Astral Codex Ten Podcast
1) SSC Survey Results: ADHD and Rejection Sensitivity
Introduction ADHD is typically considered a disorder of attention and focus. There are various other traits everyone knows are linked – officially, hyperactivity and “behavior problems”; unofficially,...Show More
2) The Good News Is That One Side Has Definitively Won The Missing Heritability Debate
…the bad news is that they can't agree which one. I explained the debate more here, but the short version is: twin studies find that most traits are at least 50% genetic, sometimes much more. But mol...Show More
3) Why AI Safety Won't Make America Lose The Race With China
If we worry too much about AI safety, will this make us "lose the race with China"1? (here "AI safety" means long-term concerns about alignment and hostile superintelligence, as opposed to "AI ethics"...Show More
4) The New AI Consciousness Paper
Most discourse on AI is low-quality. Most discourse on consciousness is super-abysmal-double-low quality. Multiply these - or maybe raise one to the exponent of the other, or something - and you get t...Show More
5) Suggest Questions For Metaculus/ACX Forecasting Contest
ACX has been co-running a forecasting contest with Metaculus for the past few years. Lately the "co-running" has drifted towards them doing all the work and giving me credit, but that's how I like it!...Show More
6) What Happened To SF Homelessness?
Last year, I wrote that it would be very hard to decrease the number of mentally ill homeless people in San Francisco. Commenters argued that no, it would be easy, just build more jails and mental ho...Show More
7) In What Sense Is Life Suffering?
"Life is suffering" may be a Noble Truth, but it feels like a deepity. Yes, obviously life includes suffering. But it also includes happiness. Many people live good and happy lives, and even people w...Show More
8) The Bloomer's Paradox
In Jason Pargin's I'm Starting To Worry About This Black Box Of Doom, a manic pixie dream girl cajoles a shut-in incel loser to drive her and her mysterious box cross-country. The further they drive,...Show More
9) Writing For The AIs
American Scholar has an article about people who "write for AI", including Tyler Cowen and Gwern. It's good that this is getting more attention, because in theory it seems like one of the most influe...Show More
10) Links For October 2025
[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...Show More