Astral Codex Ten

AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI have long mentioned the possibility that their products could be existentially dangerous, but this has recently crescendoed into even more dire warnings, including suggestions that we have to pace the frontier, ie coordinate to slow AI progress. In response, cynical commentators have suggested this is a conspiracy to boost the companies’ stocks. The exact motives imputed vary from person to person.

A technician at a Siberian lab has died of yersinia infection aka plague. The details are fuzzy, but the lab appears to have been working with pneumonic plague, an especially contagious and dangerous form. A few articles quote authorities as saying the risk is small. What about forecasters? Sentinel Global Risks Watch1 are the people best placed to have an opinion on this.

Dear Steven: Earlier this month, frustrated by some of your social media posts, I challenged you to a public debate on AI. I hadn’t realized that debate offers are to New Media what chum is to sharks. My inbox was deluged by podcasters, debating societies, and general influencers, all offering to host. When I objected that maybe we should wait for you to accept before figuring out details, they all said great, that’s absolutely right, they would contact you right away.

This is a guest post by Drew Housman, whose review of Dominion earned finalist status in the 2024 ACX book review contest. If you are unsuccessful for long enough on your pregnancy journey, and none of the many doctors you see can identify a problem, you get branded with a label. You now have “unexplained infertility.” This is good because there’s still hope of fixing the problem but dreaded because once you’ve reached this point the system is less interested in you.

[This is one of the finalists in the 2026 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months.

Hi, this is Lars Doucet, author of the book review of Henry George’s Progress and Poverty that won the first ACX book review contest, as well as the three-part follow-up guest post series, “Does Georgism Work?” A lot has happened since then, including land value tax (LVT) enablement laws passing this year in two U.S. states and the election of LVT-friendly national leaders in the UK and South Korea.

In early July, Cassie Pritchard argued on Twitter that liberalism had failed; it bet the farm on economic progress making people happier, but although it delivered impressive economic progress, happiness had failed to follow. In late July, I countered that Pritchard had made a mistake by comparing happiness to income, when the literature instead supports a correlation of happiness with log(income).

[previously in series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9] Paul Graham once said that every city sends a message. New York says you should make more money. Berkeley says you should live better. Boston says you should be smarter. People shouldn’t decide on a permanent residence until they’ve lived in several cities and understand their differing psychological effects. San Francisco sends a message too.

Superforecasting is the art/science/sport of predicting the future - for example, who will win elections, which countries will fight wars, when key technologies will be discovered. Over the past few years, it went from an obscure academic subfield to a multibillion dollar industry in the form of prediction markets. More recently, AI superforecasters have come close to the accuracy of top humans, and their performance is rising rapidly.

[This is one of the finalists in the 2026 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked] A couple of decades ago in Kabul, a fellow aid worker on his third beer came up with a vivid simile for what American money was doing to the Afghan organizations implementing USAID projects.