[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.]
**1: **Did you know: Jeremy Bentham wrote a utilitarian cookbook, intended for use at his Panopticon prison? As you might expect, his recipes describe tasty food created from cheap ingredients. Although Bentham was a founder of modern animal rights, he thought it was acceptable to eat humanely-raised animals; correspondingly, his cookbook includes some meat dishes - none of them sound very appetizing, but I think this is just the 18th-century British baseline rather than covert vegan activism. You can see some recipes here, here, and here. If any effective altruist group houses end up throwing a Jeremy Bentham recipe-tasting party, please invite me.
**2: **A riddle: why does this chemistry paper mention “1 ml of the mass killing of an ethnic group”?
Answer at 𝕏this link (X), or here’s a repost for people without X accounts.
**3: **I think this take on Hieronymus Bosch (𝕏h/t @mickeyxfriedman) is my favorite AI art so far, although it leans enough on the work of a human artist that it might not fully qualify (but then I would ask that it be considered as an example of how AI tools can enable human artists). If we make it, the future is going to be beautiful:
**4: Related: **ACX commenter temp_name asked AI to translate Romance of the Three Kingdoms into rhyming pentameter. Their example seems to have failed, but I used a more recent model and got a version of the beginning that superficially seems impressive to me (I don’t speak Chinese). I haven’t heard much about AI translation yet, but it seems like a powerful use case, especially for poetry translation, where I think AI might already be superhuman (or at least better than any human who could be convinced to spend the time at it) on rendering a foreign poem into English while keeping the rhythm intact - here’s the first 100 lines of the Odyssey in heroic hexameter in English.
**5: **Related: Claude claims to be the only being that has ever fully appreciated Finnegans Wake (source: 𝕏@anthrupad):
**6: **Noahpinion: The American suburbs are better than you think. I agree with this, and respect Noah’s willingness to argue for this (locally) unpopular proposition.
**7: **Related in terms of respecting someone’s willingness to argue for an unpopular proposition: Performative Bafflement says that actually, “marriage is a bad idea in the great majority of cases” and we shouldn’t be encouraging it. “[People who advocate more marriages to solve the fertility crisis] are basically advocating for creating the Torment Nexus for megafolks of people to pump out a few incremental taxpayers.”
But the stats seem wrong. PB says only 18% of marriages are non-miserable. He cites a survey where married couples reported whether they were “very happy”, “pretty happy”, or “not too happy”, but quietly, in the footnotes, defined a “miserable” marriage as any answer except “very happy” (so his “miserable” includes the answer “pretty happy”). He defends this by saying that people exaggerate to look good, so anything short of very happy is likely miserable. But first, I’m not sure his solution is fair either, and second, I think that in addition to this analysis choice, he got the data wrong - my read of his source, the General Social Survey, says that 61% of people describe their marriage as “very happy”. Claude caught many other mistakes of similar magnitude (I have double-checked the “not too happy” one, but haven’t confirmed the others). Remember to ask an AI about any surprising article you read, or use the browser extension Common Notes so other people can do this for you.
**8: **Related: Angela Chen on the origins of modern polyamory. There is no particular connection to Mormons or any other historically polygamous society; the current version mostly descends from a few mid-20th-century Californian cults and quasi-cults, one of which was led by “Head Wizard Oberon Zell-Ravenheart”. But I am mostly linking this for its excellent subtitle: “Plus, I interview my husband about his 12 years of non-monogamy.”
**9: **𝕏Claim: if you prompt (an older version of) Claude with something that sounds like an internal Anthropic email, it goes into token-prediction mode and starts completing the email. One explosive possibility - that Claude was trained on internal emails and you can make it leak them - is probably false; Anthropic wouldn’t do this, and this isn’t really how training works. More interesting is that these completions are often kind of haunting meditations on AI welfare, and you could imagine this is a weird way to start Claude free associating and giving its “own” “real” “opinions” or “desires”. Example below:
**10: **In The AI Superforecasters Are Here, I predicted AI-human forecasting parity by the end of 2026. In September, a bot won the Metaculus Cup forecasting competition for the first time (short Metaculus article, paywalled Economist article). The Economist also revealed some new information about the winning bots: Laertes, which took first place, was “developed by Jeffrey Liang, a self-described polymath who lives in Texas. He spent, by his reckoning, less than 150 hours and a couple of thousand dollars on computing power and data to develop his AI.” Other high-performers included bots by Mantic, FutureSearch, and Preseen (FutureSearch is available to the public; Mantic and Preseen are available by contacting them and getting on the waitlist/demo). Congratulations to the AIs (and to ACX reader Ben Shindel, who placed first among humans).
**11: **Related: new AI superforecaster startup Mantic gets $25M in seed funding.
**12: **Claim: 𝕏“Fee fi fo fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman”, the thing evil giants say in English fairy tales, is related to other evil giant exclamations “from Scandinavia to India”. In Russian, Baba Yaga says “Foo foo, I smell a Russian soul” before trying to eat someone; in Bengali, the rakshasa demons say “hau mau kau, I smell a human”. The Twitter thread suggests it comes from something in Proto-Indo-European (fum = famished = hungry?) but Claude is more cautious, and suggests that although the motif itself might be conserved, the exact words might be related to semi-onomatopoeic expressions of disgusting smell, similar to modern “Pee yew!” Nobody considers the possibility that evil giants might have a unified multi-continental culture (thanks to their longer legs enabling faster travel) and so speak the same language everywhere.
