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Astral Codex Ten Podcast: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Jeremiah
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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- 3 days ago47 min
The Types Of Candidate You Find In The California Gubernatorial Race
Sorry, I give up. In past elections, I've covered every single candidate for governor of California, from the incumbents all the way down to the cranks. In 2022 there were twenty-six of them, and I covered them all. But sorry, I give up. This year there are sixty. It's too many. I can't disambiguate them all into unique individuals with their own personalities, hopes, and dreams. So as consolation for the list I'm not giving you, here are the basic types, and a few examples of each. The Top-Tier Democrats One of these people will definitely win, but what else is there to say about them? They're all the same. They've all paid the danegeld to some set of unions and interest groups, then put up some kind of incredibly generic platform about how they're compassionate but also a fighter. I can't bring myself to name any of them or discuss them further. The Top-Tier Republicans More or less the same as the top-tier Democrats, minus the chance of winning. They all have cowboy hats and flag pins. They all pose on horseback at their ranch. They all promise to Take Back California for the forces of America and its god, Donald J. Trump. None of these people are actually interesting, but honorable mention to Sheriff Chad Bianco, whose name is Italian for "white Chad". He might be the perfect Republican candidate: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-types-of-candidate-you-find-in
- 3 days ago10 min
The Sigmoids Won't Save You
"All exponentials eventually become sigmoids" is an annoying AI talking point. If someone presents a graph like this… ….and points out that it seems like AI capabilities could soon reach the level marked "High", then the height of intelligent debate is to point out that actually, the trend could go like this: …and then it would never reach the level marked "High"! In slogan form, this is "all exponentials eventually become sigmoids" (a sigmoid is the s-shape of the second graph, which starts exponential but gradually flattens out). It's technically true. No process can keep growing forever; eventually it hits physical or practical limits. For example, total cases during an epidemic is classically sigmoid:
- 3 days ago15 min
Nostalgebraist's Hydrogen Jukeboxes
In conclusion, the only good theory of taste is Nostalgebraist's. He wrote a post called Hydrogen Jukeboxes, analyzing the literary output of an AI called R1. This AI tried hard to write good fiction, which was part of the problem. It crammed its stories with what Nostalgebraist called (stealing a term from Ginsberg) the "eyeball kick" - a flashy stylistic move that immediately catches the reader's attention and "wows" them. Here are examples - some from R1, others from an experimental OpenAI model trained specifically for fiction-writing: "There is a prompt like a spell: write a story about AI and grief, and the rest of this is scaffolding—protagonists cut from whole cloth, emotions dyed and draped over sentences." "When the jar of Sam's laughter shattered, Eli found the sound pooled on the floorboards like liquid amber, thick and slow. It had been their best summer, that laughter—ripe with fireflies and porch wine—now seeping into the cracks, fermenting." "And so I built a Mila and a Kai and a field of marigolds that never existed. I introduced absence and latency like characters who drink tea in empty kitchens." "The morning her shadow began unspooling from her feet, Clara found it coiled beneath the kitchen table like a serpent made of smoke." Nostalgebraist and another writer, Coagulopath, catalogue some of the most common AI eyeball kicks, each occurring across multiple LLM models: "An overwhelming reliance on cliche. Everything is a shadow, an echo, a whisper, a void, a heartbeat, a pulse, a river, a flower—you see it spinning its Rolodex of 20-30 generic images and selecting one at random." "Conjunctions combining one thing that is abstract and/or incorporeal with another thing that is concrete and/or sensory." "Repetitive writing. Once you've seen about ten R1 samples you can recognize its style on sight. The way it italicises the last word of a sentence. Its endless "not thing x, but thing y" parallelisms…the way how, if you don't like a story, it's almost pointless reprompting it: you just get the same stuff again, smeared around your plate a bit." https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/nostalgebraists-hydrogen-jukeboxes
- 3 days ago14 min
Three Model Organisms For Taste
(a continuation of yesterday's post) Reddit Vexillology Vexillology is the c. elegans of aesthetics - the simplest model organism that lets us observe dynamics of interest. I haven't read enough MFA books to do more than relay the thoughts of my betters, and you probably haven't either. But anyone can have opinions on flags. If you're like me, you learned the following code of good flags: They should be so simple that a child could draw them. No images, no "busy" areas, and - for God's sake - no text The rule of tincture: "never put metal on metal, or color on color". In medieval heraldry, "metals" were yellow and white (sometimes implemented with literal gold and silver) and "colors" were every other color (except black, which is a "fur" and has its own rules). A good flag shouldn't have a metal touch another metal, or a color touch another color. So the French tricolor (blue then white then red) is okay, but a hypothetical (blue then red then white) tricolor wouldn't be okay, because blue would be touching red, which would be "color on color". Every so often, a US state will decide that its flag is politically incorrect and sponsor a contest to design a new one. Then online vexillologists will go over the entries, savaging any that violate the code. "Look how busy this one is! It has four different colors!" "Oh god, this one literally included text! Can you believe it!" They'll moan and scowl and ask why everyone can't be more like Indonesia. Good old Indonesia, they know how to follow the rules: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/three-model-organisms-for-taste
- 3 weeks ago31 min
Contra Everyone On Taste
Last 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 wil
- 3 weeks ago10 min
What Deontological Bars?
Constraint 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
- 3 weeks ago8 min
Your Attempt To Solve Debate Will Not Work
As 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
- May 8, 202646 min
Links For April 2026
[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
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