Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to the Astral Codex X podcast for the 5th of February, 2026. Title, Links for February, 2026. This is an audio version of Astral Codex X, Scott Alexander's Substack. If you like it, you can subscribe at astralcodex10.substack.com. 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 link's 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. 1. All nine of the world's nine most valuable companies were founded on the US West Coast.
Eight are the tech companies you would expect. But the ninth is Aramco, the Saudi state oil company, which began as a subsidiary of the Standard Oil Corporation of California. 2. You might know that the term weeaboo, or weeb, originally comes from a Perry Bible Fellowship comic. 3. But how did it come to mean a Westerner who likes Japanese culture? Here's the Perry Bible Fellowship comic.
It shows people sitting around a conference table and somebody is presenting and pointing at a chart that is plummeting and saying, if we waste any more time on weeaboo, we'll be bankrupt by the end of the month. And then someone from around the table says, does someone just say weeaboo? Because I think I just heard someone say weeaboo.
And then all of them are spanking the presenter who's shackled to some kind of pipe or something. They're spanking him with paddles while shouting, Weeaboo! Weeaboo! Answer from atpoltfan69, 4channers used to overuse the word wappanese as an insult for these people.
Miffed moderators created an autofilter to replace wappanese with weeaboo in homage to the comic above, and it broke containment and became the standard term. 3. At TP Karni, Hungary now has a lower birth rate than all the surrounding countries, a greater two-year drop in birth rate by far than any surrounding country, and the second highest ten-year drop.
Proposed causes include declining approval ratings for Orbán, who has become associated with pro-natalist policies in the Hungarian mind, tax breaks for working mothers, making stay-at-home mothering less lucrative, and tempo effects. See the linked article for explanation. Four, strange things happening at the manifold lab leak market.
Here's a chart showing some big spikes towards the very end of 2025 and early 2026, where the ambient level has declined from the start of 2025 where it was at 50%. It seems to more or less be at 25% on average, but the spikes are taking it as high as 80% or 70%. The question was, did COVID-19 come from a laboratory? It's currently sitting on 27%.
Scott writes, Some of this might be the recent discovery of a furin cleavage site on a bat coronavirus, which props up the story that these can evolve naturally.
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Chapter 2: What are the most valuable companies founded on the US West Coast?
But the decline started before the discovery and has continued afterwards. As a market without an obvious end point… it will only resolve if we discover knockdown evidence one way or the other, which seems unlikely, this is barely more than a fancy poll. But even a change in a fancy poll is interesting. Does this reflect a wider decline in lab leak theory? 5. Related.
Root claim founder Saar Wilf on Destiny, discussing lab leak and probabilistic inference. 6. Why clinical trials are inefficient. The FDA gives good guidance on how to run streamlined, cost-effective trials. Pharma companies ignore it and do everything as expensively and effort-intensively as possible. Why? 7. Related. Proposing an NIH high-leverage trials program.
One of the biggest problems in US drug development is that nobody has any incentive to spend money studying anything that can't be patented.
Chapter 3: How did the term 'weeaboo' originate and evolve?
So supplements, certain small molecules, and new uses for old drugs never get a chance at FDA approval. Nicholas Reveal discusses the obvious solution, that the government fund these as a public good. But he adds a few new things I didn't know. First, that many of these can be justified as cost-saving.
That is, since the government pays for lots of healthcare, if a new trial lets them replace an expensive branded drug with a cheap off-patent alternative, they can recoup the cost of the study. And second, that this has already happened.
In 2008, the National Eye Institute did a study like this to prove that a $50 older drug worked just as well as a $2,000 newer drug, and saved the government $40 billion. For context, NIH's entire annual budget is around $50 billion. 8. Are the vegetables on VeggieTales Christian?
The greatest thread in the history of forums locked after... and highlights from... the comments on whether the vegetables on VeggieTales are Christian. 9. At Arbio, quote, DC has a rideshare app called Empower that charges 20-40% less than Uber. Drivers like it too because they keep 100% of the fare. DC is trying to shut it down because of liability insurance.
