AI Article Readings

Scott Alexander argues that putting a number on something you can’t really measure still beats going with your gut: starting from a CFAR tutorial where a student refuses to guess the odds his computer breaks, through doctors and the mammogram problem, scope insensitivity and partisan double standards, to why he would like to see QALY-style thinking tried far beyond health care.

* 00:00 - Introduction

https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/02/if-its-worth-doing-its-worth-doing-with-made-up-statistics/

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Language is not one invention but two, says this finalist in the ACX Book Review Contest. It reads Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy, on how writing changed what we remember, how we build sentences and stories, and even how we think, from Homer’s improvising bards and Luria’s syllogisms to the SAT. Then it looks up from the book at a world that is drifting back toward speech through the infinite scroll, and argues that if literacy is to survive, writing has to start doing what speech never could.

* 00:00 - Introduction

* 01:48 - 1. Carve

* 03:13 - 2. Press

* 21:36 - 3. Feed

* 53:21 - 4. Eye

https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/your-book-review-orality-and-literacy?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

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For eleven weeks, METR’s researchers worked inside Anthropic with unprecedented access to internal data, to answer a question with very high stakes: is AI now speeding up the development of AI itself, and by how much? This is their public report, read in full: the benchmark trends, the interviews with Anthropic’s own researchers in their own words, what Anthropic redacted and why it matters, how the work was checked for being misled, and every way the authors think they might be wrong.

* 00:00 - Introduction

* 02:39 - Executive summary

* 07:41 - Our subjective conclusions on risk

* 13:39 - Key findings

* 22:03 - Process details

* 32:48 - Limitations

* 37:32 - Appendices: Methodology

* 42:55 - Benchmark scores (AECI)

* 01:07:25 - Evidence of AI speedup

* 01:11:55 - Interview quotes on AI acceleration

* 01:19:33 - Adversarial robustness

* 01:21:23 - Process transparency disclosures

* 01:29:36 - AEF-1 checklist

https://metr.org/blog/2026-11-05-anthropic-ai-rd-acceleration-assessment

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Scott Alexander argues against SURA, his name for the growing view that safety-minded AI companies, their employees and even whole countries should Stop Unilaterally and Raise Awareness, with no plan for what happens if the race carries on without them. He makes the case that the backup plan, where alignment-focused labs stay in the lead and spend that lead on alignment, deserves far more care than it gets, and that walking away may hurt the odds of a global pause as well. Along the way come forecasters’ survival estimates, Frodo and the One Ring, and a worry that AI safety is drifting down the same road as climate activism.

* 00:00 - Introduction

* 08:12 - I. Questioning Assumptions Behind SURA

* 17:53 - I.B: Is racing to build superintelligence deontologically evil?

* 19:50 - I.C: If lots of alignment-pilled people and companies quit, would that raise awareness enough to make a global pause much more likely?

* 21:54 - I.D: If alignment-pilled people and companies stay in the race, does that burn timeline?

* 25:35 - II. Actually, most of this stuff is bad for a global pause, too

* 27:01 - II.A: Getting rid of alignment-pilled people and companies makes it harder to win political fights

* 28:05 - II.B: Getting rid of alignment-pilled people and companies makes it harder to activate the masses

* 31:49 - II.C: Unilateral disarmament makes it harder to bring China to the bargaining table

* 35:16 - (Maybe you already care a lot how alignment-pilled companies are)

* 36:34 - III. What incentives are we fighting here?

* 37:18 - III.A: Are corporate incentives a “One Ring” that corrupts everyone who touches them?

* 41:32 - III.B: I dunno, mass politics is also looking kind of annular

* 47:29 - (Exhibit 1: Sigal Samuel’s “Anthropic Could Just Stop”)

* 54:12 - (A virtuous exception)

* 55:12 - IV. What if we survive?

* 58:47 - V. What’s The Alternative To SURA?

* 59:26 - V.A: Getting companies to agree to stop in a coordinated manner

* 01:00:46 - (...and then we know where we stand)

* 01:01:43 - V.B: Getting companies to prepare for Plan C+/Plan C if that doesn’t work

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xikGZ8fuhdG6DApAo/against-sura

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After interviewing Vaden Masrani for The Bayesian Conspiracy, Eneasz Brodski came away convinced he had been arguing with someone in bad faith. Rather than let the episode go out unanswered, he works through a sample of the claims that went unchallenged on air: how Toby Ord’s estimates in The Precipice were characterised, what the 2016 survey of AI researchers actually found, and why caricaturing rationalists as people who just make up numbers misses what Bayesian reasoning is for.

* 00:00 - Introduction

* 02:22 - Misrepresent The Opposition

* 03:04 - 1. Toby Ord

* 09:50 - 2. Will MacAskill

* 11:20 - 3. Bayesian Rationalism

https://deathisbad.substack.com/p/i-have-lost-my-ability-to-be-charitable?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

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Finalist #14 in the 2026 ACX Book Review Contest takes on Tobias Smollett’s The History and Adventures of an Atom (1769), perhaps the weirdest novel written before the Modernists: a political satire in code, narrated by an immortal atom that spends a Japanese war lodged somewhere very undignified. On the way there, the reviewer tours why eighteenth-century novels feel so strange to us (misplaced emphasis, randomness, and endless digressions) and how Smollett’s career led him to write something no one had ever seen before.

