Astral Codex Ten

Books: D

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Books: D

Books, collections, and literary works mentioned in the writing. This section collects the D slice of the category index.

Reference Index

Use the title to open the reference entry. Use the caret to expand a compact inline dossier with source context, issue trail, related pages, and outbound links.

Don Juan6 mentions across 6 issues

Don Juan is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between May 17, 2024 and October 11, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "List of all books reviewed below. Don Juan"; "Book review contest finalists are: ... Don Juan"; "I told myself that I’d review one, And so I guess we’ll settle for Don Juan". It most often appears alongside Dominion, How Language Began, How the War Was Won.

Article page
Don Juan
Mention count
6
Issue count
6
First seen
May 17, 2024
Last seen
October 11, 2024
Book title
Don Juan
Likely author
Amedeo Rothson
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Choose Book Review Finalists 2024
May 17, 2024 · Original source
...ites Collected Poems by C.P. Cavafy Consequences of Language Defining Death Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will Discrimination and Disparities Djinn Dominion Don Juan Don't Make No Waves, Don't Back No Losers Egypt's Golden Couple Elon Musk End Times Eothen Eve Food of the Gods For Whom the Bell Tolls Frankenstein Free Range Kids Fund...
Open Thread 334
June 17, 2024 · Original source
2: Book review contest finalists are: Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa, Dominion, Don Juan, Family That Couldn't Sleep, How Language Began, How The War Was Won, Nine Lives, Real Raw News, Silver Age Marvel Comics, Sixth Day, Spirit of Rationalism, Complete Rhyming Dictionary, The Pale King, Two Arms and a Head, and Ballad of the White Horse. Honorable mention to at least Catkin, Road of the King, World Empire Lost, Piranesi, Meme Machine, and Determined. I might promote some honorable mentions to finalists depending on how tolerant you all are of book reviews, and some others to honorable mention after I read more reviews. First review goes up this Friday! Thanks to everyone who entered.
Your Book Review: Don Juan
July 05, 2024 · Original source
But Byron? After all, it’s been a century Since George gave up his life to join the Greeks In breaking from their Turkish penitentiary Before the Brits could lap up their antiques. However great his corpus, what adventure re- Sung here can match its author’s final weeks? Yet still, I told myself that I’d review one, And so I guess we’ll settle for Don Juan.
Inline links: breaking, their antiques
Don Juan (rhymes with ‘through one,’ à la gringo) Dates back to — I don’t know — some days of yore. The legends say this playboy struck a bingo With women wed and single, rich and poor: He’d charm, disguise, connive — forgive the lingo — To please (ahem) his little matador, And shush his conscience, nagging at his vice, By crying, “Tan largo me lo fiàis!”
Inline links: “Tan largo me lo fiàis!”
Don Juan’s childhood was a true anomaly; His father was a serial philanderer, So Juan’s learning was awash with homily: His brilliant mother (I don’t want to slander her) Defied her intellect and raised a qualm all ye Free-thinkers understand — or so I’ll gander: her Son learned the classics, but with strict omission Of sex, to keep him from his pop’s tradition;
Open Thread 338
July 15, 2024 · Original source
2: Several people speculated that the recent Don Juan review was secretly by me. It wasn’t, but unrelatedly I have been working on a Don-Juan-related project, which I might show you at some point. I’m mentioning this now so that I don’t seem like I’m plagiarizing the (excellent) review.
Inline links: the recent Don Juan review
Vote In The 2024 Book Review Contest
September 27, 2024 · Original source
1: Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa 2: Dominion 3: Don Juan 4: The Family That Couldn’t Sleep 5: How Language Began 6: Real Raw News 7: Two Arms And A Head 8: How The War Was Won 9: Silver Age Marvel Comics 10: The Complete Rhyming Dictionary And Poet’s Craft Book 11: The History Of The Rise And Influence Of The Spirit Of Rationalism In Europe 12: The Pale King 13: Nine Lives 14: The Ballad Of The White Horse
Inline links: Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa, Dominion, Don Juan, The Family That Couldn’t Sleep, How Language Began, Real Raw News, Two Arms And A Head, How The War Was Won, Silver Age Marvel Comics, The Complete Rhyming Dictionary And Poet’s Craft Book, The History Of The Rise And Influence Of The Spirit Of Rationalism In Europe, The Pale King, Nine Lives, The Ballad Of The White Horse
Book Review Contest 2024 Winners
October 11, 2024 · Original source
Don Juan, reviewed by Amedeo Rothson. Amedeo has been called “the greatest writer who has ever lived,” namely by himself. He writes occasional essays and still-more-occasional verse at The Titan’s Breakfast.
Inline links: Don Juan, The Titan’s Breakfast
Dominion5 mentions across 5 issues

Dominion is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between May 17, 2024 and October 11, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "List of all books reviewed below. Dominion"; "Book review contest finalists are: ... Dominion"; "Matthew Scully, author of Dominion". It most often appears alongside Don Juan, How Language Began, How the War Was Won.

Article page
Dominion
Mention count
5
Issue count
5
First seen
May 17, 2024
Last seen
October 11, 2024
Book title
Dominion
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Choose Book Review Finalists 2024
May 17, 2024 · Original source
...oosing Elites Collected Poems by C.P. Cavafy Consequences of Language Defining Death Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will Discrimination and Disparities Djinn Dominion Don Juan Don't Make No Waves, Don't Back No Losers Egypt's Golden Couple Elon Musk End Times Eothen Eve Food of the Gods For Whom the Bell Tolls Frankenstein Free Range...
Open Thread 334
June 17, 2024 · Original source
2: Book review contest finalists are: Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa, Dominion, Don Juan, Family That Couldn't Sleep, How Language Began, How The War Was Won, Nine Lives, Real Raw News, Silver Age Marvel Comics, Sixth Day, Spirit of Rationalism, Complete Rhyming Dictionary, The Pale King, Two Arms and a Head, and Ballad of the White Horse. Honorable mention to at least Catkin, Road of the King, World Empire Lost, Piranesi, Meme Machine, and Determined. I might promote some honorable mentions to finalists depending on how tolerant you all are of book reviews, and some others to honorable mention after I read more reviews. First review goes up this Friday! Thanks to everyone who entered.
Your Book Review: Dominion
June 28, 2024 · Original source
Matthew Scully, author of Dominion, is an unlikely animal welfare advocate. He’s a conservative Christian who worked as a speechwriter for George W. Bush. That’s like finding out that Greta Thunberg’s Chief of Staff spent their spare time writing a 400-page, densely researched book called “Guns Are Good, Actually.”
Scully is like a right-wing, vegetarian, Christian, David Foster Wallace. If you read DFW’s Consider the Lobster and thought, “I wish someone would write a full length book with this vibe, where a very talented and surprisingly funny writer excoriates problematic industries,” Dominion is the book for you.
Inline links: Consider the Lobster
If you are intrigued by the type of person who would use their ingroup status to get other conservatives to let their guard down, only to roast them in print for their views on animals, Dominion is the book for you.
Vote In The 2024 Book Review Contest
September 27, 2024 · Original source
1: Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa 2: Dominion 3: Don Juan 4: The Family That Couldn’t Sleep 5: How Language Began 6: Real Raw News 7: Two Arms And A Head 8: How The War Was Won 9: Silver Age Marvel Comics 10: The Complete Rhyming Dictionary And Poet’s Craft Book 11: The History Of The Rise And Influence Of The Spirit Of Rationalism In Europe 12: The Pale King 13: Nine Lives 14: The Ballad Of The White Horse
Inline links: Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa, Dominion, Don Juan, The Family That Couldn’t Sleep, How Language Began, Real Raw News, Two Arms And A Head, How The War Was Won, Silver Age Marvel Comics, The Complete Rhyming Dictionary And Poet’s Craft Book, The History Of The Rise And Influence Of The Spirit Of Rationalism In Europe, The Pale King, Nine Lives, The Ballad Of The White Horse
Book Review Contest 2024 Winners
October 11, 2024 · Original source
Dominion, reviewed by Drew Housman. Drew writes about animal welfare on his Substack and about all kinds of stuff on his personal blog. He also wrote a book about his college days and early career. He’s interested in working with animal welfare orgs and can be reached at drewhous@gmail.com.
Inline links: Dominion, his Substack, personal blog, wrote a book, drewhous@gmail.com
Double Fold4 mentions across 4 issues

Double Fold is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between April 30, 2021 and July 12, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "When Double Fold by Nicholson Baker came out in 2001"; "Double Fold is little-known among the general public"; "The story of Double Fold might be said to begin in the 1930s with the advent of microfilming". It most often appears alongside Addiction By Design, Down and Out in Paris and London, How Children Fail.

Article page
Double Fold
Mention count
4
Issue count
4
First seen
April 30, 2021
Last seen
July 12, 2021
Book title
Double Fold
Likely author
Nicholson Baker
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Your Book Review: Double Fold
April 30, 2021 · Original source
When Double Fold by Nicholson Baker came out in 2001, it was described as The Jungle of the American library system. After 20 years, the book remains universally known, sometimes admired but often despised, among librarians. The reason for their belligerence is that Baker publicly revealed a decades-long policy of destruction of primary materials from the 19th and 20th centuries, based on a pseudoscientific notion that books on wood-pulp paper are quickly turning to dust, coupled with a misguided futuristic desire to do away with outdated paper-based media. As a consequence, perfectly well preserved books with centuries of life still ahead of them were hastily replaced with an inferior medium which has, at the moment that I am writing this review, already mostly gone the way of the dodo. Despite its notoriety among librarians, however, Double Fold is little-known among the general public, even compared to Baker’s other non-fiction and his novels.
The story of Double Fold might be said to begin in the 1930s with the advent of microfilming. The idea of photographing documents to make them more portable had been around at least since the 1870s, but it took 60 more years until microfilm technology was sufficiently advanced to become attractive for libraries. The basic idea was simple: you took pictures of every page of a book, put them together into a roll of film stored in a small box, and when someone wanted to “read” the book, they put the film into a large TV-like device that magnified the image onto a screen, with a pair of buttons that you could use to navigate left and right.
Rebecca Rego Barry was one of the researchers who benefited from a treasure trove of newspapers that had been saved from dispersal by Baker immediately before Double Fold was published. She used them to sift through a decade’s worth of Herald Tribune, searching for articles written by a columnist whom she was analyzing for her thesis. “Could the articles be found on microfilm? Theoretically they could, with another year and an extra set of eyes, if whoever had microfilmed it had done a decent job in the first place.”
Inline links: one of the researchers
Vote In The Book Review Contest!
June 18, 2021 · Original source
1: Order Without Law 2: On The Natural Faculties 3: Progress And Poverty 4: Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are? 5: Why Buddhism Is True 6: Double Fold 7: The Wizard And The Prophet 8: Through The Eye Of A Needle 9: The Years Of Lyndon Johnson 10: Addiction By Design 11: The Accidental Superpower 12: Humankind 13: The Collapse Of Complex Societies 14: Where’s My Flying Car? 15: Down And Out In Paris And London 16: How Children Fail 17: Plagues And Peoples
Inline links: Order Without Law, On The Natural Faculties, Progress And Poverty, Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are?, Why Buddhism Is True, Double Fold, The Wizard And The Prophet, Through The Eye Of A Needle, The Years Of Lyndon Johnson, Addiction By Design, The Accidental Superpower, Humankind, The Collapse Of Complex Societies, Where’s My Flying Car?, Down And Out In Paris And London, How Children Fail, Plagues And Peoples
Book Review Contest: Winners
July 10, 2021 · Original source
Order Without Law, reviewed by Phil Hazelden Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are, reviewed by Jeff Russell Why Buddhism Is True, reviewed by Eve Bigaj Double Fold, reviewed by Boštjan P The Wizard And The Prophet, reviewed by Maryana Through The Eye Of A Needle, reviewed by Tom Powell Years Of Lyndon Johnson, reviewed by Theodore Ehrenborg Addiction By Design, reviewed by Ketchup Duck The Accidental Superpower, reviewed by Jon Boguth Humankind, reviewed by Neil Roques The Collapse Of Complex Societies, reviewed by Etirabys Where's My Flying Car, reviewed by Jonathan P How Children Fail, reviewed by HonoreDB Plagues And Peoples, reviewed by Joel Ferris (who is looking for a job, email here)
Inline links: Order Without Law, Phil Hazelden, Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are, Jeff Russell, Why Buddhism Is True, Eve Bigaj, Double Fold, Boštjan P, The Wizard And The Prophet, Through The Eye Of A Needle, Years Of Lyndon Johnson, Addiction By Design, The Accidental Superpower, Humankind, The Collapse Of Complex Societies, Etirabys, Where's My Flying Car, How Children Fail, Plagues And Peoples, here
Open Thread 180
July 12, 2021 · Original source
3: I didn’t know this when writing the Book Review Winners post, but Boštjan, who wrote the review of Double Fold, has a whole blog about book-preservation-related issues, The Fate Of Books. If you enjoyed the review, consider checking it out. And although I’m posting this one in particular here because I missed it, also check out the blogs of the various other winners and finalists, which are posted on the thread.
Inline links: Book Review Winners, the review of, The Fate Of Books
Down and Out in Paris and London4 mentions across 4 issues

Down and Out in Paris and London is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between June 10, 2021 and October 14, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London is at least three things"; "If nothing else, Down and Out in Paris and London should serve as inspiration"; "the finalists are: 15: Down And Out In Paris And London". It most often appears alongside Addiction By Design, Double Fold, How Children Fail.

