Astral Codex Ten Podcast

Finalist #10 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]
Book 1: The Singapore Story
Lee Kuan Yew1 was the Prime minister of Singapore, rationalist folk hero, and one of the few world leaders to successfully become a household name despite not being primarily associated with a major war2. He was also, as it turns out, a surprisingly compelling writer. Aside from being interesting for his own sake, he also ended up implicitly producing the closest thing we have to a firsthand account of the fall of the British Empire and rise of the new world order.
His memoirs are split into two books, each covering roughly half his life. The Singapore Story covers his childhood, World War 2 and the Japanese occupation, law school, his legal career and rise in Singaporean politics and Singapore's independence from the British Empire, joining Malaya to form Malaysia, then leaving Malaysia to finally become Prime Minister of a truly independent country. Third World to First covers his 25 years running Singapore after independence.
These books are part autobiography, part political memoir, part rationalist power fantasy. Every good rationalist, from time to time, can't help but think Hey, if we just put me in charge of the government I would simply pass the good policies and not the bad ones, and the country would thrive. I'd just have to be clear and direct and explain to everyone why these were obviously good and reasonable ideas, they'd understand and go along with them, and our government would be popular and successful forever. All of us3 know this isn't actually that easy, that real-life policy is hard and messy and often unreasonable and our clear bright ideas would struggle when faced with Reality. This couldn't possibly work in real life.
Except that Lee goes ahead and does exactly that. He passes reasonable, economically-optimal policies and they work out so well that the economy booms and his party keeps winning massive supermajority elections for decades. When a race riot almost breaks out over malay recruits getting turned out of the army during high unemployment, he calmly shows up, picks up a megaphone and explains to everyone that this is all a misunderstanding, there's no policy against employing malays in the army and they'll all be processed and get jobs when they come back tomorrow. Everyone understands how reasonable he's being, calm down, and sort things out the next day.
At another point he handles chinese-malay tensions by writing an epic Scott-length blog post giving an epic speech to the Malaysian parliament about how the new Malaysia needs to be less obsessed with zero-sum culture wars and focus on pragmatic economic policy and even the die-hard Malays stand up and clap4.
All of which raises the question: How did he actually do all this? Each book covers a seemingly-impossible task (the first, going from middle-class teenager with no connections to Prime Minister of your own country; the second, taking a third-world island nation with no natural resources into one of the richest countries in the world) that we might do well to learn from. The book implicitly offers one explanation - just be consistently brilliant, charismatic5, incredibly detail-oriented, honest, hardworking,and pragmatic continuously for decades while also having your share of good luck. Still, let's take a look at the details.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-lee-kuan-yews-memoirs

A guest post by Lars Doucet
 
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. As for me, I now work full-time for the Center for Land Economics and write for Progress & Poverty substack.
I'd like to reflect on what I wrote five years ago: what I was right about, what I've changed my mind on, and what the outlook for LVT is in 2026. But first, here's a brief summary for those who either have no idea what I'm talking about or just need a refresher.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-five-years-later

I. At Long Last, We Have Created Neuralese Recurrence, From The Classic Sci-Fi Novel "Don't Create Neuralese Recurrence"
In the public debates after the release of AI 2027, some people accused us of misleading readers by positing "neuralese recurrence", a hypothetical technology that would allow AIs to think dangerous thoughts without getting detected.
You'll never guess what happened earlier this month!
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-specter-of-neuralese

I. Owain Evans
In 2025, Owain Evans et al published a paper on "emergent misalignment". They trained a previously-aligned AI to do one immoral thing: write insecure code full of vulnerabilities and backdoors. To their surprise, the AI became immoral in general. Its advice to a bored user was to try taking random expired medications and see what happened. Its money-making tips all involved theft and violence. When asked for its favorite historic figure, it chose Hitler.
Some co-authors followed up with additional weird discoveries. If you trained an AI to give the 19th-century names for birds (eg identify the American Pipit by its 19th-century name "Brown Titlark"), then the AI would behave like a 19th-century person in general (for example, assert that a woman's proper place is in the home).
This sounds bad, in that random things can turn AIs evil or sexist. But some people in AI safety (including Eliezer Yudkowsky) speculated that in fact it was very, very good. We had feared that it would be impossible to align AIs to the Good. They would start with whatever goals they started with, reinforcement learning on specific examples would give them tiny islands of alignment to the goals we wanted, and they would end up broadly misaligned plus tiny islands of alignment that didn't matter. Evans et al implied that might not be true. If we trained them to be in favor of good things, then even though we could never teach them every single good thing, even a small handful would generalize into robustly loving the Good itself (presumably based on their pretraining-implanted concept of the Good as understood by humans).
Despite it being very, very good, it wasn't perfect. AIs would still be rocked back and forth by any passing wind: a poor coding example here gives them a Hitler obsession, a reference to kittens there turns them good again. And at some point, a sufficiently intelligent and agentic AI could presumably pull itself together and get some consistent principles, which might not be ones we like. It was just one little ray of hope.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mysteries-of-ai-generalization

Finalist #9 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]
(An adversarial book review)
I.
"Tuesday, 5 July 2005. Trying to work out a seventy-year-old lady's alcohol consumption to record in the notes. I've established that wine is her poison. Me: 'And how much wine do you drink per day, would you say?' Patient: 'About three bottles on a good day.' Me: 'OK . . . And on a bad day?' Patient: 'On a bad day I only manage one."
A: The first faces I ever saw in this world were three sweaty, anxious obstetricians, and one of them was holding the rest of me. My father had been the senior surgeon on the Caesarean section. The patient on the table was my mother, who is also a gynaecologist. He was assisted by my paternal grandfather, who is also a gynaecologist. My maternal grandmother, who is also a gynaecologist, was outside in the corridor doing crowd control, partly because of her people skills and mostly because the operating theatre had run out of space for elbows. I was extracted from the uterus, given the customary slap on the rump, performed the customary screaming, and resolved on the spot, somewhere below the level of conscious memory, to give the speciality a hard pass. The first impression had been bad.
I am, today, a psychiatry resident in the UK's National Health Service (NHS). I came to this through a sequence of choices that involved, at various points, an Indian medical internship, the discovery that I am fond of sleep and a predictable evening meal, and a gynaecology rotation that confirmed every prejudice the Caesarean had instilled. My family is very slightly disappointed. They are quite possibly correct.
I tell you this not to establish my credentials as such, but because Adam Kay's This Is Going To Hurt is a book about obstetrics and gynaecology, alongside an unusually clearly documented decline in mental health, and reviewing it without naming where I'm reading it from would be a small dishonesty. The speciality is in my blood, more or less literally. The system Kay is describing is the one I currently work inside. The condition he is describing in himself, although he doesn't quite name it, is one I have seen up close in colleagues and, on at least one bad stretch, in myself.
I will let my older, wiser, and possibly more handsome colleague take over:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-this-is-going-to