn’t wait, and we have to get started on the new year’s forecasting contest to make sure there’s enough time for events to happen or not. That means the 2025 contest is now open! https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/subscrive-drive-25-free-unlocked…

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

1
Links For January 2025 31:08

לפני 14 weeks31:08

31:08

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

1
Highlights From The Comments On Lynn And IQ 22:41

לפני 14 weeks22:41

22:41

Shaked Koplewitz writes : Doesn't Lynn's IQ measure also suffer from the IQ/g discrepancy that causes the Flynn effect? That is, my understanding of the Flynn effect is that IQ doesn't exactly measure g (the true general intelligence factor) but measures some proxy that is somewhat improved by literacy/education, and for most of the 20th century those were getting better leading to improvements in apparent IQ (but not g). Shouldn't we expect sub Saharan Africans to have lower IQ relative to g (since their education and literacy systems are often terrible)? And then the part about them seeming much smarter than a first worlder with similar IQ makes sense - they'd do equally badly at tests, but in their case it's because e.g. they barely had a chance to learn to read rather than not being smart enough to think of the answer. (Or a slightly more complicated version of this - e.g. maybe they can read fine, but never had an education that encouraged them to consider counterfactuals so those just don't come naturally). Yeah, this is the most important factor that I failed to cover in the post (I edited it in ten minutes later after commenters reminded me, but some of you got the email and didn’t see it). https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-lynn…

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

1
How To Stop Worrying And Learn To Love Lynn's National IQ Estimates 9:36

לפני 14 weeks9:36

9:36

Richard Lynn was a scientist who infamously tried to estimate the average IQ of every country. Typical of his results is this paper , which ranged from 60 (Malawi) to 108 (Singapore). Lynn’s national IQ estimates ( source ) People obviously objected to this, and Lynn spent his life embroiled in controversy, with activists constantly trying to get him canceled/fired and his papers retracted/condemned. His opponents pointed out both his personal racist opinions/activities and his somewhat opportunistic methodology. Nobody does high-quality IQ tests on the entire population of Malawi; to get his numbers, Lynn would often find some IQ-ish test given to some unrepresentative sample of some group related to Malawians and try his best to extrapolate from there. How well this worked remains hotly debated; the latest volley is Aporia’s Are Richard Lynn’s National IQ Estimates Flawed? (they say no). I’ve followed the technical/methodological debate for a while, but I think the strongest emotions here come from two deeper worries people have about the data: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-to-stop-worrying-and-learn-to…

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