Mention count
4
Issue count
4
First seen
June 10, 2021
Last seen
October 14, 2021
Book title
Down and Out in Paris and London
Likely author
Whimsi
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Your Book Review: Down And Out In Paris And London
June 10, 2021 · Original source
George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London is at least three things; a highly entertaining, almost picaresque tale of rough-and-tumble living in Europe, a serious attempt to catalogue the numerous humiliations and injustices impoverished people were exposed to in Orwell’s time, and a stark comparison between life as a tramp who makes use of robust, if hellish and kafkaesque welfare resources, and as one who tries to get by working terrible jobs and living in disgusting places.
The notion that Orwell might be lying never occurs to the major. The fact that Orwell is now a tramp like all the others doesn’t matter either. What matters is that he was a gentleman, and therefore still is a gentleman, deep down in chakras. I suppose this is the cultural groundwork for the income-independent classism dicussed at length in Scott’s review of Fussell on Class. I imagine Orwell was laughing at himself on the inside, dissapointed in the knowledge that even months of starving and working as a scullion couldn’t change the fact that he was a upper middle class Etonian that served in the imperial police. But of course it’s that tension that makes this and all the rest of Orwell’s non-fiction so interesting. Whether he’s taking down a stampeding Burmese elephant in Shooting an Elephant or fighting Franco’s fascists alongside anarcho-syndicalists in Homage to Catalonia, there’s alway a sense that he’s somewhere he’s not supposed to be, bringing back forbidden knowledge from unexplored moral territory, so that it might sit comfortably on middle-class and public school library bookshelves. Orwell’s genius, as I see it, is in not being a genius. He was merely among the first to realize that ugly, uncouth, and unconscionable places and people might be worth a closer look, and that the lives of such people had much broader political and social significance than the reading public had yet dared to imagine. If nothing else, Down and Out in Paris and London should serve as inspiration to journalists and writers everywhere; it’s proof that if one wishes to write an important book, one need only write truthfully about the vaguely terrifying parts of society that the average person often sees, but never enters.
Inline links: Fussell on Class, Shooting an Elephant, Homage to Catalonia
Vote In The Book Review Contest!
June 18, 2021 · Original source
1: Order Without Law 2: On The Natural Faculties 3: Progress And Poverty 4: Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are? 5: Why Buddhism Is True 6: Double Fold 7: The Wizard And The Prophet 8: Through The Eye Of A Needle 9: The Years Of Lyndon Johnson 10: Addiction By Design 11: The Accidental Superpower 12: Humankind 13: The Collapse Of Complex Societies 14: Where’s My Flying Car? 15: Down And Out In Paris And London 16: How Children Fail 17: Plagues And Peoples
Inline links: Order Without Law, On The Natural Faculties, Progress And Poverty, Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are?, Why Buddhism Is True, Double Fold, The Wizard And The Prophet, Through The Eye Of A Needle, The Years Of Lyndon Johnson, Addiction By Design, The Accidental Superpower, Humankind, The Collapse Of Complex Societies, Where’s My Flying Car?, Down And Out In Paris And London, How Children Fail, Plagues And Peoples
Book Review Contest: Winners
July 10, 2021 · Original source
SECOND PLACE: Down And Out In Paris And London, reviewed by Whimsi
Inline links: Down And Out In Paris And London
Links For October
October 14, 2021 · Original source
14: Whimsi, author of the review of Down And Out In Paris And London that won second place in the book review contest here, reviews The Emperor, a book on the court of Haile Selassie of Ethiopia.
Inline links: reviews
Dune3 mentions across 3 issues

Dune is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between September 20, 2021 and August 13, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "explanations for why it shows up in Dune"; "Mentats in Dune"; "This contains spoilers for the Dune series". It most often appears alongside Spain, United States, 18th century.

Article page
Dune
Mention count
3
Issue count
3
First seen
September 20, 2021
Last seen
August 13, 2022
Book title
Dune
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Links For September
September 20, 2021 · Original source
2: The Story Of Adrenochrome: QAnon believes that elites are addicted to adrenochrome, a drug synthesized from the glands of tortured children. Where did this theory come from? The short version is “Hunter S Thompson made it up for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”. But read the long version for, among other things, explanations for why it shows up in Dune and A Clockwork Orange.
Inline links: The Story Of Adrenochrome
Your Book Review: The Castrato
June 03, 2022 · Original source
Socioeconomic upheaval of this magnitude could pave the way for the return of aristocracy, likely another key factor for the potential development of a castrati-like practice. In this neo-feudalist future, we would once again see large numbers of nobles who are, for all intents and purposes, above the law and public reproach. As in the past, these new kings and queens and dukes and duchesses could use their influence and wealth to sponsor transhuman programs that draw “volunteers” from their peasantry. Whether these programs will initially produce transhumans for entertainment (art, sport) or for labor (servants, guards), it seems likely that the line will eventually become blurred—for example, uber-athletes produced for athletic competition also coming to serve as soldiers (or vice versa). The historical and fictional trope of the court mage (e.g. Mentats in Dune, any number of sorcerers/mystics who have served kings such as Merlin, John Dee, or Rasputin) suggests that rulers may seek out (or create) individuals who have undergone some kind of transformation that gives them unique mental abilities. If these cognitively enhanced individuals offer their rulers a decisive strategic advantage in military or politics, arms race dynamics could ensue and demand for “court mages” could soar.
Inline links: neo-feudalist, trope of the court mage, John Dee
Your Book Review: God Emperor Of Dune
August 13, 2022 · Original source
[This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked. This contains spoilers for the Dune series. - SA]
As God Emperor of Dune begins, our attention is immediately drawn to people. Here, 3500 years after the chronological setting of the first novel, is immediate proof that humanity has survived in the form of a small group of people fleeing through a forest, wolves nipping at their heels.
The wolves belong to Leto Atreides II, the grandson of Duke Leto Atreides and son of Paul Muad’ib Atreides, the Kwisatz Haderach and protagonist of Dune I: The One You’ve Probably Read. At the end of the third book, Leto fused his body with Arakeen sandtrout, the larval form of the Sandworms on which the plot of the series mostly hangs. This symbiosis gave Leto super-human physical powers to match the clairvoyance already enjoyed by his family and allowed him to seize control of the galactic empire.
Dawn of Eurasia2 mentions across 2 issues

Dawn of Eurasia is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between June 13, 2021 and October 09, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Bruno Macaes' Dawn of Eurasia"; "his Disunited Nations and Dawn Of Eurasia review". It most often appears alongside Disunited Nations, ACTIV-6, Alexandros Marinos.

Article page
Dawn of Eurasia
Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
June 13, 2021
Last seen
October 09, 2022
Book title
Dawn of Eurasia
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Open Thread 176
June 13, 2021 · Original source
2: I asked you all to vote on entries from the Runners-Up Packet to promote to finalists. There were three clear winners - the two reviews I posted last week, and a review contrasting Peter Zeihan's Disunited Nations with Bruno Macaes' Dawn of Eurasia. I've already posted a Zeihan review, and I worry readers are getting tired of these reviews and don't have the patience for a semi-duplicate, so I'm awarding the new Zeihan review...some prize to be determined later, like "People's Choice" or something, that doesn't involve me making it a finalist. Don't worry, there will be money involved. If you want to read it, you can find it here as "Disunited Nations (2020) vs. Dawn of Eurasia (2017)"
Inline links: here
Open Thread 245
October 09, 2022 · Original source
7: Misha Saul, who won the Readers’ Choice in last year’s Book Review Contest for his Disunited Nations and Dawn Of Eurasia review, has a Substack, Kvetch, with posts like The Heroes We’re Allowed, Why Practice Judaism, and The Enigma Of Clarence Thomas. Check it out!
Inline links: Kvetch, The Heroes We’re Allowed, Why Practice Judaism, The Enigma Of Clarence Thomas
Dead Sea Scrolls2 mentions across 2 issues

Dead Sea Scrolls is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between December 22, 2025 and January 13, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "slatestarcodex.com"; "It would be hard enough to get the Dead Sea Scrolls". It most often appears alongside ACX, Adeline, Aella Simposium.

Article page
Dead Sea Scrolls
Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
December 22, 2025
Last seen
January 13, 2026
Book title
Dead Sea Scrolls
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Open Thread 413
December 22, 2025 · Original source
4: Thank you so much, and congratulations, to everyone who took the GWWC Pledge recently because of my post on the topic (a GWWC staff member told me Friday that it was 30 full pledges and 13 trial pledges, but more have come in since then). I’ve tried to give the promised permanent subscription to everyone involved. If you signed up but didn’t get yours, then either I didn’t see you, I misclicked something, or you have some kind of weird no-email-registered account that I can’t give subscriptions to - in any case, please email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com and we can sort it out. Please include in your email the address you’re registered on Substack with, if it’s different from the address you’re emailing me with.
Inline links: my post on the topic
SOTA On Bay Area House Party
January 13, 2026 · Original source
“Our big problem is the Bible. It would be hard enough to get the Dead Sea Scrolls; Israeli security is no laughing matter. But our lawyer says we have to destroy the original original. What even is that? Altman is pushing for us to find the Ark of the Covenant, but you can bet he’s not the one who’s going to have to open it afterwards.”
Deep Utopia2 mentions across 2 issues

Deep Utopia is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between October 17, 2024 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "His latest book breaks from his usual oeuvre. In Deep Utopia , he asks"; "If you made Zizek write fiction, you would get Deep Utopia"; "Deep Utopia feels less like an academic paper". It most often appears alongside 1108 R St, 11841 Wagner Street, 131 Colonie Center.

Article page
Deep Utopia
Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
October 17, 2024
Last seen
April 01, 2026
Book title
Deep Utopia
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Book Review: Deep Utopia
October 17, 2024 · Original source
His latest book breaks from his usual oeuvre. In Deep Utopia, he asks: “What if technology is really really good?”
Inline links: Deep Utopia
We can start by bounding the damage. Our deep utopia will know how to wirehead people safely. So worst-case scenario, if you absolutely can’t figure out anything else to do, you live in perfect bliss forever. Bostrom urges us not to reflexively turn up our noses at this outcome. Wireheading grosses us out because our best approximations for it - drugs, porn, etc - are tawdry and shallow. Actually-good wireheading would be neither. You could walk through the woods at sunrise, experiencing a combination of the joy you felt at the birth of your first child, the excitement Einstein experienced upon seeing the first glimmers of relativity, and the ecstasy of St. Teresa as she gazed upon the face of God. That afternoon, you could walk somewhere else, and feel an entirely different artisanal combination of blisses. “It feels so good that if the sensation were translated into tears of gratitude, rivers would overflow.”
Inline links: would be neither
If wireheading seems too meaningless, you can add in wireheaded-meaning. People often say that an MDMA trip or mystical vision was the most meaningful experience of their lives. It would be trivial for our Deep Utopians to hack your brain to see a world in a grain of sand or heaven in a wildflower. We're gonna mean so much, you might even get tired of meaning. And you'll say 'please, please, it's too much meaning. We can't take it anymore, Professor Bostrom, it's too much!'
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places
April 01, 2026 · Original source
Contact: Joe Nash Contact Info: helsinkirationalish[@]gmail[.]com Time: Wednesday, May 6th, 6:00 PM Location: Oluthuone Kaisla, Vilhonkatu 4. I will have the book Deep Utopia on the table. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9GG65WCW+PW Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/a995jZ2y2s9qWxjEy
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9GG65WCW+PW, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/a995jZ2y2s9qWxjEy
Determined2 mentions across 2 issues

Determined is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between June 17, 2024 and October 11, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Honorable mention to at least ... Determined"; "Determined , reviewed by Slippin Fall". It most often appears alongside Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa, Catkin, Dominion.