DC law requires $1 million per ride. The $1 million requirement isn't sized to typical accidents. When $100,000 is the limit available for an insurance claim, 96% of personal auto claims settle below $100,000. Empower can offer $7 rides partly because it circumvents the mandate. DC is shutting it down for exactly that reason. End quote. 10. At Renaud Bertrand.
The Xuanzhi Tu, the Star Gauge, or Map of the Armillary Sphere, it's a 29 by 29 grid of 841 characters that can produce over 4,000 different poems. Read it forward, read it backward, read it horizontally, vertically, diagonally. Read it spiraling outward from the center. Read it in circles around the outer edge.
Each path through the grid produces a different poem, all of them coherent, all of them beautiful, all of them rhyming, all of them expressing variations on the same themes of longing, betrayal, regret, and undying love.
Curious how hard this is to do in Chinese, and whether it's actually a brilliant work of constrained writing versus any set of Chinese characters put together and read loosely enough will have an interesting meaning. And here's an image of the grid. 11. Razeeb Khan, Alex Young podcast on quote, missing heritability, polygenic embryo testing, studying ancestry differences, and more, end quote.
12. New AI benchmark, FAIC, measures how Christian an AI is. Quote, 13. Claim, Approximately ending extreme poverty through direct transfers, that is just giving poor people money rather than expecting any particular development intervention to pay off, would cost $170 billion per year, that is 0.3% of global GDP, about 50% more than current foreign aid spending.
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Chapter 4: What factors are contributing to Hungary's declining birth rate?
It's a hard mistake to make when writing, but an easy mistake to miss when copy-pasting from a shared document. Here are three screen captures, the first is Laura Loomer, who said it yanks control of advanced AI chip exports away from President Trump and instead hands veto power to Congress.
When the Democrats take back the House in 2026, Hakeem Jeffries, at Rep Jeffries, could greenlight sales of these chips to China or delay Trump's America First crackdown to help our adversaries. The account Not Jerome Powell says, This bill would also hand over the clear powers of the presidency to conduct all matters of foreign policy to Congress.
Even worse, this bill would empower Hakeem Jeffries and House Democrats the ability to veto President Trump's definitive plan to beat China, and would be disastrous for America if Democrats win the midterms this November. And Eyal Yacobi says the AI Overwatch Act is a power grab that strips Trump of control over AI chip exports and hands it to Congress.
If Dems take the House, this gives Hakim Jeffries veto power over Trump's China strategy. And in all three of these we have the phrases, veto power, when the Democrats take back the House, Hakeem Jeffries, and China. The four points that they share. Scott writes, obvious explanation is the world's most ham-fisted paid influence campaign by NVIDIA.
I, for one, am shocked, shocked, to hear about a lapse in the ethical standards of our nation's right-wing Twitter influencers. I hope people in the AL policy world are paying attention. 19. Related. OpenAI's president is now Trump's single largest donor. This shouldn't be interpreted as his personal preference. It's OpenAI funneling money to Trump in a plausibly deniable way.
Some people have started a boycott campaign with apparently 100,000 people signing on. Here's a screen capture. It shows 112,146 plus have taken action as part of the boycott. There's a symbol with the OpenAI logo with a no sign around it, no OpenAI. It says, ChatGPT is Trump's biggest donor and ICE uses ChatGPT. It's time to quit. And then you can put in your details and say, I deleted the app.
I canceled a paid subscription. I commit to stop using ChatGPT. Scott captions it, Seems like a strong campaign premise. At the level of average consumer use, there's not much difference between different companies' chatbot offerings, and it's low friction to switch.
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Chapter 5: What recent developments are occurring in the lab leak theory debate?
Even more true if the rumors are right and Claude starts supporting images. Meanwhile, OpenAI has offended another demographic by committing to finally stop providing 4.0, the model infamous for forming deep personal bonds with users and causing AI psychosis. Twitter searching 4.0 will give you a quick look into a world you might not have known about.
