Astral Codex Ten Podcast

[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

In early July, Cassie Pritchard argued on Twitter that liberalism had failed; it bet the farm on economic progress making people happier, but although it delivered impressive economic progress, happiness had failed to follow.
In late July, I countered that Pritchard had made a mistake by comparing happiness to income, when the literature instead supports a correlation of happiness with log(income). Add the log term, and most happiness-income relationships reappear, and liberalism goes back to looking pretty good.
Last week, Pritchard responded on her Substack. I don't have the interest to give this the full treatment it requires, but she deserves some response, so I'll make a few points.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/re-re-re-pritchard-on-liberal-happiness

[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]
1. A New Cause Area
In October 1819, my grandmother's grandfather's grandfather, Hiram Bingham I, stood with his wife, Sybil, and his friends outside Park Street Church in Boston and bade farewell to family before venturing into the unknown. They would spend the next five months on a cramped ship sailing to a foreign land of strange people, full of "destitution, degradation, and barbarism." They did not know if they would ever return to America.
Unlike others who voyaged out to sea, they were not whalers, nor merchants trying to make a quick profit. Instead, their goal was far more ambitious: to uplift an entire nation out of heathenry to civilization. Or as Hiram wrote, to "most effectually and most extensively promote the Redeemer's cause with the means that are put into our hands".
I first came across Hiram's memoir, A Residence of Twenty-One Years in the Sandwich Islands, on my honeymoon to the Hawaiian Islands last summer. I had vague knowledge of a family connection to the area, and decided to do some research into it. As I started reading, I had a growing sense of deja vu as I recognized my own patterns of thinking in Hiram's words.
Today's Effective Altruists sincerely want to do the most good possible, and often focus on international development as a means of improving lives. However, there is another group who fits that description equally well: 19th-century missionaries.
Hiram and his colleagues believed that Heaven and Hell were not metaphorical, and that doing the most good meant saving the most souls from eternal torment. And what, they asked themselves, was the most effective means towards accomplishing this goal? Spreading the Gospel to those who had never heard it. All of humanity required salvation, and those who lived in foreign lands mattered just as much as those who lived nearby.
As a missionary destination, the Hawaiian Islands (then known as the Sandwich Islands), had several compelling advantages. First, the islands were very neglected, being recently discovered. While not as important as China, Egypt/Palestine, or India, they still held a sizable population. And unlike those places, there was little competition from other missionaries or pre-existing organized religions, making them much more tractable for conversion. The mission to Hawaii would prove notably cost-effective compared to other missions1. Basically all that was needed was a ship, a printing press, and missionaries to teach the Bible.
In other words, if the EA Forum existed in the early 19th century, I could easily imagine a post arguing that bringing the Gospel to the Sandwich Islands is a promising cause area.
So, with the benefit of 200 years of hindsight, what can Effective Altruists and other aspiring do-gooders today learn from the previous wave of people who wanted to save the world?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-a-residence-of-21

I.
Matthew Adelstein (aka Bentham's Bulldog) and Richard Chappell debate the existence of God. So do JP Andrew, Benjamin Tettu, Sangwon Lee, Ethan Muse, other Ethan, and "Atheistic Journals", all within this month! I thought the omnipresence of the early '00s online atheism debate was a time-bound historical phenomenon. But now that the blogosphere has reincarnated as Substack, it's back, nearly as strong as ever.
I enjoyed participated in the early 00's version, but the current incarnation leaves me cold. I can't get as interested as I once did in the details of the Fine-Tuning Argument, the Argument From Miracles, et cetera. It's not just that I've already served my time in the theology mines. My lack of belief in God intuitively feels like it precedes all of these things.
Consider by analogy a society where people regularly debated whether aliens assisted the rise of Napoleon. There are many reasons to believe in such assistance: Napoleon's rise from Corsican nobody to Emperor and would-be world conqueror was a bizarre deviation from the usual pattern of history. He won battles outnumbered 4-to-1, when everyone knows victory usually goes to the larger army. He became monarch of France immediately after it had declared eternal enmity against the concept of monarchy and resolved to murder anyone who didn't hate monarchy enough. And the arguments against such intervention are comparatively flimsy. True, nobody saw aliens, but a sufficiently advanced civilization could conduct its interventions in secret. True, our prior for alien intervention is generally low, but maybe this is unjustified: we have no idea how many historical events the aliens have intervened in; Alexander the Great was pretty strange too. True, Napoleon finally lost, but this is not decisive; maybe the aliens only wanted him to blaze brightly for a few years before his eventual defeat, or maybe stronger aliens were backing the Duke of Wellington.
In a world where this hypothesis somehow entered the space of serious debate, it would be hard to dislodge. Our own historical community is protected from it not because they can precisely add up the Bayesian evidence for and against each of these considerations and conclude its falsehood, but because common sense precludes entertaining it in the first place. This isn't to say that Reason doesn't work - if someone could precisely add up the Bayesian evidence for and against these considerations, they would get the right answer - but as a historical matter, this type of delicate reasoning wasn't how our society resolved this question.
My atheism is more deeply rooted in whatever prevented us from considering this question in the first place than in the type of delicate reasoning that could get us out of it.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-im-staying-out-of-the-substack

[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]
Holocaust stories, both true and fictional, tend to repeat the same few clichés over and over. There's the innocent child who only partially understands what's happening (Diary of Anne Frank, Boy in the Striped Pajamas). There's the sentimental redemption story that focuses on a small individual act (Life is Beautiful, The Book Thief). And of course, there's the good German, or at least the morally conflicted one (Schindler's List, The Reader).
You won't find any of these tropes in The Escape Artist.
This 2022 book by Jonathan Freedland1 tells the true, and largely unknown, story of one of the few Jews ever to break out of Auschwitz. The details of his improbable escape are remarkable enough, but what really makes the story fascinating is the way it so thoroughly defies every single expectation we have of a Holocaust narrative. Its deeply unlikeable protagonist eventually alienates every friend and supporter he has, and dies a bitter old man, almost completely forgotten by history. His story lacks not only good Germans, but even good non-Germans, with his harshest criticism saved not for the Nazis, not even for the dithering Allies, but for the Jewish leaders of Europe. And though one could see the story of his escape as a triumph, in his own telling, it's a failure, for although he makes it out of Auschwitz against all odds, he fails at his larger mission: to stop the Holocaust. There's no redemption here, no moral uplift, no lessons save for perhaps the grimmest and most nihilistic "lesson" I've ever encountered in any story, Holocaust-related or otherwise: that when confronted with the unthinkable, most people's natural tendency is denial.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves. To get out of Auschwitz, first you have to get into Auschwitz…
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-escape-artist