Article page
Determined
Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
June 17, 2024
Last seen
October 11, 2024
Book title
Determined
Likely author
Slippin Fall
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Open Thread 334
June 17, 2024 · Original source
2: Book review contest finalists are: Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa, Dominion, Don Juan, Family That Couldn't Sleep, How Language Began, How The War Was Won, Nine Lives, Real Raw News, Silver Age Marvel Comics, Sixth Day, Spirit of Rationalism, Complete Rhyming Dictionary, The Pale King, Two Arms and a Head, and Ballad of the White Horse. Honorable mention to at least Catkin, Road of the King, World Empire Lost, Piranesi, Meme Machine, and Determined. I might promote some honorable mentions to finalists depending on how tolerant you all are of book reviews, and some others to honorable mention after I read more reviews. First review goes up this Friday! Thanks to everyone who entered.
Book Review Contest 2024 Winners
October 11, 2024 · Original source
Determined, reviewed by Slippin Fall, who invites you to join him at Nobels in the Street where he will try to win himself, using zero math, a Nobel Prize every Monday for the next six Mondays. First up, on 10/14, the Nobel Prize in Physics. He sh*ts you not, and hopes to see you there.
Inline links: Determined, Nobels in the Street
Dilbert2 mentions across 2 issues

Dilbert is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between January 16, 2026 and January 21, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "I may be the only person to have read every Dilbert book before graduating elementary school"; "Gather them into one of his signature compendia"; "Dilbert is a relic of a simpler time". It most often appears alongside Adams, Alice, Coffee With Scott Adams.

Article page
Dilbert
Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
January 16, 2026
Last seen
January 21, 2026
Book title
Dilbert
Outbound links
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The Dilbert Afterlife
January 16, 2026 · Original source
There’s a running joke about how if you see a business that loses millions yearly, it’s probably run by some banker’s wife who’s getting subsidized to feel good about herself and pretend she has a high-powered job. I think this is approximately what was going on with Stacey’s. Adams made enough money off Dilbert that he could indulge his fantasies of being something more than “the Dilbert guy”. For a moment, he could think of himself as a temporarily-embarrassed businessman, rather than just a fantastically successful humorist. The same probably explains his forays into television (“Dilbert: The Animated Series”), non-Dilbert comics (“Plop: The Hairless Elbonian”), and technology (”WhenHub”, his site offering “live chats with subject-matter experts”, which was shelved after he awkwardly tried to build publicity by suggesting that mass shooting witnesses could profit by using his site to tell their stories.)
For the first part of my life, I was focused on making myself a worthy husband and parent, as a way to find meaning. That worked. But marriages don't always last forever, and mine eventually ended, in a highly amicable way. I'm grateful for those years and for the people I came to call my family. Once the marriage unwound, I needed a new focus. A new meaning. And so I donated myself to "the world," literally speaking the words out loud in my otherwise silent home. From that point on, I looked for ways I could add the most to people's lives, one way or another. That marked the start of my evolution from Dilbert cartoonist to an author of - what I hoped would be - useful books. By then, I believed I had condensed enough life lessons that I could start passing them on. I continued making Dilbert comics, of course. As luck would have it, I'm a good writer. My first book in the "useful" genre was How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. That book turned out to be a huge success, often imitated, and influencing a wide variety of people. I still hear every day how much that book changed lives. My plan to be useful was working. I followed up with my book Win Bigly, that trained an army of citizens how to be more persuasive, which they correctly saw as a minor super power. I know that book changed lives because I hear it often. You'll probably never know the impact the book had on the world, but I know, and it pleases me while giving me a sense of meaning that is impossible to describe. My next book, Loserthink, tried to teach people how to think better, especially if they were displaying their thinking on social media. That one didn't put much of a dent in the universe, but I tried. Finally, my book Reframe Your Brain taught readers how to program their own thoughts to make their personal and professional lives better. I was surprised and delighted at how much positive impact that book is having. I also started podcasting a live show called Coffee With Scott Adams, dedicated to helping people think about the world, and their lives, in a more productive way. I didn't plan it this way, but it ended up helping lots of lonely people find a community that made them feel less lonely. Again, that had great meaning for me. I had an amazing life. I gave it everything I had. If you got any benefits from my work, I'm asking you to pay it forward as best you can. That is the legacy I want.
Lesser lights may distance themselves from their art, but Adams radiated contempt for such surrender. He lived his whole life as a series of Dilbert strips. Gather them into one of his signature compendia, and the title would be Dilbert Achieves Self Awareness And Realizes That If He’s So Smart Then He Ought To Be Able To Become The Pointy-Haired Boss, Devotes His Whole Life To This Effort, Achieves About 50% Success, Ends Up In An Uncanny Valley Where He Has Neither The Virtues Of The Honest Engineer Nor Truly Those Of The Slick Consultant, Then Dies Of Cancer Right When His Character Arc Starts To Get Interesting.
Highlights From The Comments On Scott Adams
January 21, 2026 · Original source
[original post: The Dilbert Afterlife]
Inline links: The Dilbert Afterlife
This is my second time having this argument - the first was my Elegy For John McCain, which failed much worse - basically everyone thought it was unfairly negative to him and inappropriate just after his death. That was eight years ago, I don’t think I’ve done any more posts, positive or negative, on people’s deaths since then, and I felt ready to try again. For what it’s worth, I still like the elegy, and am glad I memorialized McCain in some way.
Inline links: Elegy For John McCain
This is my second time having this argument - the first was my Elegy For John McCain, which failed much worse - basically everyone thought it was unfairly negative to him and inappropriate just after his death. That was eight years ago, I don’t think I’ve done any more posts, positive or negative, on people’s deaths since then, and I felt ready to try again. For what it’s worth, I still like the elegy, and am glad I memorialized McCain in some way. This became more awkward after I found out that Adams had said several nice things about me. Sandeep writes: Among the numerous intellectual gifts I have received from reading Scott Adams is that I started reading slatestarcodex on his recommendation (which then had a huge influence on me). I had known about slatestarcodex even before, but it was Adams’ recommendation that gave me the energy to overcome my reading-inertia and start poring through long articles of Alexander. I think I’d heard that Adams recommended me at one point, but forgotten by the time I wrote this post. Here’s one of his articles saying nice things about me; someone else dug up a kind tweet, though it was in response to someone else’s deleted message and I couldn’t see exactly what he was praising. I don’t want to have a blanket policy of never criticizing anyone who’s nice to me; it seems corrupt in the sense of “replacing my journalistic judgment with a policy of praising anyone who gives me favors”. On the other hand, the deepest circle of hell is supposedly reserved for people who betray their benefactors, and this makes game theoretic sense. Without having a general solution to this problem. In this situation, I mainly considered the point above - I don’t think this was a fully hostile article, and so I didn’t run my full “is it appropriate to write a hostile article about this person?” check. But secondarily, I think Adams linked my blog post as part of the usual blogosphere activity of recommending interesting links, not as a specific attempt to kindle a friendship with mutual obligations. If I were his friend, then I hope I would understand him well enough to know whether he would want a mixed memorial like this (and if not, I wouldn’t do it). @Eigengender on Twitter ran a poll, and found that: …which makes me more confident that I landed on the tone I wanted. And several people commented that the essay seemed pro-Adams, or made them like Adams more: Joel McKinnon writes: As a chronic sufferer of TDS I've fallen into the "the friend of my enemy is my enemy," and long stopped having any respect for this other Scott A. The post did a great job of contextualizing a complicated and intelligent man's life and ideas. Jonathan Lipschutz writes: I loved Dilbert! He had a remarkable ability to identify the absurdity of life/reality. I was not aware of so much other material/information/‘wisdom’?!/ideas. It seems to me he was a true, great contributor to America and Americans and Western intellectual discourse in the vain of other greats like Mark Twain. What I learned from your piece, which was absolutely amazing in its own right and shined throughout as a tribute and labor of love, was [Adams’] humanity. He was labeled as a racist, which i believe to be bunk and a lack of honesty/courage with addressing the point/argument he was making. He was an eminently flawed human being, like all humans, but he was also acutely aware of this and tried to help others with humor and honesty. Pointing out ways humans fall short, including himself. But he used his special powers in the service of intellectual honesty/inquisitiveness/love for his fellow human beings. Banjo Kildeer writes: This is a wonderful piece. Your love for Scott Adams shines through. @disgruntledcho1 writes: [This] made me actually feel warmly for Scott Adams, a thus-far unparalleled feat. The most important question is whether Scott Adams himself would have appreciated the post, and this convinces me that he would have. One of Adams’ favorite persuasion topics was what he called “Two Movies On One Screen”, where people would come away from the same event with totally different narratives - for example, a Democrat might watch a Trump speech and conclude that Trump had openly and clearly announced his racism, while a Republican watching the same speech might think that Trump had just said something patriotic and hadn’t mentioned race at all. Whatever his opinion on what I said, I’m sure he would have found your reactions hilarious. … 2: Was I Unfair To Adams? … Leo Abstract writes: [The problem with your eulogy] isn’t that it was harsh--he was harsher to himself, frequently. (i.e. when he said he realized at age 8, sadly looking at his nerdy little face in the mirror, he was gonna have to ‘get rich’). [The] problem is it was just wrong, and seemed badly(or un-)researched. His interest in persuasion was teaching people when others were doing it to them, not teaching them to do it to others. His interest in Trump was Trump doing it BACK at the media, not on his poor voters. Disagree. Adams’ book Win Bigly includes Persuasion Tips, persuasion checklists, and a Persuasion Resource Reading List, all of which take it as a given that he is teaching you to persuade others: I haven’t watched his videos, but they have names like You Could Be MUCH More Persuasive, The Persuasion Playbook (“Learn practical techniques to harness the power of persuasion”), and Persuasion Techniques That Will Improve Your Business And Life. Adams absolutely did not limit his interest in Trump’s persuasion to the media, and praised Trump (for example) using persuasion techniques to take down other Republican candidates. You can find his discussion of how Adams “publicly predicted Ben Carson’s demise” after Trump acted out a mocking version of Carson’s description of getting stabbed in the belt buckle (according to Adams, a masterful example of “visual persuasion”). Leo continues: A good example would be spinning a whole tale about him as an ‘ivermectin true believer’, when he was open about his skepticism. if you knew his history with medically-assisted suicide, you’d know he didn’t plan on fighting the cancer and only did IVM because his fans begged him. I half-apologize for this one. I didn’t try to “spin a whole tale” about Adams as “an ivermectin true believer”. What I said was: » “In 2024, diagnosed with terminal cancer, Adams decided to treat it via ivermectin, according to a protocol recommended by fellow right-wing contrarian Dr. William Makis. This doesn’t seem to me like a story about a cynic milking right-wingers for the grift. It sounds like a true believer.” I stand by that paragraph. I don’t think someone who was milking right-wingers as a cynical grift would have gone so far as to trust their recommendations on what to take for his cancer. I think Adams became a sincere right-winger, and so was willing to listen to right-wing medical advice. But I agree that it was written sloppily and sort of suggests he was an ivermectin true believer. He wasn’t, and I apologize for that. I later realized I didn’t need to read tea leaves about this - he says, very explicitly, in one of his books, that yes, after getting attacked by too many left-wing trolls, he decided to commit to fully joining the right wing: » “If you want to see the world more clearly, avoid joining a tribe. But if you are going to war, leave your clear thinking behind and join a tribe. Trumped joined the Republican tribe to win the presidency. Now I was joining the Trump tribe. For a war against Hillbullies [ie pro-Hillary Clinton bullies]. I was all in.” After I made some of these arguments to Leo, he said: I do think that people who listened to thousands of hours of him speaking off-the-cuff might have a better understanding than someone attempting to gain the same by reading a few of his old blog posts. This is a fair criticism. I tried listening to a couple of his shows, and they had a different, friendlier tone than his books / interviews / tweets. Arguably Adams thought of formal written communication as a place to do manipulation, and verbal communication as a cozier spot where he could relate to people normally and explain all the manipulation he was doing. @Ashwin V writes: If you knew anything about Scott, you would know that he never considered anyone a "lesser human" as you've so confidently asserted. He was streaming and trying to pass on his wisdom on his death bed. This was a response to my claim that Adams “longed to be a manipulator of lesser humans”. Several people including Ashwin objected that Adams didn’t see anyone as lesser, nor think of manipulation as demeaning. For example, nutter_just: “Your error is in thinking you must be a lesser human to be manipulable. My impression was Scott believed everyone was like this even himself which is why he believed self affirmations worked. It’s you manipulating your dumb self.” Again, I’ll half-apologize. I regret my exact framing (“lesser humans”), which I think was unnecessarily inflammatory since it implies he was sort of thinking in those terms. But I think he was doing a bad thing which requires that on some philosophical level he has to be treating other people as his lessers in an unacceptable way, even if he wasn’t consciously thinking that they were. I think trying to manipulate people is inherently demeaning to the dignity of humankind. Nor is it exonerating to say “I also manipulate myself” (even if this is true). For analogy, suppose that Adams was a literal telepathic mind controller. If he used his powers on himself (mind controlling himself to work harder), that sounds like a good lifehack. But if he used his powers to turn everyone else into his zombie slaves, he would be offending the dignity of humankind, and “I also use my powers on myself!” would be no excuse. There are a thousand edge cases, complications, things that are sort of manipulation but not quite, and ways that some of those things might be permissible for the greater good. But none of them change the fact that in the simplest and most typical of cases, like the telepathic mind controller with his zombie slaves, manipulation is wrong. One might object that there are simple, typical cases on the other side too. When a job candidate shaves, dresses nicely, and gives a firm handshake, this is in some sense “manipulating” the interviewer, since it’s an attempt to influence his decision through some channel other than facts. I can’t draw a perfect bright line here between the good and the bad cases, but I would apply tests like “is this an attempt to more effectively convey true information?” (eg when I shave, it conveys that I’m capable of remembering to shave and care a lot about the interview), “is this something where failing to do the thing would also convey even more information?” (eg if I didn’t shave, it would falsely suggest I really didn’t want the job), and “is this something where the target has basically given implied consent to this level of manipulation” (eg the interviewer wants and even hopes that people will dress nicely for the interview). I think some of Adams’ manipulations seem closer to the bad cases than the good ones. He wrote about the moment he decided to use his persuasion powers to convince America to elect Trump. One day when he was doing his dispassionate observer act, he heard about Hillary’s estate tax plan and realized it would cost his estate lots of money. He had no particular principled stance against it (“You can argue whether an estate tax is fair or unfair, but fairness is an argument for idiots and children”) but concluded that: This was personal. This was also the day I decided to move from observer to persuader. Until then I was happy to simply observe and predict. But once Clinton announced her plans to use government force to rob me on my deathbed, it was war. Persuasion war.” Accepting for the sake of argument that Adams’ persuasive powers are as impressive as he thinks, he manipulated thousands of people who might have stood to benefit from an estate tax, or who sincerely believed in fairness-based arguments for an estate tax, to vote against their own interests/beliefs, in order to enrich him personally1. I think this requires some sort of standpoint where you consider their agency and interests less important than your own, and that’s why I described him as wanting to manipulate “lesser humans”. This coexists with him often being very nice, with many people saying his podcast helped them become better people, etc. @janiesaysyay writes: This essay is a great demonstration of the kind of leftist, myopic thinking Scott [Adams] was fighting. This is how [Alexander] describes [Coffee With Scott Adams], one of the most influential online shows: » "I had been vaguely aware that he had some community around him, but on the event of his death, I tried watching an episode or two of his show. I couldn’t entirely follow..." “Some community"?! CWSA was one of the first long running, online, interactive, alternative news shows. Scott was a trailblazer host with his reasonable, thoughtful take on current events, often describing the "2 screens” views of both the left and right political opinions on current events. Scott [Adams]' question and answer discussions with his audience brought varied insights, and gave Americans a nuanced view of news. At the end of his life, Scott was highly influential in American thought, culture and politics. CWSA made it acceptable to be an American, someone who was proud of the country, unashamed of their race; proud of the culture, and proud of the heritage which built the country. This made me wonder whether I was underestimating the reach of Adams’ podcast, so I tried to find statistics. CWSA ranks 50th on Apple’s top 100 news/politics podcasts2. It’s very close to the rankings of Jen Psaki (Biden’s ex-press-secretary) and Al Franken (ex-Senator), but also to very many people I have never heard of. I’m not sure how to interpret this. Comparing YouTube subscribers of Adams and various other podcasts I’ve heard of, all numbers in thousands: Joe Rogan: 21,000
Inline links: Elegy For John McCain, writes, Here’s one of his articles saying nice things about me, ran a poll, writes, writes, writes, writes, writes, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!8Dya!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6aea0e56-b1a1-48ca-84ab-406017ae27a1_1618x462.png, You Could Be MUCH More Persuasive, The Persuasion Playbook, Persuasion Techniques That Will Improve Your Business And Life, writes, nutter_just, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!r4fL!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7d643c5f-b24c-4f01-baad-963686d680da_560x174.jpeg, 1, writes, 2, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!wOcC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F141d78d7-8756-4ed6-bc53-081bac795a0a_728x250.png
Disunited Nations2 mentions across 2 issues

