AI Article Readings

In this article, John Psmith reviews Xenophon’s Anabasis as both a gripping ancient adventure story and a meditation on leadership under impossible pressure, using the retreat of the Ten Thousand to explore what it means to become an “operator”: someone who takes responsibility when institutions fail, keeps a fractious group alive, and cannot simply walk away once others depend on him.
https://open.substack.com/pub/thepsmiths/p/review-anabasis-by-xenophon?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web


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In this post, ryan_b reviews Tamler Sommers’ Why Honor Matters, exploring the case for honor as a local, social, psychologically realistic ethical framework rather than an abstract universal theory. The review walks through honor’s links to courage, hospitality, shame, solidarity, violence, revenge, and community, while keeping sight of its darker associations and the costs of trying to do without it entirely.
* 00:00 - Introduction
* 01:14 - One
* 03:52 - Two
* 07:42 - Three
* 11:38 - Four
* 16:18 - Five
* 20:34 - Six
* 23:34 - Conclusion
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LgbuyRpXxbMhiCDq9/book-review-why-honor-matters


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In this post, Ajeya Cotra expands on her claim that near-term AI timelines could make modern marriage “shorter” than we usually imagine, arguing that the Singularity could either cut lives off through catastrophic risk or transform them so radically that ordinary lifelong vows may no longer fit the world people find themselves in. The essay is less a rejection of marriage than a reframing of commitment under extreme uncertainty: even if “til death” might really mean “til death or the Singularity,” a finite marriage can still be profound, stabilising, and worth choosing.
https://open.substack.com/pub/acotra/p/til-death-or-the-singularity?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web


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In this post, Ajeya Cotra offers a clear, unsentimental framework for deciding whether to marry a long-term partner, treating marriage as a commitment device that enables deeper investment, trust, and shared life-building while also forcing a real tradeoff against possible alternatives. The piece walks through when “waiting for more information” stops being useful, how to evaluate a partner as cofounder, friend, and lover, and why the finite value of time may make endless searching costlier than it feels.
https://open.substack.com/pub/acotra/p/should-you-marry-her?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web


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In this post, Scott Alexander reviews The Dialectical Imagination as a way into the strange, slippery world of the Frankfurt School: its origins, its relationship to Marxism, its suspicion of capitalism and mass culture, and its insistence that criticism itself can be a kind of philosophical work. The piece is a witty, sceptical, and surprisingly sympathetic attempt to understand a school of thought often discussed through caricature, conspiracy, or second-hand reputation, asking what its members really believed, why they were so hard to pin down, and whether their ideas still echo through modern culture.
* 00:00 - Introduction
* 03:58 - Now The Wheels Of Heaven Stop, I Feel The Devil’s Riding Crop
* 09:47 - Papua New Guinea As Hot New Startup Hub
* 12:05 - Marxism-Lurianism Will Win
* 15:33 - If You Seek It, You Are Turning Away From It
* 21:25 - The Structure Of Unscientific Revolutions
* 24:26 - But Why Art Criticism?
* 36:05 - In Partial, Grudging Praise Of Herbert Marcuse
* 40:10 - Pessimism Of The Intellect, Pessimism Of The Will
* 49:54 - Did The Frankfurt School Cause Everything You Hate, And Should You Blame The Jews?
https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/book-review-the-dialectical-imagination?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web


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