Show Notes
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
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