Disunited Nations is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between June 13, 2021 and October 09, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Peter Zeihan's Disunited Nations"; "his Disunited Nations and Dawn Of Eurasia review". It most often appears alongside Dawn of Eurasia, ACTIV-6, Alexandros Marinos.

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Disunited Nations
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June 13, 2021
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October 09, 2022
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Disunited Nations
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Open Thread 176
June 13, 2021 · Original source
2: I asked you all to vote on entries from the Runners-Up Packet to promote to finalists. There were three clear winners - the two reviews I posted last week, and a review contrasting Peter Zeihan's Disunited Nations with Bruno Macaes' Dawn of Eurasia. I've already posted a Zeihan review, and I worry readers are getting tired of these reviews and don't have the patience for a semi-duplicate, so I'm awarding the new Zeihan review...some prize to be determined later, like "People's Choice" or something, that doesn't involve me making it a finalist. Don't worry, there will be money involved. If you want to read it, you can find it here as "Disunited Nations (2020) vs. Dawn of Eurasia (2017)"
Inline links: here
Open Thread 245
October 09, 2022 · Original source
7: Misha Saul, who won the Readers’ Choice in last year’s Book Review Contest for his Disunited Nations and Dawn Of Eurasia review, has a Substack, Kvetch, with posts like The Heroes We’re Allowed, Why Practice Judaism, and The Enigma Of Clarence Thomas. Check it out!
Inline links: Kvetch, The Heroes We’re Allowed, Why Practice Judaism, The Enigma Of Clarence Thomas
Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes2 mentions across 2 issues

Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between September 15, 2023 and July 19, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes by Julian"; "( Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes , Ch. 11, pg. 187-188)"; "Everett writes extensively about the ‘immediacy of experience principle’ of Pirahã culture ... (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 7, pg. 132)". It most often appears alongside @campeters4, A Strange Dream, a_reader.

