In this post Scott Alexander uses flags, movie plot holes, and tech-company names as “model organisms” for thinking about taste: small, familiar examples where broader arguments about rules, context, elegance, novelty, and cliché become easier to see. It’s a sharp, funny exploration of why some aesthetic rules feel obvious, when they may just be inherited habits, and why “easy wins” can sometimes feel suspiciously tasteless.

* 00:00 - Introduction

* 00:09 - Reddit Vexillology

* 07:49 - 2: Movie Plot Holes

* 10:12 - Tech Company Names

https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/three-model-organisms-for-taste?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

In this post John Psmith reviews Aaron Reed’s 50 Years of Text Games, using the history of interactive fiction to explore why games made of words once felt magical, why they faded, and why AI might make them newly strange, powerful, and relevant.

https://open.substack.com/pub/thepsmiths/p/review-50-years-of-text-games-by?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

In this post Scott Alexander returns to the topic of artistic taste, responding to thoughtful replies from Ozy, Frank Lantz, and Sympathetic Opposition on a piece he wrote last year. He opens by unpacking eight distinct things people tend to bundle together under the heading of "good art" — from raw sensory delight to historical novelty to political point-making — and then sets out to argue, contra his interlocutors, that letting these blur into one another is doing real damage. Along the way he draws on analogies from restaurant criticism, medical research, modern literary fiction, and his own relationship with poetry to defend a particular view of what aesthetic judgment is actually for.

https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/contra-everyone-on-taste?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

In this essay, Lee Sandlin reflects on how war is remembered, misunderstood, mythologised, and slowly lost to those who never experienced it directly, moving from private family mementos to the vast cultural memory of World War Two with a bleak, humane eye for the gap between history as story and history as lived catastrophe.

https://www.leesandlin.com/articles/LosingTheWar.htm

Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

This is beautiful.

https://open.substack.com/pub/nataliercargill/p/it-is-the-end-of-the-world-and-i?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

A short story by Max Harms.

https://open.substack.com/pub/raelifin/p/the-fulcrum?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

In this post, Kelsey Piper argues that one of AI’s most prominent critics is making a weaker case than he used to: as AI tools have improved, adoption has grown, and costs have fallen, the serious skeptical argument has shifted from “AI has no value” to harder questions about profitability, capital expenditure, and whether current revenue can justify the build-out. It’s a sharp but spoiler-free critique of bad AI skepticism, and a call for better, more precise scrutiny of an industry that still badly needs it.

* 00:00 - Introduction

* 07:27 - Maybe everything is a lie?

* 14:54 - We’re not headed for March 2000

https://open.substack.com/pub/theargument/p/ais-biggest-critic-has-lost-the-plot?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

In this post, Jane Psmith reviews Thomas Asbridge’s The Greatest Knight, a biography of William Marshal, using it as a springboard into the violent, strange, and often surprisingly funny world of twelfth-century knighthood. She highlights how Asbridge turns one extraordinary career into a broader portrait of civil war, tournament culture, patronage, loyalty, and the making of chivalric ideals.

https://open.substack.com/pub/thepsmiths/p/review-the-greatest-knight-by-thomas?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

In this post Scott Alexander offers fifteen (and a half) short pieces of writing advice, framed as compensation for missing the first half of Lighthaven's second Inkhaven — a month-long bootcamp where aspiring bloggers must publish a post a day or get kicked out. Dispensed in his characteristic voice, with the usual asides, jokes, and passing metaphors, the collection ranges across questions of craft, style, structure, and reader attention, aimed at anyone trying to work out why some writing lands and other writing merely happens.

* 00:00 - Introduction

* 00:43 - 1: Against microdishonesty

* 03:59 - 2: Avoid cliches like the plague

* 06:13 - 3: Disciplines to do on a mountaintop for thirty years

* 10:02 - 4: Untangle your sentences

* 13:19 - 5: Against explainers

* 16:46 - 6: The Traditional Five Paragraph Essay

* 19:36 - 7: Against the blogosphere

* 22:54 - 8: Watching paint dry

* 25:38 - 9: “Where do you get your ideas?”