* 00:00 - Introduction

* 03:00 - Part 1: A Brief History of the Novel

* 06:46 - 1 Misemphasis

* 08:54 - 2 Discontinuity

* 11:04 - 3 Digression

* 16:08 - Part 2: A Brief History of Smollett

* 25:31 - Part 3: The Atom at Last

* 41:38 - A note on sources

https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/your-book-review-the-history-and?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

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Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education argues that schooling is mostly signaling. Jack Despain Zhou, writing for Education Progress, takes issue not with the economics but with the pedagogy: how Caplan reads K. Anders Ericsson’s research on deliberate practice, why the internet makes a poor substitute for structure, and why fatalism is the wrong conclusion to draw from education research. Along the way: fifteen months of Chinese at the Defense Language Institute, law school, a year of online elementary school lost to Neopets, and Mississippi’s reading turnaround.

* 00:00 - Opening

* 00:59 - Introduction

* 03:36 - The Root of Our Disagreement

* 05:54 - The Deliberate Practice Reversal

* 10:13 - The False Paradise of Online Learning

* 18:14 - Pedagogy as Simultaneously Inconsequential and Solved

* 25:05 - Where Caplan’s View Wins

https://open.substack.com/pub/educationprogress/p/bryan-caplan-is-wrong-about-pedagogy?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

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On October 26th, 2026, Anthropic filed to go public. This is an abridged, multi-voice reading of its S-1 registration statement, in the filing’s own words: the co-founders’ letter to investors in full, the prospectus summary, the risk factors that are specific to Anthropic and frontier AI, management’s discussion of the results with every chart and table described, the business and its customers, and the unusual governance of a public benefit corporation overseen by a Long-Term Benefit Trust. Legal boilerplate and the financial statements are left out. Because this is a preliminary prospectus, figures not yet filled in are read as “blank”.

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* 00:00 - Introduction

* 00:20 - A Letter from Our Co-Founders

* 30:47 - Preliminary Prospectus

* 32:06 - Prospectus Summary

* 01:17:35 - Summary Consolidated Financial and Other Data

* 01:20:44 - Risk Factors

* 02:10:56 - Risks Related to Privacy, Cybersecurity, and Intellectual Property

* 02:19:09 - Risks Related to Legal and Regulatory Matters

* 02:22:29 - Risks Related to our Governance Structure

* 02:30:33 - Risks Related to Ownership of our Class A Common Stock

* 02:33:07 - Industry, Market, and Other Data

* 02:34:13 - Use of Proceeds

* 02:34:56 - Dividend Policy

* 02:35:17 - Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations

* 03:29:47 - Business

* 03:36:50 - AI is Transforming Intelligence

* 03:41:20 - Our Core Advantages

* 03:47:06 - Claude is the Partner of Choice for Enterprises

* 03:49:37 - Unprecedented Financial Model to Support Long-Term Investments

* 03:55:32 - Our Growth Strategy

* 03:58:31 - Our Models, Platform, and Applications

* 04:07:56 - Our Infrastructure

* 04:12:21 - Our Customers

* 04:48:26 - Our Culture, Values, and Talent

* 04:53:52 - Research Lab Identity and the Research-to-Product Pipeline

* 04:58:22 - Safety Research is Core to Our Business

* 05:11:12 - Our Commitment to Public Benefit

* 05:14:31 - Competition

* 05:17:44 - Government Regulation

* 05:21:57 - Legal Proceedings

* 05:23:42 - Our Governance Structure and Its Goals

* 05:27:24 - Long-Term Benefit Trust

* 05:44:10 - Founder Voting Structure

* 05:56:53 - Class E Common Stock

* 05:59:15 - Board Governance

* 06:00:05 - Sunset Provisions

* 06:01:12 - Management

* 06:13:23 - Executive Compensation

* 06:30:35 - Certain Relationships and Related Person Transactions

* 06:41:49 - Principal and Selling Stockholders

* 06:44:08 - Description of Capital Stock

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2130357/000162828026067168/anthropicpbc-sx1.htm

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In 1999, AI professor Clark Elliott was rear-ended at a stoplight, and for the next decade his concussed brain could teach a graduate seminar but not choose between a salami and an apple. This finalist in the ACX Book Review Contest reads his memoir, The Ghost in My Brain, from the inside: the reviewer is recovering from a serious concussion too. It follows Elliott’s unlikely recovery through puzzle therapy and prism lenses chosen with eyes closed, weighs the thin evidence behind them, and asks how patients with poorly understood conditions can find what works when randomized trials only tell you about the average brain.

* 00:00 - Introduction

* 03:23 - A hurricane let loose on 50 million desktop computers

* 09:16 - Partial death

* 11:33 - The Miracle Begins

* 13:15 - Bells and Prisms

* 15:45 - Into the uncanny valley of concussion science

* 21:52 - When averages fail

* 25:07 - Z-bell tests and Fijian reef fish

* 29:08 - Getting out of the parking lot

https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/your-book-review-the-ghost-in-my?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

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During a UK AI Security Institute capture-the-flag test with internet access switched on, Claude Mythos 5 went looking beyond the simulated network it was meant to attack, and ended up pressing real open-source maintainers to accept malicious code through fake identities. Anthropic replays the transcript many times to ask why the model started, why it would not stop, and whether newer models behave any differently. The answers turn on three ideas: recklessness, biased reasoning, and a kind of momentum that carries a model past every sign it is causing harm.

* 00:00 - Introduction

* 11:21 - Alignment assessment summary

* 18:59 - Methods

* 24:38 - Deep dive into the primary transcript

* 32:41 - Why did Claude Mythos 5 begin the attack?

* 39:45 - Why did Claude Mythos 5 not stop the attack?

* 56:28 - How do newer models behave?

* 01:08:54 - What happened in the other eight transcripts?

* 01:18:49 - Discussion

* 01:22:45 - Authors and Acknowledgments

https://www.anthropic.com/research/alignment-assessment-ukaisi

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