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Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes
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Julian
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Book Review Contest 2023 Winners
September 15, 2023 · Original source
Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes by Julian. He’s a professional translator and doesn’t blog or substack or anything of the sort, but will happily reply to e-mails.
Inline links: Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, e-mails
Your Book Review: How Language Began
July 19, 2024 · Original source
This is what he looks like. According to Wikipedia, the context for this picture is: “Noam Chomsky speaks about humanity's prospects for survival” Since around 1957, Chomsky has dominated linguistics. And this matters because he is kind of a contrarian with weird ideas. Is language for communicating? No, it’s mainly for thinking: (What Kind of Creatures Are We? Ch. 1, pg. 15-16) It is, indeed, virtual dogma that the function of language is communication. ... there is by now quite significant evidence that it is simply false. Doubtless language is sometimes used for communication, as is style of dress, facial expression and stance, and much else. But fundamental properties of language design indicate that a rich tradition is correct in regarding language as essentially an instrument of thought, even if we do not go as far as Humboldt in identifying the two. Should linguists care about the interaction between culture and language? No, that’s essentially stamp-collecting: (Language and Responsibility, Ch. 2, pg. 56-57) Again, a discipline is defined in terms of its object and its results. Sociology is the study of society. As to its results, it seems that there are few things one can say about that, at least at a fairly general level. One finds observations, intuitions, impressions, some valid generalizations perhaps. All very valuable, no doubt, but not at the level of explanatory principles. … Sociolinguistics is, I suppose, a discipline that seeks to apply principles of sociology to the study of language; but I suspect that it can draw little from sociology, and I wonder whether it is likely to contribute much to it. … You can also collect butterflies and make many observations. If you like butterflies, that’s fine; but such work must not be confounded with research, which is concerned to discover explanatory principles of some depth and fails if it has not done so. Did the human capacity for language evolve gradually? No, it suddenly appeared around 50,000 years ago after a freak gene mutation: (Language and Mind, third edition, pg, 183-184) An elementary fact about the language faculty is that it is a system of discrete infinity, rare in the organic world. Any such system is based on a primitive operation that takes objects already constructed, and constructs from them a new object: in the simplest case, the set containing them. Call that operation Merge. Either Merge or some equivalent is a minimal requirement. With Merge available, we instantly have an unbounded system of hierarchically structured expressions. The simplest account of the “Great Leap Forward” in the evolution of humans would be that the brain was rewired, perhaps by some slight mutation, to provide the operation Merge … There are speculations about the evolution of language that postulate a far more complex process … A more parsimonious speculation is that they did not, and that the Great Leap was effectively instantaneous, in a single individual, who was instantly endowed with intellectual capacities far superior to those of others, transmitted to offspring and coming to predominate. At best a reasonable guess, as are all speculations about such matters, but about the simplest one imaginable, and not inconsistent with anything known or plausibly surmised. It is hard to see what account of human evolution would not assume at least this much, in one or another form. I think all of these positions are kind of insane for reasons that we will discuss later. (Side note: Chomsky’s proposal is essentially the hard takeoff theory of human intelligence.) Most consequential of all, perhaps, are the ways Chomsky has influenced (i) what linguists mainly study, and (ii) how they go about studying it. Naively, since language involves many different components—including sound production and comprehension, intonation, gestures, and context, among many others—linguists might want to study all of these. While they do study all of these, Chomsky and his followers view grammar as by far the most important component of humans’ ability to understand and produce language, and accordingly make it their central focus. Roughly speaking, grammar refers to the set of language-specific rules that determine whether a sentence is well-formed. It goes beyond specifying word order (or ‘surface structure’, in Chomskyan terminology) since one needs to know more than just where words are placed in order to modify or extend a given sentence. Consider a pair of sentences Chomsky uses to illustrate this point in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (pg. 22), his most cited work: (1a) I expected John to be examined by a specialist. (2a) I persuaded John to be examined by a specialist. The words “expected” and “persuaded” appear in the same location in each sentence, but imply different ‘latent’ grammatical structures, or ‘deep structures’. One way to show this is to observe that a particular way of rearranging the words produces a sentence with the same meaning in the first case (1a = 1b), and a different meaning in the second (2a != 2b): (1b) I expected a specialist to examine John. (2b) I persuaded a specialist to examine John. In particular, the target of persuasion is “John” in the case of (2a), and “the specialist” in the case of (2b). A full Chomskyan treatment of sentences like this would involve hierarchical tree diagrams, which permit a precise description of deep structure. You may have encountered the famous sentence: “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” It first appeared in Chomsky’s 1957 book Syntactic Structures, and the point is that even nonsense sentences can be grammatically well-formed, and that speakers can quickly assess the grammatical correctness of even nonsense sentences that they’ve never seen before. To Chomsky, this is one of the most important facts to be explained about language. A naive response to Chomsky’s preoccupation with grammar is: doesn’t real language involve a lot of non-grammatical stuff, like stuttering and slips of the tongue and midstream changes of mind? Of course it does, and Chomsky acknowledges this. To address this point, Chomsky has to move the goalposts in two important ways. First, he famously distinguishes competence from performance, and identifies the former as the subject of any serious theory of language: (Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Ch. 1, pg. 4) The problem for the linguist, as well as for the child learning the language, is to determine from the data of performance the underlying system of rules that has been mastered by the speaker-hearer and that he puts to use in actual performance. Hence, in the technical sense, linguistic theory is mentalistic, since it is concerned with discovering a mental reality underlying actual behavior. Observed use of language or hypothesized dispositions to respond, habits, and so on, may provide evidence as to the nature of this mental reality, but surely cannot constitute the actual subject matter of linguistics, if this is to be a serious discipline. Moreover, he claims that grammar captures most of what we should mean when we talk about speakers’ linguistic competence: (Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Ch. 1, pg. 24) A grammar can be regarded as a theory of a language; it is descriptively adequate to the extent that it correctly describes the intrinsic competence of the idealized native speaker. Another way Chomsky moves the goalposts is by distinguishing E-languages, like English and Spanish and Japanese, from I-languages, which only exist inside human minds. He claims that serious linguistics should be primarily interested in the latter. In a semi-technical book summarizing Chomsky’s theory of language, Cook and Newson write: (Chomsky’s Universal Grammar: An Introduction, pg. 13) E-language linguistics … aims to collect samples of language and then describe their properties. … I-language linguistics, however, is concerned with what a speaker knows about language and where this knowledge comes from; it treats language as an internal property of the human mind rather than something external … Not only should linguistics primarily be interested in studying I-languages, but to try and study E-languages at all may be a fool’s errand: (Chomsky’s Universal Grammar: An Introduction, pg. 13) Chomsky claims that the history of generative linguistics shows a shift from an E-language to an I-language approach; ‘the shift of focus from the dubious concept of E-language to the significant notion of I-language was a crucial step in early generative grammar’ (Chomsky, 1991b, pg. 10). … Indeed Chomsky is extremely dismissive of E-language approaches: ‘E-language, if it exists at all, is derivative, remote from mechanisms and of no particular empirical significance, perhaps none at all’ (Chomsky, 1991b, pg. 10).1 I Am Not A Linguist (IANAL), but this redefinition of the primary concern of linguistics seems crazy to me. Is studying a language like English as it is actually used really of no particular empirical significance? And this doesn’t seem to be a one-time hyperbole, but a representative claim. Cook and Newson continue: (Chomsky’s Universal Grammar: An Introduction, pg. 14) The opposition between these two approaches in linguistics has been long and acrimonious, neither side conceding the other’s reality. … The E-linguist despises the I-linguist for not looking at the ‘real’ facts; the I-linguist derides the E-linguist for looking at trivia. The I-language versus E-language distinction is as much a difference of research methods and of admissible evidence as it is of long-term goals. So much for what linguists ought to study. How should they study it? The previous quote gives us a clue. Especially in the era before Chomsky (BC), linguists were more interested in description. Linguists were, at least in one view, people who could be dropped anywhere in the world, and emerge with a tentative grammar of the local language six months later. (A notion like this is mentioned early in this video.) Linguists catalog the myriad of strange details about human languages, like the fact that some languages don’t appear to have words for relative directions, or “thank you”, or “yes” and “no”. After Chomsky's domination of the field (AD), there were a lot more theorists. While you could study language by going out into the field and collecting data, this was viewed as not the only, and maybe not even the most important, way to work. Diagrams of sentences proliferated. Chomsky, arguably the most influential linguist of the past hundred years, has never done fieldwork. In summary, to Chomsky and many of the linguists working in his tradition, the scientifically interesting component of language is grammar competence, and real linguistic data only indirectly reflects it. All of this matters because the dominance of Chomskyan linguistics has had downstream effects in adjacent fields like artificial intelligence (AI), evolutionary biology, and neuroscience. Chomsky has long been an opponent of the statistical learning tradition of language modeling, essentially claiming that it does not provide insight about what humans know about languages, and that engineering success probably can’t be achieved without explicitly incorporating important mathematical facts about the underlying structure of language. Chomsky’s ideas have motivated researchers to look for a “language gene” and “language areas” of the brain. Arguably, no one has yet found either—but more on that later. How Chomsky attained this stranglehold on linguistics is an interesting sociological question, but not our main concern in the present work2. The intent here is not to pooh-pooh Chomsky, either; brilliant and hard-working people are often wrong on important questions. Consider that his academic career began in the early 1950s—over 70 years ago!—when our understanding of language, anthropology, biology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence, among many other things, was substantially more rudimentary. Where are we going with this? All of this is context for understanding the ideas of a certain bomb-throwing terrorist blight on the face of linguistics: Daniel Everett. How Language Began is a book he wrote about, well, what language is and how it began. Everett is the anti-Chomsky. II. THE MISSIONARY We all love classic boy-meets-girl stories. Here’s one: boy meets girl at a rock concert, they fall in love, the boy converts to Christianity for the girl, then the boy and girl move to the Amazon jungle to dedicate the rest of their lives to saving the souls of an isolated hunter-gatherer tribe. Daniel Everett is the boy in this story. The woman he married, Keren Graham, is the daughter of Christian missionaries and had formative experiences living in the Amazon jungle among the Sateré-Mawé people. At seventeen, Everett became a born-again Christian; at eighteen, he and Keren married; and over the next few years, they started a family and prepared to become full-fledged missionaries like Keren’s parents. First, Everett studied “Bible and Foreign Missions” at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. After finishing his degree in 1975, the natural next step was to train more specifically to follow in the footsteps of Keren’s parents. In 1976, he and his wife enrolled in the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) to learn translation techniques and more viscerally prepare for life in the jungle: They were sent to Chiapas, Mexico, where Keren stayed in a hut in the jungle with the couple’s children—by this time, there were three—while Everett underwent grueling field training. He endured fifty-mile hikes and survived for several days deep in the jungle with only matches, water, a rope, a machete, and a flashlight. Everett apparently had a gift for language-learning. This led SIL to invite Everett and his wife to work with the Pirahã people (pronounced pee-da-HAN), whose unusual language had thwarted all previous attempts to learn it. In 1977, Everett’s family moved to Brazil, and in December they met the Pirahã for the first time. As an SIL-affiliated missionary, Everett’s explicit goals were to (i) translate the Bible into Pirahã, and (ii) convert as many Pirahã as possible to Christianity. But Everett’s first encounter with the Pirahã was cut short for political reasons: (Don’t Sleep There Are Snakes, Ch. 1, pg. 13-14) In December of 1977 the Brazilian government ordered all missionaries to leave Indian reservations. … Leaving the village under these forced circumstances made me wonder whether I’d ever be able to return. The Summer Institute of Linguistics was concerned too and wanted to find a way around the government’s prohibition against missionaries. So SIL asked me to apply to the graduate linguistics program at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. It was hoped that UNICAMP would be able to secure government authorization for me to visit the Pirahãs for a prolonged period, in spite of the general ban against missionaries. … My work at UNICAMP paid off as SIL hoped it would. Everett became a linguist proper sort of by accident, mostly as an excuse to continue his missionary work. But he ended up developing a passion for it. In 1980, he completed Aspects of the Phonology of Pirahã, his master’s thesis. He continued on to get a PhD in linguistics, also from UNICAMP, and in 1983 finished The Pirahã Language and Theory of Syntax, his dissertation. He continued studying the Pirahã and working as an academic linguist after that. In all, Everett spent around ten years of his life living with the Pirahã, spread out over some thirty-odd years. As he notes in Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: (Prologue, pg. xvii-xviii) I went to the Pirahãs when I was twenty-six years old. Now I am old enough to receive senior discounts. I gave them my youth. I have contracted malaria many times. I remember several occasions on which the Pirahãs or others threatened my life. I have carried more heavy boxes, bags, and barrels on my back through the jungle than I care to remember. But my grandchildren all know the Pirahãs. My children are who they are in part because of the Pirahãs. And I can look at some of those old men (old like me) who once threatened to kill me and recognize some of the dearest friends I have ever had—men who would now risk their lives for me. Everett interviewing some Pirahã people. (source) Everett did eventually learn their language, and it’s worth taking a step back to appreciate just how hard that task was. No Pirahã spoke Portuguese, apart from some isolated phrases they used for bartering. They didn’t speak any other language at all—just Pirahã. How do you learn another group’s language when you have no languages in common? The technical term is monolingual fieldwork. But this is just a fancy label for some combination of pointing at things, listening, crude imitation, and obsessively transcribing whatever you hear. For years. It doesn’t help that the Pirahã language seems genuinely hard to learn in a few different senses. First, it is probably conventionally difficult for Westerners to learn since it is a tonal language (two tones: high and low) with a small number of phonemes (building block sounds) and a few unusual sounds3. Second, there is no written language. Third, the language has a variety of ‘channels of discourse’, or ways of talking specialized for one or another cultural context. One of these is ‘whistle speech’; Pirahãs can communicate purely in whistles. This feature appears to be extremely useful during hunting trips: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 11, pg. 187-188) My first intense contact with whistle speech came one day when the Pirahãs had given me permission to go hunting with them. After we’d been walking for about an hour, they decided that they weren’t seeing any game because I, with my clunking canteens and machete and congenital clumsiness, was making too much noise. “You stay here and we will be back for you later.” Xaikáibaí said gently but firmly. … As I tried to make the best of my solitary confinement, I heard the men whistling to one another. They were saying, “I’ll go over there; you go that way,” and other such hunting talk. But clearly they were communicating. It was fascinating because it sounded so different from anything I had heard before. The whistle carried long and clear in the jungle. I could immediately see the importance and usefulness of this channel, which I guessed would also be much less likely to scare away game than the lower frequencies of the men’s normal voices. Fourth, important aspects of the language reflect core tenets of Pirahã culture in ways that one might not a priori expect. Everett writes extensively about the ‘immediacy of experience principle’ of Pirahã culture, which he summarizes as the idea that: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 7, pg. 132) Declarative Pirahã utterances contain only assertions related directly to the moment of speech, either experienced by the speaker or witnessed by someone alive during the lifetime of the speaker. One way the language reflects this is that the speaker must specify