* 26:18 - 10: There are effortposts everywhere for those eyes to see

* 30:20 - 11: In partial, extremely grudging praise of Mikhail Samin

* 33:38 - 12: The purpose of poetry

* 36:36 - 13: Runway

* 38:13 - 14: Conflict and curiosity

* 40:36 - 15: What can’t the reader trivially regenerate from a prompt?

* 43:02 - 15.5: Just say the thing you want to say

https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/half-a-month-of-consolation-writing?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

In this post Andy Masley takes a close, critical look at popular claims that data centers produce harmful “infrasound,” using the viral videos of Benn Jordan as a case study in how persuasive, high-production misinformation can spread. He unpacks the underlying science, contrasts it with how it’s presented online, and argues that while noise pollution is real, the more extreme infrasound claims don’t hold up to scrutiny, offering both a technical and sociological lens on how these ideas gain traction.

* 00:00:00 - Introduction

* 00:00:36 - Intro

* 00:04:48 - What is infrasound?

* 00:16:14 - What the science says about infrasound harms

* 00:16:17 - The history of infrasound science

* 00:21:48 - The consensus

* 00:23:03 - Benn Jordan’s infrasound videos are a complete disaster

* 00:24:22 - First video - Infrasound: What You Can’t Hear CAN Hurt You

* 00:24:51 - 0:00 to 1:40 - Intro

* 00:46:18 - 1:40 to 3:48 - Philosophy of time

* 00:47:51 - 3:48 to 4:34 - UV and infrasound

* 00:51:24 - 4:50 to 5:21 - The symptom list

* 01:01:33 - 5:21 to 5:51 - The heart-contraction study

* 01:09:41 - 5:51 to 6:37 - ‘It’s hard to study’

* 01:19:06 - 6:52 to 8:10 - The Vic Tandy ghost story

* 01:26:31 - 8:10 to 10:09 - Backyard recording

* 01:28:52 - 10:25 to 12:00 - The South Dakota detour

* 01:32:13 - 12:08 to 14:32 - The Yellowstone segment

* 01:32:37 - 14:24 to 14:49 - The inescapability frame

* 01:34:45 - 14:49 to 18:00 - The physics detour and SpaceX launch

* 01:36:38 - 17:18 to 18:00 - Helmholtz resonance

* 01:37:22 - 18:00 to 18:56 - The Liverpool Cathedral study

* 01:39:56 - 18:56 to 20:16 - The Goldsmiths Haunt Project

* 01:43:23 - 20:16 to End - The gear section

* 01:43:49 - Conclusion

* 01:48:41 - Second video - Datacenters Behaving Like Acoustic Weapons

* 01:49:35 - 0:00 to 1:29 - Intro

* 01:53:41 - 2:24 to 3:22 - The symptom list, round two

* 01:56:53 - 4:06 to 9:10 - xAI’s Colossus

* 02:01:55 - 9:10 to 15:18 - MARA slash Granbury

* 02:08:58 - 15:18 to 17:58 - The Permian Basin

* 02:11:45 - 17:58 to 23:15 - The experiment

* 02:12:07 - Problem 1: The “haunted painting” priming

* 02:13:25 - Problem 2: He isn’t blind

* 02:14:15 - Problem 3: The stimulus itself

* 02:15:32 - Problem 4: The self-selection filter

* 02:16:47 - Problem 5: The effect sizes are tiny and the framing is misleading

* 02:19:33 - Problem 6: Multiple comparisons

* 02:20:31 - What the experiment actually shows

* 02:21:07 - 23:15 to 25:43 - YouTube data vs research data

* 02:23:09 - 25:43 to end - The call to action

* 02:25:26 - Conclusion

* 02:26:35 - There’s a lot of social permission to treat data centers as boogeymen right now

https://open.substack.com/pub/andymasley/p/contra-benn-jordan-data-center-and?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe