Scott Alexander responds to Steven Pinker’s arguments about AI, intelligence and risk, reviving a public dispute without a confirmed debate.
An Open Letter To Steven Pinker On AI
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Science
256 posts
Nature’s Capacity To ‘Bounce Back’ When Species Are Lost Is Overestimated: Study
A global analysis finds most ecosystem benefits rise with biodiversity, challenging the idea that other species can readily replace those lost.
Curiosity Blog, Sols 5029-5035: Back In The Lab
Curiosity completed CheMin work on a Basque Lakes sample and ran SAM’s laser spectrometer as the rover team weighs further analysis.
Dust: Pretraining Transformers Without Backpropagation
Q Labs reports that Dust can pretrain transformer language models using activation perturbations, but its results remain experimental and compute-intensive.
Opus 5.5 Agents Discover Two Room-temperature Magnetic Semiconductor Candidates
Vals AI reports simulations of two Luttinger-compensated magnetic semiconductor candidates, including one newly designed compound. Experimental confirmation is pending.
Open Thread 454
Astral Codex Ten’s Open Thread 454 shares community notices, new Fatima document translations, archived book reviews and an AI safety invitation.
APOD: 2026 October 4 – Supernumerary Rainbows Over New Jersey
NASA’s October 4, 2026 APOD explains a 2018 New Jersey photograph showing at least five supernumerary rainbows after Hurricane Florence.
Heading Home: NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 Concludes Station Science Mission
NASA says Crew-12 is scheduled to return from the ISS in early October after conducting research on health, materials, microbes and space manufacturing.
APOD: 2026 October 3 – Selfie At Vera Rubin Ridge
NASA’s October 3, 2026 APOD features a Curiosity rover selfie made from 61 images at Vera Rubin Ridge, captured on Mars in January 2018.
Science-Themed Halloween Costumes: A Halloween Guide
Find creative science-themed Halloween costumes for kids, adults, and groups, plus simple DIY ideas, budget tips, and practical safety advice.