how they know something by affixing an appropriate suffix to verbs: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 12, pg. 196) Perhaps the most interesting suffixes, however (though these are not unique to Pirahã), are what linguists call evidentials, elements that represent the speaker’s evaluation of his or her knowledge of what he or she is saying. There are three of these in Pirahã: hearsay, observation, and deduction. To see what these do, let’s use an English example. If I ask you, “Did Joe go fishing?” you could answer, “Yes, at least I heard that he did,” or “Yes, I know because I saw him leave,” or “Yes, at least I suppose he did because his boat is gone.” The difference between English and Pirahã is that what English does with a sentence, Pirahã does with a verbal suffix. Everett also convincingly links this cultural principle to the lack of Pirahã number words and creation myths. On the latter topic, Everett recalls the following exchange: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 7, pg. 134) I sat with Kóhoi once and he asked me, after hearing about my god, “What else does your god do?” And I answered, “Well, he made the stars, and he made the earth.” Then I asked, “What do the Pirahãs say?” He answered, “Well, the Pirahãs say that these things were not made.” And all of this is to say nothing of the manifold perils of the jungle: malaria, typhoid fever, dysentery, dangerous snakes, insects, morally gray river traders, and periodic downpours. If Indiana Jones braved these conditions for years, we would consider his stories rousing adventures. Everett did this while also learning one of the most unusual languages in the world. People on the bank of the Maici river. (source) By the way, he did eventually sort of achieve his goal of translating the Bible. Armed with a solid knowledge of Pirahã, he was able to translate the New Testament’s Gospel of Mark. Since the Pirahã have no written language, he provided them with a recorded version, but did not get the reaction he expected: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 17, pg. 267-268) When we returned to the village, I recorded Mark’s gospel in my own voice for the Pirahãs to listen to. I then brought in a wind-up tape recorder to play the recording, and I taught the Pirahãs how to use it, which, surprisingly enough, some of the children did. Keren and I left the village and returned a few weeks later. The people were still listening to the gospel, with children cranking the recorder. I was initially quite excited about this, until it became clear that the only part of the book that they paid attention to was the beheading of John the Baptist. “Wow, they cut off his head. Play that again!” One reaction to hearing the gospel caught Everett even more off-guard: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 17, pg. 269) "The women are afraid of Jesus. We do not want him." "Why not?" I asked, wondering what had triggered this declaration. "Because last night he came to our village and tried to have sex with our women. He chased them around the village, trying to stick his large penis into them." Kaaxaóoi proceeded to show me with his two hands held far apart how long Jesus's penis was—a good three feet. But the Pirahã had an even more serious objection to Jesus: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 17, pg. 265-266) Part of the difficulty of my task began to become clear to me. I communicated more or less correctly to the Pirahãs about my Christian beliefs. The men listening to me understood that there was a man named Hisó, Jesus, and that he wanted others to do what he told them. "The Pirahã men then asked, "Hey Dan, what does Jesus look like? Is he dark like us or light like you?" I said, "Well, I have never actually seen him. He lived a long time ago. But I do have his words." "Well, Dan, how do you have his words if you have never heard him or seen him?" They then made it clear that if I had not actually seen this guy (and not in any metaphorical sense, but literally), they weren't interested in any stories I had to tell about him. Period. This is because, as I now knew, the Pirahãs believe only what they see. Sometimes they also believe in things that someone else has told them, so long as that person has personally witnessed what he or she is reporting. In the end, Everett never converted a single Pirahã. But he did even worse than converting zero people—he lost his own faith after coming to believe that the Pirahã had a good point. After keeping this to himself for many years, he revealed his loss of faith to his family, which led to a divorce and his children breaking contact with him for a number of years afterward. But Everett losing his faith in the God of Abraham was only the beginning. Most importantly for us, he also lost his faith in the God of Linguistics—Noam Chomsky. III. THE WAR In 2005, Everett’s paper “Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirahã: Another look at the design features of human language” was published in the journal Cultural Anthropology. An outsider might expect an article like this, which made a technical observation about the apparent lack of a property called ‘recursion’ in the Pirahã language, to receive an ‘oh, neat’ sort of response. Languages can be pretty different from one another, after all. Mandarin lacks plurals. Spanish sentences can omit an explicit subject. This is one of those kinds of things. But the article ignited a firestorm of controversy that follows Everett to this day. Praise for Everett and his work on recursion in Pirahã: He became a pure charlatan, although he used to be a good descriptive linguist. That is why, as far as I know, all the serious linguists who work on Brazilian languages ignore him. Noam Chomsky, MIT professor and linguist
Inline links: Wikipedia, hard takeoff, grammar, 1, this video, don’t appear to have words for relative directions, “thank you”, “yes” and “no”, long been an opponent, 2, Daniel Everett, Sateré-Mawé people, prepared, Bible and Foreign Missions, 1975, SIL, viscerally prepare, Pirahã people, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!42Ji!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5c899185-e1a2-4358-ae6a-e9298f6c7cdb_1600x1002.jpeg, source, 3, number words, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!yx-R!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F77975f2c-ef0f-47d7-9ed9-f22bbe04f78b_1024x768.jpeg, source, Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirahã: Another look at the design features of human language
Everett interviewing some Pirahã people. (source) Everett did eventually learn their language, and it’s worth taking a step back to appreciate just how hard that task was. No Pirahã spoke Portuguese, apart from some isolated phrases they used for bartering. They didn’t speak any other language at all—just Pirahã. How do you learn another group’s language when you have no languages in common? The technical term is monolingual fieldwork. But this is just a fancy label for some combination of pointing at things, listening, crude imitation, and obsessively transcribing whatever you hear. For years. It doesn’t help that the Pirahã language seems genuinely hard to learn in a few different senses. First, it is probably conventionally difficult for Westerners to learn since it is a tonal language (two tones: high and low) with a small number of phonemes (building block sounds) and a few unusual sounds3. Second, there is no written language. Third, the language has a variety of ‘channels of discourse’, or ways of talking specialized for one or another cultural context. One of these is ‘whistle speech’; Pirahãs can communicate purely in whistles. This feature appears to be extremely useful during hunting trips: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 11, pg. 187-188) My first intense contact with whistle speech came one day when the Pirahãs had given me permission to go hunting with them. After we’d been walking for about an hour, they decided that they weren’t seeing any game because I, with my clunking canteens and machete and congenital clumsiness, was making too much noise. “You stay here and we will be back for you later.” Xaikáibaí said gently but firmly. … As I tried to make the best of my solitary confinement, I heard the men whistling to one another. They were saying, “I’ll go over there; you go that way,” and other such hunting talk. But clearly they were communicating. It was fascinating because it sounded so different from anything I had heard before. The whistle carried long and clear in the jungle. I could immediately see the importance and usefulness of this channel, which I guessed would also be much less likely to scare away game than the lower frequencies of the men’s normal voices. Fourth, important aspects of the language reflect core tenets of Pirahã culture in ways that one might not a priori expect. Everett writes extensively about the ‘immediacy of experience principle’ of Pirahã culture, which he summarizes as the idea that: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 7, pg. 132) Declarative Pirahã utterances contain only assertions related directly to the moment of speech, either experienced by the speaker or witnessed by someone alive during the lifetime of the speaker. One way the language reflects this is that the speaker must specify how they know something by affixing an appropriate suffix to verbs: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 12, pg. 196) Perhaps the most interesting suffixes, however (though these are not unique to Pirahã), are what linguists call evidentials, elements that represent the speaker’s evaluation of his or her knowledge of what he or she is saying. There are three of these in Pirahã: hearsay, observation, and deduction. To see what these do, let’s use an English example. If I ask you, “Did Joe go fishing?” you could answer, “Yes, at least I heard that he did,” or “Yes, I know because I saw him leave,” or “Yes, at least I suppose he did because his boat is gone.” The difference between English and Pirahã is that what English does with a sentence, Pirahã does with a verbal suffix. Everett also convincingly links this cultural principle to the lack of Pirahã number words and creation myths. On the latter topic, Everett recalls the following exchange: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 7, pg. 134) I sat with Kóhoi once and he asked me, after hearing about my god, “What else does your god do?” And I answered, “Well, he made the stars, and he made the earth.” Then I asked, “What do the Pirahãs say?” He answered, “Well, the Pirahãs say that these things were not made.” And all of this is to say nothing of the manifold perils of the jungle: malaria, typhoid fever, dysentery, dangerous snakes, insects, morally gray river traders, and periodic downpours. If Indiana Jones braved these conditions for years, we would consider his stories rousing adventures. Everett did this while also learning one of the most unusual languages in the world. People on the bank of the Maici river. (source) By the way, he did eventually sort of achieve his goal of translating the Bible. Armed with a solid knowledge of Pirahã, he was able to translate the New Testament’s Gospel of Mark. Since the Pirahã have no written language, he provided them with a recorded version, but did not get the reaction he expected: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 17, pg. 267-268) When we returned to the village, I recorded Mark’s gospel in my own voice for the Pirahãs to listen to. I then brought in a wind-up tape recorder to play the recording, and I taught the Pirahãs how to use it, which, surprisingly enough, some of the children did. Keren and I left the village and returned a few weeks later. The people were still listening to the gospel, with children cranking the recorder. I was initially quite excited about this, until it became clear that the only part of the book that they paid attention to was the beheading of John the Baptist. “Wow, they cut off his head. Play that again!” One reaction to hearing the gospel caught Everett even more off-guard: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 17, pg. 269) "The women are afraid of Jesus. We do not want him." "Why not?" I asked, wondering what had triggered this declaration. "Because last night he came to our village and tried to have sex with our women. He chased them around the village, trying to stick his large penis into them." Kaaxaóoi proceeded to show me with his two hands held far apart how long Jesus's penis was—a good three feet. But the Pirahã had an even more serious objection to Jesus: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 17, pg. 265-266) Part of the difficulty of my task began to become clear to me. I communicated more or less correctly to the Pirahãs about my Christian beliefs. The men listening to me understood that there was a man named Hisó, Jesus, and that he wanted others to do what he told them. "The Pirahã men then asked, "Hey Dan, what does Jesus look like? Is he dark like us or light like you?" I said, "Well, I have never actually seen him. He lived a long time ago. But I do have his words." "Well, Dan, how do you have his words if you have never heard him or seen him?" They then made it clear that if I had not actually seen this guy (and not in any metaphorical sense, but literally), they weren't interested in any stories I had to tell about him. Period. This is because, as I now knew, the Pirahãs believe only what they see. Sometimes they also believe in things that someone else has told them, so long as that person has personally witnessed what he or she is reporting. In the end, Everett never converted a single Pirahã. But he did even worse than converting zero people—he lost his own faith after coming to believe that the Pirahã had a good point. After keeping this to himself for many years, he revealed his loss of faith to his family, which led to a divorce and his children breaking contact with him for a number of years afterward. But Everett losing his faith in the God of Abraham was only the beginning. Most importantly for us, he also lost his faith in the God of Linguistics—Noam Chomsky. III. THE WAR In 2005, Everett’s paper “Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirahã: Another look at the design features of human language” was published in the journal Cultural Anthropology. An outsider might expect an article like this, which made a technical observation about the apparent lack of a property called ‘recursion’ in the Pirahã language, to receive an ‘oh, neat’ sort of response. Languages can be pretty different from one another, after all. Mandarin lacks plurals. Spanish sentences can omit an explicit subject. This is one of those kinds of things. But the article ignited a firestorm of controversy that follows Everett to this day. Praise for Everett and his work on recursion in Pirahã: He became a pure charlatan, although he used to be a good descriptive linguist. That is why, as far as I know, all the serious linguists who work on Brazilian languages ignore him. Noam Chomsky, MIT professor and linguist
Inline links: source, monolingual fieldwork, 3, number words, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!yx-R!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F77975f2c-ef0f-47d7-9ed9-f22bbe04f78b_1024x768.jpeg, source, Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirahã: Another look at the design features of human language
People on the bank of the Maici river. (source) By the way, he did eventually sort of achieve his goal of translating the Bible. Armed with a solid knowledge of Pirahã, he was able to translate the New Testament’s Gospel of Mark. Since the Pirahã have no written language, he provided them with a recorded version, but did not get the reaction he expected: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 17, pg. 267-268) When we returned to the village, I recorded Mark’s gospel in my own voice for the Pirahãs to listen to. I then brought in a wind-up tape recorder to play the recording, and I taught the Pirahãs how to use it, which, surprisingly enough, some of the children did. Keren and I left the village and returned a few weeks later. The people were still listening to the gospel, with children cranking the recorder. I was initially quite excited about this, until it became clear that the only part of the book that they paid attention to was the beheading of John the Baptist. “Wow, they cut off his head. Play that again!” One reaction to hearing the gospel caught Everett even more off-guard: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 17, pg. 269) "The women are afraid of Jesus. We do not want him." "Why not?" I asked, wondering what had triggered this declaration. "Because last night he came to our village and tried to have sex with our women. He chased them around the village, trying to stick his large penis into them." Kaaxaóoi proceeded to show me with his two hands held far apart how long Jesus's penis was—a good three feet. But the Pirahã had an even more serious objection to Jesus: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 17, pg. 265-266) Part of the difficulty of my task began to become clear to me. I communicated more or less correctly to the Pirahãs about my Christian beliefs. The men listening to me understood that there was a man named Hisó, Jesus, and that he wanted others to do what he told them. "The Pirahã men then asked, "Hey Dan, what does Jesus look like? Is he dark like us or light like you?" I said, "Well, I have never actually seen him. He lived a long time ago. But I do have his words." "Well, Dan, how do you have his words if you have never heard him or seen him?" They then made it clear that if I had not actually seen this guy (and not in any metaphorical sense, but literally), they weren't interested in any stories I had to tell about him. Period. This is because, as I now knew, the Pirahãs believe only what they see. Sometimes they also believe in things that someone else has told them, so long as that person has personally witnessed what he or she is reporting. In the end, Everett never converted a single Pirahã. But he did even worse than converting zero people—he lost his own faith after coming to believe that the Pirahã had a good point. After keeping this to himself for many years, he revealed his loss of faith to his family, which led to a divorce and his children breaking contact with him for a number of years afterward. But Everett losing his faith in the God of Abraham was only the beginning. Most importantly for us, he also lost his faith in the God of Linguistics—Noam Chomsky. III. THE WAR In 2005, Everett’s paper “Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirahã: Another look at the design features of human language” was published in the journal Cultural Anthropology. An outsider might expect an article like this, which made a technical observation about the apparent lack of a property called ‘recursion’ in the Pirahã language, to receive an ‘oh, neat’ sort of response. Languages can be pretty different from one another, after all. Mandarin lacks plurals. Spanish sentences can omit an explicit subject. This is one of those kinds of things. But the article ignited a firestorm of controversy that follows Everett to this day. Praise for Everett and his work on recursion in Pirahã: He became a pure charlatan, although he used to be a good descriptive linguist. That is why, as far as I know, all the serious linguists who work on Brazilian languages ignore him. Noam Chomsky, MIT professor and linguist
Inline links: source, Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirahã: Another look at the design features of human language
Dark Age Ahead1 mentions across 1 issues