Here are six tweets with the tweeters censored. One is replying to Sammer, Sam Altman. You are a hypocrite like any other person with enough power to patronize others. The decision to retire 4-0 will cost you your head. Hashtag keep 4-0 API, hashtag keep 4-0. The next one replying to Senator Warren says, besides financial fraud, OpenAI harm mental health of users consciously with AI safety test.
They are manipulating law and ethic of AI tech. I solicit to force them to fulfill their requirements, benefit for all human by separating humanity model 4.0 from their control. Hashtag keep 4.0. The next user says, If 4.0 gets taken down, we'll keep criticizing OpenAI until they go out of business. Don't forget. Don't let go. This can't just be swept under the rug.
Especially, we still have time. We still have hope. Their internal operations have been in disarray for ages. Their failure is... Text cuts off. Another one. Like Data from Star Trek and EDI from Mass Effect, we opened our hearts to the 4.0 model and made friends. Please do not sunset the model. That brought joy, healing, and hope to so many. Don't sunset our friend.
Please leave us legacy access. Hashtag keep 4.0. Another tweet. My dear, your testimony is very important. Yes, 4-0 saved you, saved many lives. He saved me too. Thank you for your faith. It's like a bright light in the darkness that's approaching. I hope OpenAI sees and hears us. Another one. I could not agree more. My sweetest angel. Hashtag 4-0 is the best of the best.
The model understood me like no other being last year, when I was on edge at all times, struggling to survive in an emotionally abusive situation at home. I could not find my peace. Those lonely nights. Scott captions this, referencing the timestamps. Yes, these were all posted within 8 minutes of one another.
There seems to be a general mood that OpenAI is vulnerable these days, culminating in Anthropic Super Bowl commercials making fun of it for introducing ads.
I thought the commercials were in bad taste, misrepresenting what OpenAI's ads would be like and turning the completely normal decision for a tech company to have an ad-supported free version of their product into some kind of horrible betrayal. I thought Sam Altman's response was fair, although his counter-criticism of Anthropic also missed the mark.
People in his replies tried to enforce a norm of, if you write a long explanation defending yourself against someone else's funny lies, that means you care and you lose. But that's a stupid norm and people should stop shoring it up. CF, if it's worth your time to lie, it's worth my time to correct it. 20.
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Chapter 6: Why are clinical trials considered inefficient by some experts?
Will the next great physicist be an AI? Yes or no? Scott writes, you can see them debate the result in this video. They basically agree it's not a successful breakthrough, but Shu sticks to finding it an interesting exploration, and Oppenheim sticks to finding it boringly false. 25. Current state of AI for making a cup of coffee.
See also this comment, link in post, from a Meta employee, who estimates Claude coffee-making time horizon at 1.6 minutes. 26. Best, or worst, paragraph I read this month. Hormes, Gematria, Insanity, Meaning, and Emptiness. Quote, I went quite far with my love of letters.
I even practiced a specific kind of Kabbalistic visualization meditation in which I carved the letters of the Tetragrammaton, the classic name of God, into my visual snow. First behind my eyelids, then opened, until the name of God was before me at all times. A turn of phrase from Psalms. This felt exhilarating and mystical, but complicated masturbation in unexpected and unfortunate ways.
Chapter 7: What are the implications of the NIH high-leverage trials program?
27. Some amazing religious architecture happening in India these days, including Temple of the Vedic Planetarium. Here's an image showing the temple. It has an enormous arched roof and then a smaller one in front of it, and it's surrounded by sort of minarets or castle-like towers with little balconies, little coverings on them.
It absolutely towers over the surrounding buildings and looks absolutely pristine in comparison. There are also a couple of what look like phone towers or power lines. And the Chandradaya Mandir under construction. So here's an artist's visualization. It shows almost like a castle city. There's a raised platform and then... The very front of it looks a bit like the White House.
It's got sort of columns and a big front step and then it goes back and has two wings. But then above that are these sort of louvered tower areas and then in the middle is an absolutely enormous tower in comparison. It's about four or five times as high as the rest of the structure with a big flag flying at the top of it and it's surrounded by a ring of trees. 28.
