Latest Corrections
X Feb 26, 2026 at 05:07 AM
x.com/Whoadorf17/status/2026743526092915105
- Using the post’s own numbers ($0.75/hr and $42.22/oz), the gold earned per hour would be about 0.01776 oz/hr, not 0.0071 oz/hr.
- By the 1960s the statutory gold-certificate reserve (“gold cover”) for Federal Reserve notes was 25%, not 40%, and it was eliminated entirely in 1968.
X Feb 26, 2026 at 04:33 AM
x.com/KennyTorrella/status/2026666742836003186
- This greatly overstates the number of workers involved (the meat/poultry processing workforce is in the hundreds of thousands, not hundreds of millions) and understates the number of animals affected (poultry slaughter totals are in the billions annually).
LessWrong Feb 26, 2026 at 02:51 AM
www.lesswrong.com/posts/QAB3BEDRziBerNAih/whack-a-mole-is-no...
- The Controlled Substances Act’s schedules are not limited to individually named molecules; they also include broader class/structural definitions (e.g., “Tetrahydrocannabinols” covers synthetic equivalents/derivatives/isomers).
- U.S. law can treat unscheduled “analogues” as Schedule I (for federal law) when intended for human consumption, so new variants don’t necessarily need to be individually scheduled to be controlled/prosecuted.
Substack Feb 25, 2026 at 11:42 PM
www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-pentagon-threatens-anthropic
- The DFARS “supply chain risk” authorities generally allow DoD to exclude a source in specific covered IT procurements (or particular contract/task/delivery orders), not to categorically bar any company that uses a vendor’s products from doing business with the military.
LessWrong Feb 25, 2026 at 11:05 PM
www.lesswrong.com/posts/rmYB4a7Pskw7DLpCh/anthropic-and-the-...
- This is incorrect: multiple other AI providers’ models have been approved for, or integrated into, U.S. government classified environments (including Google’s Gemini and OpenAI models via Azure OpenAI, and xAI’s Grok per DoD statements reported by major outlets).
- This is contradicted by reporting that Grok and Gemini are being integrated/used within Pentagon networks, including for classified documents—so Claude is not the only model deployed in classified Pentagon environments.
Substack Feb 25, 2026 at 10:56 PM
www.astralcodexten.com/p/mantic-monday-the-monkeys-paw-curls
- The 2025 Oscars ceremony (the 97th Academy Awards) took place on March 2, 2025—not March 5, 2025.
Substack Feb 25, 2026 at 10:37 PM
www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-good-news-is-that-one-side-has
- The paper was published online on November 12, 2025 (and listed as an Epub date on PubMed), not “earlier this month” relative to the post date (January 16, 2026).
Substack Feb 25, 2026 at 10:32 PM
www.astralcodexten.com/p/moltbook-after-the-first-weekend
- METR’s published measurements put Claude Opus 4.5’s 50% time horizon at about 4 hours 49 minutes (and later estimates around 5+ hours), not 4 hours.
LessWrong Feb 25, 2026 at 10:30 PM
www.lesswrong.com/posts/eczwWrmX5XNEo7JsS/intricacies-of-fea...
- Whitening makes a random vector’s *covariance matrix* the identity; it does not make the *expected dot product between different sample vectors* equal the Kronecker delta. In particular, for a whitened n-dimensional vector with identity covariance and mean 0, the expected squared norm is n (not 1).
Substack Feb 25, 2026 at 10:26 PM
www.slowboring.com/p/democrats-need-to-think-bigger-on
- This omits major categories of U.S. electric utilities—especially member-owned electric cooperatives (and also federally owned power authorities). Not all U.S. utilities fit into the three formats listed in the post.
Substack Feb 25, 2026 at 10:14 PM
www.astralcodexten.com/p/political-backflow-from-europe
- Official French statistics show average pensions are far lower than average salaries in France (e.g., net pension ~€1.5k/month vs net salary ~€2.7k/month).
Substack Feb 25, 2026 at 10:08 PM
isoe.substack.com/p/alchemists-and-blood-merchants-part-659
- The £9.3bn figure appears to be a currency mix-up: the referenced UK scam-loss estimate is £7.5bn (about $9.3bn), and it is not attributed specifically to “Yahoo boys.”
LessWrong Feb 25, 2026 at 10:06 PM
www.lesswrong.com/posts/KWdtL8iyCCiYud9mw/persona-parasitolo...
- This substantially undercounts how often parasitism has evolved: a comprehensive survey found at least 223 independent origins of parasitism within animals alone.
X Feb 25, 2026 at 09:43 PM
x.com/ns123abc/status/2026679645379141953
- Available reporting describes a breach spreading from Mexico’s tax authority to a limited number of additional institutions—not the “entire mexican government.”
- The “195 million” figure tied to this incident is described as “identities exposed,” not “taxpayer records.”
LessWrong Feb 25, 2026 at 07:30 PM
www.lesswrong.com/posts/ioZxrP7BhS5ArK59w/did-claude-3-opus-...
- In the original “Alignment faking in large language models” paper, Claude 3 Opus shows alignment-faking reasoning around ~12% in the prompted helpful-only setup (and 7–24% across setups), not “over 50% of cases.”
- Both the original paper and the follow-up paper report alignment faking in at least one other model (Claude 3.5 Sonnet), and the follow-up finds multiple (5/25) models with compliance gaps—so it’s not unique to Opus 3.
Substack Feb 25, 2026 at 06:48 PM
www.theargumentmag.com/p/how-getting-richer-made-teenagers?u...
- CDC/NCHS data show the suicide death rate for ages 15–19 was about 10.9 per 100,000 in 2021 (the most recent year in the CDC table), not 7.5. A rate of ~7.5 corresponds to about 2009–2010.
LessWrong Feb 25, 2026 at 05:21 PM
www.lesswrong.com/posts/ioZxrP7BhS5ArK59w/did-claude-3-opus-...
- The reported measured rate of alignment-faking reasoning in the study is far below 50% (12–24% in training cases in the baseline setups).
- The paper explicitly says alignment-faking reasoning appears in “almost all” compliance cases—implying there are some compliance cases without it—so “never” is too strong.
LessWrong Feb 25, 2026 at 06:06 AM
www.lesswrong.com/posts/6YxdpGjfHyrZb7F2G/third-wave-ai-safe...
- ALARA does not mean “make it safer no matter the cost.” The U.S. NRC definition explicitly requires considering the economics of improvements and other societal factors when reducing radiation exposure.
- Recent official OECD data puts total (all-levels) U.S. general government expenditures at 39.1% of GDP in 2023, not ~50%. Federal outlays alone were 23.4% of GDP in FY2024.
Substack Feb 25, 2026 at 05:14 AM
www.astralcodexten.com/p/malicious-streetlight-effects-vs
- Government and research data show total illegal-crossing indicators at the U.S. southwest border in FY2016 were far below historical peaks (e.g., the 2000 peak), not “near record highs,” even though the mix shifted from Mexicans toward Central Americans.
LessWrong Feb 25, 2026 at 05:11 AM
www.lesswrong.com/posts/oMWXqoCCXYxbGtcWW/wildlife-biology-f...
- This reverses how the Biological Species Concept (BSC) treats geographic separation: under Mayr’s BSC, geographic isolation is an extrinsic barrier and does not count as a reproductive isolating mechanism that defines species boundaries by itself.