Astral Codex Ten Podcast

[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: You Are Quoting Bentham: Shakespeare gets credit for coining the most new commonly-used English words, but second place must go to utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who invented maximize, minimize, international, percentage, monetary, marginalize, collaborator, unaffordable, the prefixes self-, post-, and infra-, and many more. He also sort of invented jogging? [EDIT: some skepticism]
2: @HashtagGriswold: The name of "Acme", the generic corporation from Looney Tunes, is a "gag lost to time". During the early 20th century, hundreds of companies named themselves Acme because it was at the intersection of signaling quality ("acme" is Greek for "pinnacle") and being very early in the alphabet (meaning it would come first in the phone book, a "Great Depression version of SEO").
3: @nekokolife brings us a great predictive coding demo (hard before you know the answer; obvious afterwards) - find the cat in this image. Hint: it's not hiding in shadow; its entire body is fully visible. Answer here (X).
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-july-2026-part-1

Cassie Pritchard, on Twitter:
I get why so many liberals are fundamentally disdainful of democracy these days—it's because liberalism is exhausted. It's out of answers. Liberalism won, it delivered the world it promised, and people still aren't content. They're not satisfied. So the people must be wrong.
We are unfathomably richer than our ancestors. Output per capita in America today is on the order of 900 times greater than before the invention of agriculture, about ~225 times higher than in 1 CE, and about the same (225 times) higher than Europe in 1000 CE. If measurable productivity were really the greatest object of human society, then we shouldn't just be a little bit happier than people in the distant (or even recent!) past—we should be ecstatic. We should already be living in a utopian age of overwhelming contentment. We should be currently experiencing a kind of paradise.
The Kingdom of Heaven, as liberalism conceives of it, has already been made real on Earth. We are living in their Eden, and 20% of people are depressed. We've stopped reproducing ourselves. We're overwhelmingly dissatisfied with our governments, anxious about our economies, and pessimistic about the future.
Based on Pritchard's own politics, I imagine she is using this to argue for socialism, but other people use the same reasoning to push fascism, theocracy, or other postliberal commitments. It's a fair argument and deserves an answer. We'll start with an elegant mathematical response which will satisfy nobody, then try to address the emotional impact.
The elegant mathematical response is: happiness scales with log(income), not with income:
In a large U.S. sample, the shape of the association between happiness and Log(income) was extremely systematic: from $10,000/y to over $500,000/y, average happiness rose almost perfectly linearly with Log(income), with group-level correlations of 0.98-0.99 across a range of happiness measures, including both in-the-moment experience and overall life satisfaction.
So if income increased 225x since the medieval era, then using observed coefficients, happiness should have increased about three points on a 1-10 scale. If the average serf would have rated his condition 3/10, we should be at 6/10.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-pritchard-on-liberal-happiness

Finalist #2 in the Book Review Contest
[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]
I. SURGERY FOR THE SOUL
[content warning: this review is about lobotomies, and includes disturbing descriptions and pictures - SA]
Surgery for the soul required a sharp, eight-inch-long instrument—one time, an ice pick from the Uline Ice Company was used—and not much else. It did not require anesthesia or gloves, and the sharp instrument (either a leucotome or the sturdier orbitoclast) was not necessarily sterilized. It took less than ten minutes.
The first step was to shock the patient until they lost consciousness. This eliminated the need for anesthesia, since there would be at least a few minutes until the patient regained consciousness, and also made the procedure more flexible; it did not require a surgeon, and did not even have to be performed in a hospital.
The second step was to insert the sharp, eight-inch-long instrument into the brain. In most versions of the procedure, surgeons drilled holes into the skull and inserted the leucotome through those holes. Surgeons preferred an approach that allowed them to see where in the brain they were cutting. But the abbreviated procedure used a shortcut.
Just above and behind the eye is a thin plate of bone that forms the roof of the eye socket. With enough force, the leucotome can be driven through that bone and into the frontal lobes of the brain. The cracking sound produced when the instrument fractures the orbital roof has caused at least one experienced clinician to faint.
Once the instrument was inside, completing the surgery was simply a matter of rotating the tool left and right. The goal was to cut a large number of nerve fibers. Some thought that the procedure might work by severing fibers which maintained certain fixed distorted thought patterns; by destroying them, patients might be freed from the grip of their mental illness. But there wasn't agreement among practitioners regarding why the procedure might work.
This is the transorbital lobotomy. Around 50,000 people received lobotomies in the United States in the 1940s and early 1950s; approximately 10,000 used the transorbital method I just described, with the others using approaches surgeons would be more likely to approve of (e.g., using anesthesia, gloves, being able to see where you're cutting…).
It was billed as a cure for all sorts of mental illnesses, including schizophrenia, depression, and anxiety. And while some called it a method of last resort—a procedure which should only be used after every other conceivable method had failed—it was often used on people who did not have serious mental problems, and who had not tried less serious treatments.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-great-and-desperate

"Stochastic terrorism" is the idea that if you spread fear and mistrust against a target, then eventually people will commit violence against that target, and it will be your fault, even if you never specifically said the words "you should commit violence".
Some other popular examples of the concept:
Nativists spread fear and mistrust about Muslim immigrants, and then racists go on shooting sprees in mosques.
The #Resistance insists that Donald Trump would destroy democracy, and then various people try to assassinate Donald Trump.
Conservatives spread fear and mistrust about transgender people, and then bigots commit hate crimes against transgender people.
Woke people say the police are racist and brutal, and then other woke people murder police officers.
Socialists call health insurance companies greedy and accuse them of blocking life-saving treatment, and then Luigi Mangione murdered a health insurance CEO.
AI safety activists say that Sam Altman's AI could destroy humanity, and then a guy threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's house.
Liberals said that Charlie Kirk was a hatemonger who was driving Americans apart, and then an assassin murdered Charlie Kirk.
The pro-life movement describes abortion as murder, and then pro-life activists assassinated abortion doctors and pro-choice politicians.
The "stochastic terrorism" concept is near-unique in how effectively it can be discredited merely by listing many examples of its use together in the same place. Almost no one supports a blanket prohibition on criticizing of all of these different groups of people. "Stochastic terrorism" mostly gets deployed opportunistically, by people who either are too blinkered to realize that the same argument could be leveraged against their own speech, or who hope you're too blinkered to realize that.
(in fact, one could argue that accusing someone of stochastic terrorism is itself stochastic terrorism! Here in America, we consider it justified to kill terrorists before they can threaten us further. Reclassifying criticism as terrorism implies it is potentially legitimate to apply the same norm to any especially harsh critics!)
Still, a sliver of concept-users make some fig-leaf argument that the cases they approve of are different than the cases they disapprove of. Some proposed principles:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/against-stochastic-terrorism

This was one of the most common objections to Plan A. The plan proposes AI chip regulation to ensure that both China and America know where all the chips are, making their deal to regulate AI together "trustless" (ie neither side can defect even if they want to). Several people argued that this kind of regulation amounted to some kind of "Orwellian dystopia" or "global panopticon".
I'm reminded of a story I heard - I can't find it, maybe one of you can - from a DC insider who said it was enraging to work with Silicon Valley, because he would bring up what he thought was the obvious regulatory framework, the tech people would launch into jeremiads on how it could only be enforced by world dictatorship, and he would have to interrupt and say that no, this was how eggs or milk or something had been regulated for fifty years.
What regulations does Plan A propose on AI chips?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ai-chip-regulation-is-not-a-dystopian