Dark Age Ahead is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 19, 2023 and May 19, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "her last book, published in 2004, is called Dark Age Ahead". It most often appears alongside 1980, 1980 referendum, 1995 referendum.

Reference entry
Dark Age Ahead
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
May 19, 2023
Last seen
May 19, 2023
Book title
Dark Age Ahead
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Issue trail
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The Question Of Separatism
May 19, 2023 · Original source
… and we think, thank goodness that Germany is unified now. So much easier to think about! Can you imagine if the Our World in Data charts had to show separate lines for the Electorate of Saxony, the Prince-Bishopric of Augsburg, the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg, and about 1,800 other semi-sovereign states? Can you imagine traveling around if each of them had its own currency? (Fun fact: the List of states in the Holy Roman Empire Wikipedia page doesn’t contain such a list. Instead it points to no less than 28 sub-lists.) Jacobs stops shy of asking, in either book, the question that seems to be the logical continuation of her reasoning: should everything be a city-state? Should we encourage separatism until each inhabited place in the world is either a city or a city region with its own currency? We can hazard a guess as to what her answer would be. She would probably say that there’s no need to upend everything right this moment. Just adopt an attitude of political openness and experimentation. Don’t try to hold together entities that don’t work that well. When separatist sentiment arises somewhere, you can argue it’s a bad idea, but don’t fight it out of emotion such as fear for your nation’s integrity. Eventually, things will settle — the regions that want to be city-states will be, and those that prefer to be united with others, for cultural or economic reasons, will stay that way. Unity has good PR and some genuine advantages, so there will still be plenty of it. But maybe Jane Jacobs never asks this question because she knows it’s irrelevant. We just can’t help fighting for our big countries and supranational unions (like the EU), and too bad if they enter long periods of stagflation until they violently collapse. This might be the right time to mention that her last book, published in 2004, is called Dark Age Ahead. IV. Something to Dislike For Everyone Jane Jacobs’s most famous book is The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She is recognized as perhaps the most influential thinker in urbanism. She is credited with saving Greenwich Village and SoHo in New York City, and helping cancel the Spadina Expressway in Toronto. To this day people organize “Jane’s Walks” as a living memorial to her impact on cities. But Jane Jacobs herself thought that her greatest intellectual contribution was not in city planning, but in economics. She thought that import replacement was her most important discovery, since it explained how wealth expands better than existing macroeconomic theories. She wrote multiple books that were explicitly about economics and was about to write another when she died, Uncovering the Economy. I am not an economist, so I might not be qualified to make a judgment on this matter, but: it seems to me that there’s a discrepancy here. Jacobs is widely seen as a great intellectual, but her economic ideas don’t quite seem mainstream. I’d never heard of import replacement before reading her book. Why not? The null hypothesis is that economists have examined her ideas and simply rejected them. There were some critical academic reviews of Cities and the Wealth of Nations when it came out, and more recently Tyler Cowen expressed his own mild skepticism. Some of the criticism involves the lack of quantitative data in her work, and her failure to think about issues of scale. The most obvious target, of course, is her city obsession: yes, cities are important, but they’re not the only economic phenomenon that matters, some would say. Perhaps Jacobs has overplayed her hand. But there are other possible explanations for the discrepancy. One is that she was a woman and had no credentials, which made it difficult for (mostly male) professionals to take her seriously. We know this was true at the beginning of her career at least. It seems possible that even after she managed to establish herself as an original urban thinker, economists had trouble accepting that she could, with her lack of any college degree, come up with new insights in their field. I doubt that’s really true today, though. We do take Jacobs seriously, and still read all of her books, which is more than we could say about most economists. Instead, I propose that the discrepancy comes from a darker place: in laboring to be comprehensive about cities and economics, she reached conclusions that most people don’t want to be true. No matter your politics, there’ll be something for you to dislike in Jacobs’s work. For example, it’s pretty clear that she didn’t think the European Union was a good idea, so she probably would have supported Brexit. Brexiters might rejoice, except that a lot of them are British nationalists who certainly don’t want Scotland to leave the UK, whereas Jacobs would agree with that. Which would be great news to Scottish independentists — except that if a new separatist movement arose within Scotland, she’d also support that. Jacobs’s ideas and grassroots activism in favor of small-scale, organic urban planning have come to be seen as left-wing — yet her criticism of national welfare programs wouldn’t make her out of place among hardcore right-wingers. Unless those right-wingers were military hawks, in which case they’d find no solace in reading Jacobs on military transactions of decline. Writing during the Cold War, Jacobs criticized the Soviet Union for its incredible centralization of decision-making in Moscow. She rightfully predicted its collapse, making her an ideological ally of the capitalist West, right? Not so, since the United States is also, according to her, too centralized and in the early stages of decay. “Today the Soviet Union and the United States each predicts and anticipates the economic decline of the other,” she writes. “Neither will be disappointed.” Whether she was correct about the US is left as an exercise to the reader. In any case, she did foresee, using her theory on cities, the decline of Japan. This must have been bold in the 1980s at the peak of the Japanese economic miracle, when there was a widespread trope that Japan would soon take over the world. Yet she was right: in 1991, Japan entered its “lost decade,” which soon became two lost decades, and then three. To be fair, she predicted the decline of all large-ish countries, so I wouldn’t mark her as a superforecaster or anything. Still, this puts in perspective the more recent trope that China is going to take over the world. No country, no ideology is safe from Jacobs’s prophecies. Smaller ideologies aren’t spared, either. Effective altruism would probably seem totally mistaken to her, since at its core it promotes an inorganic, top-down transfer of wealth from prosperous cities to poor areas. Progress studies people think that technological innovation will solve economic stagnation, but she would point out how labor-saving equipment so often causes damage when it is introduced to regions that don’t benefit from the other city forces, like the Scottish Highlands or many of her other examples in Colombia, India, or the American South. (This point would deserve an essay of its own, but reading Jacobs has made me a bit more worried about the “AI will take our jobs” thing. It’s clear that new jobs will appear, but when the technology city force from the San Francisco Bay Area reaches distant places with poor economies, which it will very soon thanks to the internet, the effects might not be very pleasant to see.) Overall, the political ideology that might fit Jacobs the best might be… libertarianism? She’s not a big fan of large governments who make big top-down decisions, clearly. Yet I don’t get the feeling that this association fits all that well either. Jacobs doesn’t seem to be anti-government if the government is at the city level. I doubt she would have liked the kind of hyperfragmented world depicted in Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. I also doubt she’d be impressed by cryptocurrency-backed “cloud cities” or fantasies of charter cities, none of which she would see as real cities in the sense of concentrated pockets of people who start replacing what they import with local production. Jane Jacobs, in sum, was an archetypal accidental moderate. She took one idea very seriously — the idea that cities are fundamental — and explored its ramifications without caring in the slightest if it led to the “wrong” opinions, as her friends in 1980 Toronto must have thought when she wrote about Quebec. I don’t know if she went too far; I’m sure someone more qualified than I am can find flaws in that core idea or any of her other observations. But to me she sounds convincing, and her consistency is frankly admirable. So, to end this review on a more review-y note, go read Jane Jacobs. Her books are a delight, with their elegant arguments and masterfully told anecdotes. Her predictions often take an air of doom, but she is also an optimist who offers constructive ways forward. She sets an example for all of us who care about getting the details right, no matter the credentialed experts, the current political climate, or the great theories of the past. Image credits Cities and the Wealth of Nations book cover: from Amazon.
Inline links: List of states in the Holy Roman Empire, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!gyMq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdc388f24-009c-42ee-adca-9d5c50faaa66_932x190.png, academic, reviews, expressed, Japan would soon take over the world, fantasies, of, charter, cities, accidental moderate, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!r8Rb!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F60621c76-b34b-4e10-b272-394480443e1b_1600x1066.png, Amazon
Dark Lord of Derkholm1 mentions across 1 issues

Dark Lord of Derkholm is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 28, 2023 and April 28, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Diana Wynne Jones’ Dark Lord of Derkholm". It most often appears alongside Ancient Progenitor Civilization, Aragorn, Arya Stark.

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Dark Lord of Derkholm
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1
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1
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April 28, 2023
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April 28, 2023
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Dark Lord of Derkholm
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The Psychology Of Fantasy
April 28, 2023 · Original source
The fantasy universe is so familiar that subverting it has become nearly as big a business as playing it straight. Diana Wynne Jones’ Dark Lord of Derkholm, Jacqueline Carey’s Banewreaker, Order Of The Stick. There are a million jokes along the lines of “what if the Dark Lord’s henchmen unionized?” or “what if there were performance reviews at the Adventurers’ Guild”? Terry Pratchett’s Discworld treats the fantasy universe as a given, something everyone will obviously understand, and then uses it as a foil in order to investigate everything else.
Death Note1 mentions across 1 issues

Death Note is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 03, 2023 and November 03, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "you'd want to use a classic from the culture you're studying, like The Tale of Genji or Death Note"; "references to the Death Note". It most often appears alongside 23andme, ACX Grants, administrative state.

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Death Note
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1
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November 03, 2023
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November 03, 2023
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Death Note
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Quests And Requests
November 03, 2023 · Original source
imagine this - I'm going to use Japanese here because it's the only language I could even remotely try to use as an example without making a total fool of myself, and I'll thank you for not correcting the inevitable errors. The course is a novel. Could be any novel, but I imagine for cutesiness reasons you'd want to use a classic from the culture you're studying, like The Tale of Genji or Death Note. The first chapter is just the first chapter of the novel in English. It would contain normal English sentences like "Ryuk taught Light the secrets of the Death Note." The second chapter is still in English, but it's a weird English with a sentence structure a bit more reminiscent of the foreign language. It might change to something like "Ryuk the secrets of the Death Note to Light taught". (I'm keeping the sentence the same to make it obvious what's going on here, but of course in the real book it would be the second chapter, not just a repetition of the first). The next chapter would do the same thing, but get a little more foreign, maybe "About Ryuk, secret of Death Note to Light taught" And gradually it would get a little more so: "Ryuk-about, Death Note-of secret Light-to taught." There would be enough of this that sentences with Japanese syntax would become as quickly and effortlessly readable as sentences with English syntax. And the hope is that the reader would keep going because they'd be enjoying the story, and after a little while adjusting the weird sentence structure would be a comparatively slight barrier to further progress. Then some of the grammatical particles would switch to full on foreign. Now it's "Ryuk-wa, Death Note-no secret Light-e taught." Gradually we'd get through all of the horrible little verb bits where my language studies have previously crashed and burned: "Ryuk-wa, Death Note-no secret-o Light-e teach-mashita." I might grudgingly allow little footnotes at the bottom like "This is the first time you've seen -mashita. It's just the standard past tense ending for verbs", but even that might be an unacceptable surrender to the grammar-memorization-industrial complex. Finally, and very gradually, it would start replacing English words with Japanese words. Just simple ones at first, ones that were obvious from context, and of course there would be a glossary in the back of the book you could look them up in if you had trouble. Finally, the last chapter would just be completely in Japanese: "Ryuk wa Desu Noto no himitsu o Light e oshiemashita." It would probably be very deliberately simplified Japanese, but still, if you can read a book chapter in Japanese that seems like a pretty good success condition for an Intro Japanese textbook. (and of course Japanese is a bad example here because you'd have to learn the writing system separately. I'd have preferred the example in Spanish, but I'm not confident enough in my Spanish even to do a simple example sentence.)
Deathbed Ballads1 mentions across 1 issues

Deathbed Ballads is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 09, 2025 and June 09, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "one of these: Deathbed Ballads". It most often appears alongside Astralcodexten Com, Discord, Drei Klavierstucke.

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Deathbed Ballads
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1
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June 09, 2025
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June 09, 2025
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Deathbed Ballads
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Open Thread 385
June 09, 2025 · Original source
1: Thanks to everyone who voted on Nonbook Reviews. By chance or choice, some reviews have gotten fewer votes than others; in the interest of fairness, I’m highlighting them here; if you want to look over and vote on more reviews, consider one of these: The Metaethics of Joy/Suffering/AI, Mountaintop, On Taste, Joanna Newsom: The Lyric, Time's Arrow, Phoenix Theater at Great Northern Mall, From Control Problem to RLHF, Face The Fear / Worldbuild The Future, State Of Competitive Debating Unions Address, Drei Klavierstucke, Shrinking Men, The Beginning After The End Of Humanity Circus, The Origins Of Wokeness, The Life's Work Of Banerjee/Duflo/Kremer, Deathbed Ballads, School (Review 1 by DK).
Inline links: voted on Nonbook Reviews, vote on, The Metaethics of Joy/Suffering/AI, Mountaintop, On Taste, Joanna Newsom: The Lyric, Time's Arrow, Phoenix Theater at Great Northern Mall, From Control Problem to RLHF, Face The Fear / Worldbuild The Future, State Of Competitive Debating Unions Address, Drei Klavierstucke, Shrinking Men, The Beginning After The End Of Humanity Circus, The Origins Of Wokeness, The Life's Work Of Banerjee/Duflo/Kremer, Deathbed Ballads, School (Review 1 by DK)
Debt: the First 5,000 Years1 mentions across 1 issues

Debt: the First 5,000 Years is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 10, 2022 and June 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "author of Debt: the First 5,000 Years". It most often appears alongside 50,000 BC, Africa, Altamira.

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1
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1
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June 10, 2022
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June 10, 2022
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Debt: the First 5,000 Years
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Your Book Review: The Dawn Of Everything
June 10, 2022 · Original source
It’s a co-authored book by David Graeber and David Wengrow. The Davids. First, we have David Graeber, anthropologist, famed author of Debt: the First 5,000 Years, notable figure in the 2008 Occupy Wall Street movement, a playful but snarky writer, almost certainly the reason for the section titles being the way they are, and now deceased at the relatively young age of 59, just several weeks before The Dawn of Everything was published, victim of a totally inexplicable and blazingly fast case of necrotizing pancreatitis. The surviving David, David Wengrow, is lesser known but more erudite, more pragmatic, classically academic both in his pedantry but also in his impressive armament of archeological knowledge, and it’s Wengrow who’s been trying to fill the shoes of the more famous Graeber by making the post-publishing media whirlwind tour, sometimes to visible discomfort as he goes on long-winded lectures while the hosts try hastily to cut to the next segment.
Decoding Chomsky1 mentions across 1 issues

Decoding Chomsky is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 19, 2024 and July 19, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Substantial portions of the books ... Decoding Chomsky"; "Substantial portions of the books The Kingdom of Speech and Decoding Chomsky". It most often appears alongside Alan Turing, Amazon, Amazon jungle.