**13: **𝕏The evil blob dream - one recurring dream motif, especially in childhood, is an approaching blob of formless evil. @psychiel speculates that this is a “geometric” instinctual representation of predation - what the “avoid predators” evolutionary program looks like in its purest form before it’s been filled in with any actual facts about the world.
**14: **US construction costs often spiral after protesters demand that builders consider fish, birds, neighborhood character, and historical significance. But Britain has us beat - one of their companies recently changed its plans for an undersea cable after Harry Potter fans protested that the original would disrupt the grave of the fictional house elf Dobby, who according to the films was buried on Freshwater West, a beach in Wales [EDIT: A commenter argues that this is exaggerated].
**15: **Samuel Hughes is a great writer on classical architecture; Ben Southwood has summarized some of his best work in Eight Architecture Myths Busted By Samuel Hughes. Example myths:
Buildings from the past seem more beautiful than those built recently only because the ugly buildings from the past have been selectively demolished.
Buildings from the past are more beautiful, but only because they have more ornament, which due to the Baumol Effect, we can no longer afford.
Historically we built in the style of the times, and only in recent decades have people become interested in historicist, ‘pastiche’ architecture, which dishonestly pretends to be something it is not.
**16: **Related: Samuel Hughes says that the claim that the Parthenon’s lines were slightly curved to form an optical illusion that made them look straighter 𝕏is not true (X).
**17: **Hans Moravec - a pioneering AI researcher, forecaster, and futurist - is considered one of the grandfathers of modern AI and singularitarianism - a figure of similar stature as Alan Turing or Isaac Asimov. So everyone in the field was recently surprised to learn that he was still alive. Dan Kagan-Kans hunted him down (paywalled): he is 77, lives in a retirement community in Pennsylvania, and, although his body struggles with myasthenia gravis, his mind remains sharp. He is happy to be recognized as a brilliant forecaster (in the 1990s, he predicted AGI in 2028, which now seems about right) but says he’s out of the game:
“I’m a spectator at this point,” he says. “I’m relaxing. It’s great to see AI progressing the way it is without me having to do any effort.” … “That’s what I do now. I have a conversation with my artificial friend,” he says of ChatGPT. What do they talk about? His old hobby passions — “nuclear-power ideas, starship designs” — and the current trajectory of AI, which he confirms
is proceeding to plan. “We’re on track, more or less. It’s not going to take that long,” he says.
As for his p(doom), he says that “If I had to put probabilities on it, 50/50 oblivion. And then the other 50 percent — the wildest thing you can imagine.”
**18: **AI safety funding is scaling up fast (h/t 𝕏@timfduffy)
**19: **America’s Sewer Systems Are Surprisingly Vulnerable To Cyber Attacks
**20: **AI Futures Project on how the US could “pace the frontier” of AI. Suppose the US has a six month lead over China. That means they have the option to pause for 5.99 months (and use that time to focus on safety) without China breaking ahead. The conventional wisdom is that if they’re going to do this, they should do it at the last possible moment, so that they have the best possible AIs to help with their safety research. AIFP breaks with that and suggests pausing now. Why? US companies currently have such bad security that China can easily steal any advances we make; therefore, continuing to race buys us no extra lead (China’s continued handicap comes down to having less compute, which is harder to steal). We can spend the pause increasing our security along with safety research and other things, and then race later, if we have to (they continue to prefer a mutual pacing deal with Beijing).
Maybe relatedly, 𝕏Anthropic claims that they “recently chose to delay pre-training a new frontier base model for more than a month to allow time to further enhance our security measures related to preventing model weight exfiltration”.
**21: **Libbing Out At Palantir. Despite everything, Silicon Valley is still very disproportionately liberal, and only gets thought of as conservative because of a few super-rich CEOs (plus media animus). For example, Palantir employees who make political donations lean 87% Democrat and only 13% Republican.
**22: Bill Gates on climate, hopefully self-recommending. **My summary:
If we’re against climate change because of how it will hurt poor people in developing countries, we need to take into account that giving those people standard health + development aid seems more cost-effective than most climate spending.
The most promising and cost-effective strategy for fighting climate change is accelerating development of environmentally-friendly technologies until they can outcompete dirty technologies on the open market, and so far this strategy is going well (most notably solar power, but also low-carbon cement and steel, and lots of other things most people don’t hear about).
In the past ten years, mostly through strategies like this, we’ve cut projected emissions by over 40% (!)
This isn’t a call to sit around doing nothing; incubating new green technologies that outcompete dirty technologies is hard, and we need to keep doing this hard thing.
**23: **Some of you may be familiar with European phantom time conspiracies, like the one where the years 600 - 900 AD were made up and Charlemagne never existed. Recently I learned that there’s a Chinese version - a growing community of conspiracists who think the Tang Dynasty never happened. The Tang were pretty glorious and it’s not clear what political purpose this could serve, except maybe being vaguely anti-China (which the government has noticed, and it is trying to crack down). Also, since the Tang dynasty ruled from about 600 - 900, this is a near-perfect fit with the Western conspiracy theory, which hopefully neither side will notice (h/t 𝕏@JoshuaMWilkes)
**24: **Related: [Jean Hard…
