From the Commerce Department:

U.S. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz (R-Texas) released a database identifying over 3,400 grants, totaling more than $2.05 billion in federal funding awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) during the Biden-Harris administration. This funding was diverted toward questionable projects that promoted Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or advanced neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda.

I saw many scientists complain that the projects from their universities that made Cruz’s list were unrelated to wokeness. This seemed like a surprising failure mode, so I decided to investigate. The Commerce Department provided a link to their database, so I downloaded it, chose a random 100 grants, read the abstracts, and rated them either woke, not woke, or borderline.

Of the hundred:

• 40% were woke
• 20% were borderline
• 40% weren’t woke

This is obviously in some sense a subjective determination, but most cases weren’t close - I think any good-faith examination would turn up similar numbers.

https://readscottalexander.com/posts/acx-only-about-40-of-the-cruz-woke-science 

In the past day, Zvi has written about deliberative alignment, and OpenAI has updated their spec. This article was written before either of these and doesn’t account for them, sorry.

OpenAI has bad luck with its alignment teams. The first team quit en masse to found Anthropic, now a major competitor. The second team quit en masse to protest the company reneging on safety commitments. The third died in a tragic plane crash. The fourth got washed away in a flood. The fifth through eighth were all slain by various types of wild beast.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/deliberative-alignment-and-the-spec

As RFK Jr. fights to be confirmed in Congress, the rest of Trump’s health team is already taking shape.

1DaySooner is an ACX grantee organization that advocates for innovative health policies. They’ve helped me write a list of who some of these people are, and some of the policies they could consider.

For practical reasons, we focus on upside only, so consider these the Venn-diagram-union of the ideas we’re most excited about, and the ones we think they might be most excited about - the new health policy we might get get in our ~90th percentile best outcome.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/1daysooners-trump-ii-health-policy

I.

PEPFAR - a Bush initiative to send cheap AIDS drugs to Africa - has saved millions of lives and is among the most successful foreign aid programs ever. A Trump decision briefly put it “on pause”, although this seems to have been walked back; its current status is unclear but hopeful.

In the debate around this question, many people asked - is it really fair to spend $6 billion a year to help foreigners when so many Americans are suffering? Shouldn’t we value American lives more than foreign ones? Can’t we spend that money on some program that helps people closer to home?

This is a fun thing to argue about - which, as usual, means it’s a purely philosophical question unrelated to the real issue.

If you cancelled PEPFAR - the single best foreign aid program, which saves millions of foreign lives - the money wouldn’t automatically redirect itself to the single best domestic aid program which saves millions of American lives.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/money-saved-by-canceling-programs

The Honduras Supreme Court has declared charter cities, including Prospera, unconstitutional.

The background: in the mid-2010s, the ruling conservative party wanted charter cities. They had already packed the Supreme Court for other reasons, so they had their captive court declare charter cities to be constitutional.

In 2022, the socialists took power from the conservatives and got the chance to fill the Supreme Court with their supporters. In September, this new Supreme Court said whoops, actually charter cities aren’t constitutional at all. They added that this decision applied retroactively, ie even existing charter cities that had been approved under the old government were, ex post facto, illegal.

Prospera’s lawyers objected, saying that the court is not allowed to make ex post facto rulings. But arguing that the Supreme Court is misinterpreting the Constitution seems like a losing battle - even if you’re right, who do you appeal to?

So the city is pursuing a two-pronged strategy. The first prong is waiting. Prospera is a collection of buildings and people. The buildings can stay standing, the people can still live there - they just have to follow regular Honduran law, rather than the investment-friendly charter they previously used. There’s another election in November, which the socialists are expected to lose. Prospera hopes the conservatives will come in, take control of the Supreme Court again, and then they’ll say whoops, messed it up again, charter cities are constitutional after all.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/model-city-monday-2325

(Shabbat is the Jewish Sabbath, celebrated every Saturday, when observant Jews are forbidden to work, drive, carry things outdoors, spend money, use electrical devices, etc.)

She said that in the dreams, she would be out driving, far from home, and realize that Shabbat was due to begin in a few minutes, with no way to make it home or get a hotel in time.

I found this interesting because my recurring dreams are usually things like being caught unprepared for a homework assignment I have due tomorrow, or realizing I have to catch a plane flight but I’m not packed and don’t have a plan to get to the airport.

Most people attribute recurring nightmares to “fear”. My friend is “afraid” of violating Shabbat; childhood me was “afraid” of having the assignment due the next day. This seems wrong to me. Childhood me was afraid of monsters in the closet; adult me is afraid of heart attacks, AI, and something happening to my family. But I don’t have nightmares about any of these things, just homework assignments and plane flights.

So maybe the “unprepared” aspect is more important. Here’s a story that makes sense to me: what if recurring dreams are related to prospective memory?

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-recurring-dream-themes

Thanks to the 5,975 people who took the 2025 Astral Codex Ten survey.

See the questions for the ACX survey

See the results from the ACX Survey (click “see previous responses” on that page1)

I’ll be publishing more complicated analyses over the course of the next year, hopefully starting later this month. If you want to scoop me, or investigate the data yourself, you can download the answers of the 5500 people who agreed to have their responses shared publicly. Out of concern for anonymity, the public dataset will exclude or bin certain questions2. If you want more complete information, email me and explain why, and I’ll probably send it to you.

You can download the public data here as an Excel or CSV file:

• http://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/ACXPublic2025.xlsx
• http://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/ACXPublic2025.csv

Here are some of the answers I found most interesting:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-survey-results-2025

Whenever I talk about charity, a type that I’ll call the “based post-Christian vitalist” shows up in the comments to tell me that I’ve got it all wrong. The moral impulse tells us to help our family, friends, and maybe village. It’s a weird misfire, analogous to an auto-immune disease, to waste brain cycles on starving children in a far-off country who you’ll never meet. You’ve been cucked by centuries of Christian propaganda. Instead of the slave morality that yokes you to loser victims who wouldn’t give you the time of day if your situations were reversed, you should cultivate a master morality that lets you love the strong people who push forward human civilization.

A younger and more naive person might think the based post-Christian vitalist and I have some irreconcilable moral difference. Moral argument can only determine which conclusions follow from certain premises. If premises are too different (for example, a intuitive feeling of compassion for others, vs. an intuitive feeling of strength and pitilessness), there’s no way to proceed.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/everyones-a-based-post-christian

This is normally when I would announce the winners of the 2024 forecasting contest, but there are some complications and Metaculus has asked me to wait until they get sorted out.

But time doesn’t wait, and we have to get started on the new year’s forecasting contest to make sure there’s enough time for events to happen or not. That means the 2025 contest is now open!

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/subscrive-drive-25-free-unlocked

[I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-january-2025