Best of astralcodexten.com on Kiwi News
Most upvoted by Kiwi News readers
7 stories from astralcodexten.com have been shared on Kiwi News since 5 September 2023, with 16 upvotes and 5 comments in total. The latest was shared on 5 March 2026. They are listed below, most upvoted first.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Sam Altman wants $7 Trillion
Sam Altman reportedly wants $7 trillion to scale up AI, and the author uses rough scaling estimates to argue this would be needed for future GPT models. The author projects that GPT-6 could cost about $75 billion and GPT-7 about $2 trillion, based on each GPT generation costing roughly 30 times more than the last. The article says these figures require vast amounts of compute, electricity, and training data, which the author considers hard to obtain. The author also argues that a centralized push for $7 trillion would contradict OpenAI's earlier compute overhang argument for gradual AI progress.
- Prospectus On Próspera
Próspera is a private charter city project in Honduras, and the article examines how it is structured and whether the model could work. The Honduran Congress passed a ZEDE law in 2013 that the Supreme Court had earlier struck down, and Próspera became the first ZEDE, a 58-acre tract on the island of Roatan. The author describes Próspera as a platform for a network of hubs, with a planned hub near La Ceiba, and says that in practice it currently consists of a tract of land with about three buildings.
- A cyclic theory of subcultures
David Chapman's account of subculture decline, which describes takeovers by sociopaths, does not match the author's experience, who instead describes a gradual decline in asabiyyah among well-meaning participants. Adapting Peter Turchin's civilizational cycles, the author outlines phases: a growth phase where a new movement offers open status to early joiners, a stagflation phase where the frontier closes, and an involution phase marked by fragmentation, counterelites and criticism. The movement may then institutionalize or return to a low-growth state, and the author says EA is not yet in full involution.
- Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman
Slave morality, as Nietzsche described it, is a set of values that encourages people to shrink themselves and avoid being judged on accomplishments, and it is argued to deserve scrutiny rather than acceptance as simply correct. Bentham's Bulldog holds that objecting to slave morality amounts to objecting to morality itself, a view this argument disputes. Ozy Brennan's self-help post "The Life Goals Of Dead People" is cited as an example of slave-morality ideals, such as not wanting to offend anyone or take up space. Early Christian saints are contrasted with Achilles, and Nietzsche's Superman is raised as a possible alternative to both systems.
- Mantic Monday: Groundhog Day
Prediction markets suggest that the Pentagon's "supply chain risk" designation of Anthropic, the first ever given to an American firm, has had little lasting effect on the company's valuation. Ventuals.com's perpetual future on Anthropic stock fell from about $550 billion to $475 billion after the designation, then returned to $550 billion within a day or two. Anthropic's blog post says the designation, if formally adopted, would affect only Claude use in Department of War contract work, and Claude rose from #120 on the App Store in January to #1 that weekend.
- Impact Market Mini-Grants Results
The ACX and Manifold Markets mini-grant impact market ran a test in which investors funded 18 forecasting-related projects, and after six months of judging, only three projects returned money to their investors on net, with the organizers spending $31K in total. Among the highlighted projects, Max Morawski's University of Maryland rationality education workshops were valued at $7,500, giving investor Benjamin Cosman a 25x return. OPTIC Forecasting Tournament's investors, led by Domenic Denicola, were set to turn $3,306 into $6,072. Marcus Abramovitch recommended $50,000 for Devansh Mehta's blockchain-based impact assessment project in India, while three of the other four judges recommended lower amounts.
- How Are The Gay Younger Brothers Doing?
The fraternal birth order effect is best understood as tied to older siblings in general, with older brothers exerting a slightly stronger effect than older sisters. A Dutch study of nine million people by Ablaza, Kabatek, and Perales found that replacing an older sister with an older brother was associated with a 12.5% increase in the probability of entering a same-sex union. By contrast, a 2006 Danish study by Frisch and Hviid of about two million people found no clear birth order effect, and Vilsmeier et al.'s meta-analysis reported confidence intervals that included zero.