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Astral Codex Ten Podcast

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

De : Jeremiah
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The official audio version of Astral Codex Ten, with an archive of posts from Slate Star Codex. It's just me reading Scott Alexander's blog posts. Science
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  • Contra Everyone On Taste

    Contra Everyone On Taste
    May 20 2026
    Last year I wrote a piece on artistic taste, which got many good responses from (eg) Ozy, Frank Lantz, and Sympathetic Opposition. I tastelessly forgot to respond to them until now, but I appreciate how they forced me to refine my thinking. In particular, they helped me realize that "taste" and "good art" are hard to talk about, because the discussions conflate many different things: 1: Sensory Delight. Ode To Joy makes the listener feel joyful. Michelangelo's David fills the viewer with awe at the human figure. The great cathedrals are impressive buildings, in a way that hits you like a punch to the gut. These judgments are preconscious, widespread, and don't necessarily require artistic sophistication. 2: Novelty and Innovation: Someone gets credit for doing art in a way that has never been done before. The early Impressionists invented a new way of looking at the world and explored all of its little corners. A modern Impressionist painter may be able to match their technical skill, but not their novelty; therefore, the modern would be a mere curiosity while the originals were great artists. For a modern person to be a great artist, they would have to explore entirely new media - hence the surprising and transgressive nature of modern art. 3: Paying Attention / Pattern Language: Tasteful people, viewing art over the generations and paying deep attention to it, have developed a sense of balance, composition, contrast, and what should and shouldn't be done. We can debate how predetermined the exact grammar of this language was a priori, but for better or worse people are sensitized to it and will judge works with it in mind. A good work of art should either conform to this language, or defy it deliberately and thoughtfully (that is, in a way that transcends it rather than ignores it). Along with these three big ones, here are smaller ones that might or might not be combinations or subvarieties of these: 4: Context And Discussion: Some great art raises questions, and subsequent great art proposes answers, or variations on the questions, or further elucidates the subject. The great artists of any given time are in conversation with their peers and the great artists of all past ages; new art can be judged on whether it shows awareness of, and contributes to, this conversation. Other forms of context are more personal - is a book about human evil more aesthetic if its author survived the Holocaust? 5: Literal Ability To Understand A Work: You can't fully appreciate Animal Farm unless you know the history of Soviet communism and recognize the book as an allegory for that history. If someone who knew nothing about this liked it as a cute story about talking animals, their appreciation would be different from (inferior to?) that of more knowledgeable people. 6: Changing Fashions: In 1940, Beaux-Arts and Frank Lloyd Wright were the heights of American architecture. By 1950, nobody who was anybody was doing Beaux-Arts or Prairie; it was all International Style. One could very charitably attribute this to the novelty-seeking drive above; but it's implausible that Prairie style architecture was novel and beloved in 1940, a few houses completely exhausted its potential, but the explosion of International Style buildings didn't restore the balance such that the low-hanging-fruit level level was lower in Prairie style again. More likely this was just a fashion effect where Prairie style was cool in 1940, then uncool in 1950. 7: Political And Ideological Point-Making: Great art may convey some truth about the world. This could be a purely aesthetic truth. But in the case of Uncle Tom's Cabin, the truth was "slavery is bad". Other truths are conveyed symbolically (for example, cathedrals being shaped like crosses) or through design choices (for example, the austerity of Bauhaus architecture making it more suitable for socialist housing). 8: Ability To Profoundly Affect Or Transform You: Maybe this one is emergent from some combination of sensory delight, novelty and point-making. But some people say they come away from art transformed, in a way which is neither just sensory delight nor just political ideology. Philosophers have argued for millennia about exactly what way this is, but hopefully we've all had this experience and can accept an extensional definition. These people enumerated these things to defend taste. I will instead take the bold stand that conflating many different things is bad: it frees people from thinking too hard about any particular one of them, or the ways they interact. Here are my arguments for deliberately ignoring about half of these. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-everyone-on-taste
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    32 min
  • What Deontological Bars?

    What Deontological Bars?
    May 20 2026

    Constraint consequentialists believe that you should try to do good things that improve the world, unless those break hard-and-fast rules ("deontological bars").

    For example, you shouldn't assassinate democratically-elected leaders, even very bad ones. Why not? Since bad leaders set bad policy, and bad policy can kill many thousands of people, wouldn't it be for the greater good? Because there's always one gun-owner who thinks any given leader's policies are bad, so without the rule, every leader would face constant assassination attempts, probably some of them would succeed, and the nation would either crumble or degenerate into a security state.

    This explanation combines two sub-explanations. In the first, you are wrong about whether assassinating the leader would produce good consequences - you think it would, but actually it would produce instability, tyranny, etc. In the second, you're right - maybe you're a brilliant forecaster who can see that this particular assassination would end with an orderly succession by a superior ruler. But you know that there are far more people who think they are such brilliant forecasters than who actually are, and you either use the Outside View to suspect that you are also deceiving yourself, or at least realize that the only stable bright-line equilibrium is for everyone - true brilliant forecasters and wannabes alike - to refuse to act upon their apparent foreknowledge.

    "Don't kill people" is a gimme. What other deontological bars constrain our actions?

    https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/what-deontological-bars
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    10 min
  • Your Attempt To Solve Debate Will Not Work

    Your Attempt To Solve Debate Will Not Work
    May 20 2026

    As a blogger, I hear about lots of projects to "solve debate", or "disagree better", or "map arguments". Often these are ACX grant applications. I always turn them down. They're well-intentioned, sophisticated, and doomed.

    I appreciate that Internet arguments usually don't go well, that there are lots of ways to improve them, and that this is a worthy cause. But I've also seen a dozen projects of this sort fail. Here's why I think yours will too:

    "Debate" almost never corresponds to mappable arguments. The simplest "solve debate" proposal is the argument map. Some technology helps people decompose arguments into premises and conclusions, then lets skeptics point out where the premises are wrong, or where the conclusion doesn't follow from the premise.

    But almost no real argument works that way.

    https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-attempt-to-solve-debate-will
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    9 min
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