Show Notes
I. "Telescopic altruism" is a supposed tendency for some people to ignore those close to them in favor of those further away. Like its cousin "virtue signaling", it usually gets used to own the libs. Some lib cares about people in Gaza - why? Shouldn't she be thinking about her friends and neighbors instead? The only possible explanation is that she's an evil person who hates everyone around her, but manages to feel superior to decent people by pretending to "care" about foreigners who she'll never meet. This collapses upon five seconds' thought. Okay, so the lib is angry about the Israeli military killing 50,000 people in Gaza. Do you think she would be angry if the Israeli military killed 50,000 of her neighbors? Probably yes? Then what's the problem? "But vegetarians care about animals more than humans!" Okay, yeah, they sure do get mad about a billion pigs kept for their entire lives in cages too small to turn around in, then murdered and eaten. Do you think they'd care if a billion of their closest friends were kept for their entire lives in cages too small to turn around in, then murdered and eaten? I dunno, seems bad. Maybe there is some possible comparison where some altruist cares about some set of foreigners more than a comparable set of countrymen? The war in Gaza killed 50,000 people, but the opioid crisis kills a bit over 50,000 Americans per year - is everyone who cares about Gaza exactly equally concerned about the opioid crisis? No, but there's a better explanation - people care about dramatic deaths in big explosions more than boring health crises, regardless of where they happen. Everyone, lib and con alike, cared more about 9-11 than about a hundred opioid crises, even though the former only killed 4% as many people as the latter. And even the people who care about the opioid crisis usually can't bring themselves to care about anything on the List Of Top US Causes Of Death, which are all extra-boring things like diabetes. Once you match like to like, nope, it's pretty hard to find a "telescopic altruism" example that stands out from the general background of people having weird priorities. Nearly everyone cares about people close to them more than people far away. If there's a lib who would attend a Gaza protest instead of getting their deathly-ill kid emergency medical care, I haven't met them - and the "telescopic altruism" crowd certainly hasn't provided evidence of their existence. Instead, the people who care about their neighbors 1,000,000x times more than Gazans point to the people who 'only' care about their neighbors 1,000x times more than Gazans and say "Look! Those guys care about Gazans more than their neighbors! Get 'em!" in order to avoid any debate about whether a million or a thousand or whatever is the right multiplier. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/against-the-concept-of-telescopic
More from Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Finalist #8 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] [Content warning: Sexual and relationship practices from a thousand years ago, from a time and place with a very different morality than what you probably subscribe to.] The past is an alien civilisation Around the year 1000, the Imperial Court of Japan in Kyoto was a world of opulence, aesthetics, and ambition. Isolated from the lives of regular commoners, every aspect of the lives of the elite were governed by complex etiquette rules, and relationships were thoroughly intertwined with politics and the ambition for power and wealth. High-ranking women and men lived lives so separate that they might have a passionate love affair without properly seeing each other's faces. It was in this world that Murasaki Shikibu, an intelligent and educated lady in Empress Shōshi's court, wrote The Tale of Genji, which is widely considered to be the world's oldest novel. It is an extraordinary masterpiece and a highly questionable soap opera, and I've never read anything like it. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-tale-of-genji
I am Daniel Böttger1. In 2023, my review of On The Marble Cliffs took second in the ACX book review contest, and Scott offered me the right to pitch him more essays. I have worked as a neuroscientist, so in 2024 I pitched a post with my theory of consciousness. Later that year, my connection to neuroscience took an unexpected turn, and I wrote about my experience getting diagnosed with brain cancer. This post is an update on how I'm doing. I'm doing well. Very well, in fact. Suspiciously well. So well that the only other person I've ever heard of doing as well as I am was Jo Cameron, who was profiled on ACX for her rare genetic mutation that makes her incapable of negative emotion. My case can't be a mutation, so it must be related to my brain cancer and subsequent surgery. I write about it here in the hopes of making a novel contribution to the study of low-suffering phenotypes. Content warning: the first part of this review contains medical details that some people might find gruesome; I am bad at judging these things since I can no longer feel disgust or fear myself, and have tried to err on the side of completeness. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/absurd-adventure-and-amygdalectomy
I. Econblogger Nicholas Decker is not a fan of AI 2040: One of the centerpieces of AI 2040 is the proposal that we pause the development of AI at a high level, use the AI to research alignment, and only then proceed. I am skeptical of this, and not only because it seems impractical to get such cooperation. My first argument is that I do not believe a period of "researching alignment" is meaningful – alignment research is simply capabilities research, patching particular bugs in the system, and we're not going to find anything deep without actually being in contact with the systems […] I envision AI alignment as being like research into aviation safety. There is no grand theory of why airplanes crash, unless you take that to mean gravity. Instead, we patch little problems. The airplane crashed because of metal fatigue in the engine – okay, we mandate inspections of engines, and prevent crashes from occurring by that source. As new problems arise, we iterate. We don't even need for there to be a crash to make improvements – we test proactively, we build in redundancy, and we monitor for deviations which could be a threat. What we are not doing is thinking about how we are going to keep flying saucers from crashing. If flying saucers are invented, then we will work to keep them from crashing, but we will use exactly the same methods. We will test them, see how they perform, and patch particular problems. AI will be the same way […] We should expect alignment to happen by default. My challenge for Nicholas is: would this work on you? https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/nicholas-decker-in-hell
Finalist #7 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] This is not a review of Rabelais. This is a review of a certain, incomplete translation of Rabelais. It is also arguably one of the greatest translations in our language. Let's meet the hero of our story. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-thomas-urquharts
[Original post: Why I'm Staying Out Of The Substack Religion Debate] Ben Smith writes: This post sure reads like participating in the object level debate, not just "writing a post about how I won't participate". I did joke about this at the end, but I also want to defend calling this a post about how I won't participate. This essay presented a kind of hand-wavey heuristic for why I'm not spending lots of time examining the details of every individual argument. This is fine, everyone has to do this or be overwhelmed, but I think it's important to keep hand-wavey heuristics for not participating in arguments, vs. actual participation in arguments, distinct. Little annoys me more than when I spend weeks carefully gathering citations and making a substantive contribution in a domain, and somebody responds with "well that's obviously all bullshit because it vaguely reminds me of something I have negative affect towards". It's not necessarily wrong to deprioritize a topic because it vaguely reminds you of something that you have negative affect toward, but I would prefer these people admit they're dismissing/ignoring it rather than claim to be engaging with it. I'm working on a longer post about this topic. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-491