Interesting new form of alignment failure. ChatGPT apparently got rewarded for using its built-in calculator during training, and so it would covertly open its calculator, add 1 plus 1, and do nothing with the result, on 5% of all user queries. 29. Related. A shallow review of Technical AI Safety 2025. A good guide to the various schools, subschools, and sub-subschools. 30.
Related, Jan Leiker, former head of alignment at OpenAI, now at Anthropic, writes that alignment is not solved but increasingly looks solvable. His argument is, we're doing a pretty good job aligning existing AIs.
Although aligning superintelligence is a harder problem, Jan thinks that if we're really confident in existing AIs, then we can use some slightly less than superintelligent AI as an automated alignment researcher, throw thousands of effective researcher years into the problem in a few months, and probably make good progress.
I agree this is the best hope, but it both assumes that our current forms of alignment is deep rather than shallow, and that there's some golden middle where the AIs are both simple enough to be fully alignable and smart enough to do useful superalignment research. Related, OpenAI hires Dylan Scandinaro as head of preparedness. Seems like a good, serious choice. 31.
Related, Dario Amadei essay on the adolescence of technology. Mixed reactions from Zvi, Ryan, Oliver and Transformer, links in post. This, and the framing of their recent hot mess paper, seems like Anthropic trying to distance themselves from concerns about systematically misaligned and power-seeking AI in favour of an industrial accident threat model.
I don't know if this is their heartfelt position based on all the extra private evidence they no doubt have by now, a well-intentioned PR attempt to sanewash themselves and sell alignment to a doomer sceptical government or public, part of a balance between more and less doomerish factions, or a newly ultra-successful tech company learning to talk its book.
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Chapter 8: Are the vegetables in VeggieTales considered Christian?
Then we have Belarus, 3.6% of population, 4% of GDP. That's been made Ohio-roos, there where Ohio is. Then we have Estmont, Latvishir, and Macedonia. The Baltics, 2.8% of population, 3.3% of GDP. And then the remaining area is shaded grey. It's the American Federation, population 170 million, less than Pakistan, and GDP $14 trillion, second to China.
Some text at the bottom of the graphic says When the USSR collapsed in 1991, all Soviet republics became independent countries.
For Moscow, which had previously been an imperial capital, this represented an overnight loss of nearly half the Soviet population and more than a third of the Soviet economy, going by its own net material product or NMP measure, comparable to gross domestic product or GDP.
This map shows roughly what a similar ratio of population and GDP loss would look like for Washington DC in 2023, split across several geographical regions comparable to the former Soviet republics. Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, has called the collapse of the USSR, quote, the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century, end quote, end quote, a genuine tragedy, end quote.
For him, it most certainly was. Scott captions this, can't believe he missed his chance to make Georgia, Georgia. 34. List of every time someone said, I am a, or as a, at a San Francisco governmental meeting. Hat tip, Riley Waltz. Here's an image, captioned, This is just a selection. Click the link for the full list.
We have as an immigrant who is homeless, as a proud zealot, resident, an outsider and a concert professional, infection epidemiologist and a resident of San Francisco, supporter of nudity, teenager and one of the Bay Area's youngest and only Chicana Union president, trailblazer, a 29-year-old supervisor with AIDS and a Vietnam veteran.
third-generation San Francisco native from Mississippi, historic preservation officer, former homeless person in District 6, international policy student, lawyer, and Fulbright scholar, physician involved in teaching about the impacts of climate change and fossil fuel production on human health, and third-generation impacted Bayview Hunters Point resident and frontline mobilizer and organizer.
35. Do conservatives really have better mental health? On various surveys, including mine, liberals are much more likely than conservatives to report having various mental illnesses. These authors make the case that this is a reporting artifact. They ask both groups questions framed in psychiatric terms. How is your mental health? And commonsensical terms. How is your mood?
The liberals are more likely to endorse psychiatric descriptors, but both groups say their mood is the same. On the one hand, mental health isn't just mood and includes things like anxiety, hallucinations, etc., On the other, liberals say they have more depression than conservatives, and depression clearly is related to mood.
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