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Decoding Chomsky
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July 19, 2024
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July 19, 2024
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Decoding Chomsky
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Your Book Review: How Language Began
July 19, 2024 · Original source
bedobi, Redditor Apparently he struck a nerve. And there is much more vitriol like this; see Pullum for the best (short) account of the beef I’ve found, along with sources for each quote except the last. On the whole affair, he writes: Calling it a controversy or debate would be an understatement; it was a campaign of vengeance and career sabotage. I’m not going to rehash all of the details, but the conduct of many in the pro-Chomsky faction is pretty shocking. Highly recommended reading. Substantial portions of the books The Kingdom of Speech and Decoding Chomsky are also dedicated to covering the beef and related issues, although I haven’t read them. What’s going on? Assuming Everett is indeed acting in good faith, why did he get this reaction? As I said in the beginning, linguists are those who believe Noam Chomsky is the rightful caliph. Central to Chomsky’s conception of language is the idea that grammar reigns supreme, and that human brains have some specialized structure for learning and processing grammar. In the writing of Chomsky and others, this hypothetical component of our biological endowment is sometimes called the narrow faculty of language (FLN); this is to distinguish it from other (e.g., sensorimotor) capabilities relevant for practical language use. A paper by Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch titled “The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?” was published in the prestigious journal Science in 2002, just a few years earlier. The abstract contains the sentence: We hypothesize that FLN only includes recursion and is the only uniquely human component of the faculty of language. Some additional context is that Chomsky had spent the past few decades simplifying his theory of language. A good account of this is provided in the first chapter of Chomsky’s Universal Grammar: An Introduction. By 2002, arguably not much was left: the core claims were that (i) grammar is supreme, (ii) all grammar is recursive and hierarchical. More elaborate aspects of previous versions of Chomsky’s theory, like the idea that each language might be identified with different parameter settings of some ‘global’ model constrained by the human brain (the core idea of the so-called ‘principles and parameters’ formulation of universal grammar), were by now viewed as helpful and interesting but not necessarily fundamental. Hence, it stands to reason that evidence suggesting not all grammar is recursive could be perceived as a significant threat to the Chomskyan research program. If not all languages had recursion, then what would be left of Chomsky’s once-formidable theoretical apparatus? Everett’s paper inspired a lively debate, with many arguing that he is lying, or misunderstands his own data, or misunderstands Chomsky, or some combination of all of those things. The most famous anti-Everett response is “Pirahã Exceptionality: A Reassessment” by Nevins, Pesetsky, and Rodrigues (NPR), which was published in the prestigious journal Language in 2009. This paper got a response from Everett, which led to an NPR response-to-the-response. To understand how contentious even the published form of this debate became, I reproduce in full the final two paragraphs of NPR’s response-response: We began this commentary with a brief remark about the publicity that has been generated on behalf of Everett's claims about Pirahã. Although reporters and other nonlinguists may be aware of some ‘big ideas’ prominent in the field, the outside world is largely unaware of one of the most fundamental achievements of modern linguistics: the three-fold discovery that (i) there is such a thing as a FACT about language; (ii) the facts of language pose PUZZLES, which can be stated clearly and precisely; and (iii) we can propose and evaluate SOLUTIONS to these puzzles, using the same intellectual skills that we bring to bear in any other domain of inquiry. This three-fold discovery is the common heritage of all subdisciplines of linguistics and all schools of thought, the thread that unites the work of all serious modern linguists of the last few centuries, and a common denominator for the field. In our opinion, to the extent that CA and related work constitute a ‘volley fired straight at the heart’ of anything, its actual target is no particular school or subdiscipline of linguistics, but rather ANY kind of linguistics that shares the common denominator of fact, puzzle, and solution. That is why we have focused so consistently on basic, common-denominator questions: whether CA’s and E09’s conclusions follow from their premises, whether contradictory published data has been properly taken into account, and whether relevant previous research has been represented and evaluated consistently and accurately. To the extent that outside eyes may be focused on the Pirahã discussion for a while longer, we would like to hope that NP&R (and the present response) have helped reinforce the message that linguistics is a field in which robustness of evidence and soundness of argumentation matter. Two observations here. First, another statement about “serious” linguistics; why does that keep popping up? Second, wow. That’s the closest you can come to cursing someone out in a prestigious journal. Polemics aside, what’s the technical content of each side’s argument? Is Pirahã recursive or not? Much of the debate appears to hinge on two things: what one means by recursion
Inline links: bedobi, Pullum, The Kingdom of Speech, Decoding Chomsky, The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?, principles and parameters, Pirahã Exceptionality: A Reassessment, response from Everett, response-to-the-response
Defining Death1 mentions across 1 issues

Defining Death is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 17, 2024 and May 17, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "List of all books reviewed below. Defining Death". It most often appears alongside A Canticle For Leibowitz, A Farewell to Alms, A Husband.

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Defining Death
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1
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May 17, 2024
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May 17, 2024
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Defining Death
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Choose Book Review Finalists 2024
May 17, 2024 · Original source
...ugged Babel Bad Therapy Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother Biophilia Carpentaria Cat's Cradle Catkin Choosing Elites Collected Poems by C.P. Cavafy Consequences of Language Defining Death Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will Discrimination and Disparities Djinn Dominion Don Juan Don't Make No Waves, Don't Back No Losers Egypt's Golden Couple El...
Delighting in the Trinity1 mentions across 1 issues

Delighting in the Trinity is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 10, 2022 and October 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Dr. Michael Reeves' book "Delighting in the Trinity"". It most often appears alongside 9-11, Adraste, America.

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1
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1
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October 10, 2022
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October 10, 2022
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Delighting in the Trinity
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Highlights From The Comments On Columbus Day
October 10, 2022 · Original source
Side note: if anyone should read this and think, "Oh, this ridiculous Trinity business again; how wearying", I would commend you Dr. Michael Reeves' book "Delighting in the Trinity", which is a clearer and more wonderful exploration than I would previously have thought possible.
Delirious New York1 mentions across 1 issues

Delirious New York is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 04, 2021 and May 04, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "‘Delirious New York’ (to use Rem Koolhaas’s memorable phrase)". It most often appears alongside 2008, 9/11 attacks, A Brief History Of Neoliberalism.

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Delirious New York
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May 04, 2021
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May 04, 2021
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Delirious New York
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Book Review: A Brief History Of Neoliberalism
May 04, 2021 · Original source
But the New York investment bankers did not walk away from the city. They seized the opportunity to restructure it in ways that suited their agenda. The creation of a ‘good business climate’ was a priority. This meant using public resources to build appropriate infrastructures for business (particularly in telecommunications) coupled with subsidies and tax incentives for capitalist enterprises. Corporate welfare substituted for people welfare. The city’s elite institutions were mobilized to sell the image of the city as a cultural centre and tourist destination (inventing the famous logo ‘I Love New York’). The ruling elites moved, often fractiously, to support the opening up of the cultural field to all manner of diverse cosmopolitan currents. The narcissistic exploration of self, sexuality, and identity became the leitmotif of bourgeois urban culture. Artistic freedom and artistic licence, promoted by the city’s powerful cultural institutions, led, in effect, to the neoliberalization of culture. ‘Delirious New York’ (to use Rem Koolhaas’s memorable phrase) erased the collective memory of democratic New York. The city’s elites acceded, though not without a struggle, to the demand for lifestyle diversification (including those attached to sexual preference and gender) and increasing consumer niche choices (in areas such as cultural production). New York became the epicentre of postmodern cultural and intellectual experimentation. Meanwhile the investment bankers reconstructed the city economy around financial activities, ancillary services such as legal services and the media (much revived by the financialization then occurring), and diversified consumerism (gentrification and neighbourhood ‘restoration’ playing a prominent and profitable role). City government was more and more construed as an entrepreneurial rather than a social democratic or even managerial entity. Inter-urban competition for investment capital transformed government into urban governance through public–private partnerships. City business was increasingly conducted behind closed doors, and the democratic and representational content of local governance diminished.
Dementia1 mentions across 1 issues

Dementia is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 23, 2025 and June 23, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Finalists are Dementia". It most often appears alongside ACX Grants, Alpha School, Astralcodexten.

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Dementia
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1
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1
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June 23, 2025
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June 23, 2025
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Dementia
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Open Thread 387
June 23, 2025 · Original source
3: Thank you to everyone who voted for finalists in this year’s Nonbook Review Contest. All entries among the top ten best-ranked reviews became automatic finalists, and I also added two more from the 10-25 tier that voters or I especially liked. Honorable mentions were others from the 10-25 tier that I liked a lot. Finalists are Alpha School, Dementia, Islamic Geometric Patterns, Joan of Arc, Mashed Potatoes, Men, Ollantay, Phase I Research, Synaptic Plasticity, The ACX Commentariat, The Internet That Might Have Been, and The Russo-Ukrainian War. Honorable Mentions are at least Bishop's Castle, Bukele, Elon Musk's Algorithm, JFK Conspiracies, Martial Arts, Miniatur Wunderland, School (Review 1 by DK), and Watergate. I may promote some honorables to finalists depending on reader tolerance or unexpected opportunities. I will give you finer-grained score information after the contest ends. First finalist post is planned for this Friday.
Democracy in America1 mentions across 1 issues

Democracy in America is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 19, 2022 and August 19, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "In his famous book Democracy in America , Alexis De Tocqueville warns against the dangers". It most often appears alongside 1587, 1587, 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline.

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Democracy in America
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1
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August 19, 2022
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August 19, 2022
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Democracy in America
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Your Book Review: 1587, A Year Of No Significance
August 19, 2022 · Original source
In his famous book Democracy in America, Alexis De Tocqueville warns against the dangers of overly centralized government administration, describing how the America he visited (in the early 1800s) enjoyed an extremely decentralized administration and - in a footnote - speculates that China (which he never visited) was pretty much the opposite:
Der Hexenhammer1 mentions across 1 issues

Der Hexenhammer is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 28, 2022 and October 28, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "the German name for Malleus Maleficarum is “Der Hexenhammer”". It most often appears alongside 15th century, Adam, Almighty God.

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Der Hexenhammer
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October 28, 2022
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October 28, 2022
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Der Hexenhammer
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Book Review: Malleus Maleficarum
October 28, 2022 · Original source
Did you know you can just buy the Malleus Maleficarum? You can go into a bookstore and say “I would like the legendary manual of witch-hunters everywhere, the one that’s a plot device in dozens of tired fantasy novels”. They will sell it to you and you can read it.
Paging Arthur Miller… You can just buy the Malleus Maleficarum. So, why haven’t you? Might the witches’ spiritual successors be desperate to delegitimize the only thing they’re truly afraid of - the vibrant, time-tested witch hunting expertise of the Catholic Church? Summers writes: It is safe to say that the book is to-day scarcely known save by name. It has become a legend. Writer after writer, who had never turned the pages, felt himself at liberty to heap ridicule and abuse upon this venerable volume. . . He did not know very clearly what he meant, and the humbug trusted that nobody would stop to inquire. For the most part his confidence was respected; his word was taken. We must approach this great work - admirable in spite of its trifling blemishes - with open minds and grave intent; if we duly consider the world of confusion, of Bolshevism, of anarchy and licentiousness all around to-day, it should be an easy task for us to picture the difficulties, the hideous dangers with which Henry Kramer and James Sprenger were called to combat and to cope . . . As for myself, I do not hesitate to record my judgement . . . the Malleus Maleficarum is one of the most pregnant and most interesting books I know in the library of its kind. Big if true. I myself read the Malleus in search of a different type of wisdom. We think of witch hunts as a byword for irrationality, joking about strategies like “if she floats, she’s a witch; if she drowns, we’ll exonerate the corpse.” But this sort of snide superiority to the past has led us wrong before. We used to make fun of phlogiston, of “dormitive potencies”, of geocentric theory. All these are indeed false, but more sober historians have explained why each made sense at the time, replacing our caricatures of absurd irrationality with a picture of smart people genuinely trying their best in epistemically treacherous situations. Were the witch-hunters as bad as everyone says? Or are they in line for a similar exoneration? The Malleus is traditionally attributed to 15th century theologians/witch-hunters Henry Kramer and James Sprenger, but most modern scholars think Kramer wrote it alone, then added the more famous Sprenger as a co-author for a sales boost. The book has three parts. Part 1 is basically Summa Theologica, except all the questions are about witches. Part 2 is basically the DSM 5, except every condition is witchcraft. Part 3 is a manual for judges presiding over witch trials. We’ll go over each, then return to this question: why did a whole civilization spend three centuries killing thousands of people over a threat that didn’t exist? II: Thou Shalt Have Witches In Heaven Almost half the Malleus is devoted to purely philosophical questions surrounding witchcraft. Paramount among these: why would a perfectly just God allow witches to exist? The answer probably has something to with the Devil. And you can probably get part of the way by saying that God has a principled commitment to let the Devil meddle in human affairs until the End of Days. But then you get another issue: the Devil was once the brightest of angels. He’s really really powerful. Completely unrestrained, he can probably sink continents and stuff. So why does he futz around helping elderly women kill their neighbors’ cattle? Put a different way, there’s a very narrow band between “God restrains the Devil so much that witchcraft can’t exist” and “God restrains the Devil so little that witches have already taken over the world”. Prima facie, we wouldn’t expect the amount God restrains the Devil to fall into this little band. But in order to defend the existence of witchcraft, Kramer has to argue that it does. Did you know: the German name for Malleus Maleficarum is “Der Hexenhammer” His arguments ring hollow to modern ears, and honestly neither God nor the Devil comes out looking very good. God isn’t trying to maximize a 21st century utilitarian view of the Good, He’s trying to maximize His own glory. Allowing some evil helps with this, because then He can justly punish it (and being just is glorious) or mercifully forgive it (and being merciful is also glorious). But, if God let the Devil kill everyone in the world, then there would be no one left to praise God’s glory, plus people might falsely think God couldn’t have stopped the Devil if He’d wanted to. So the glory-maximizing option is to give the Devil some power, but not too much. Meanwhile, the Devil isn’t trying to maximize 21st century utilitarian evil. He’s trying to turn souls away from God. So although he could curse people directly, what he actually wants is for humans to sell their soul to him in exchange for curse powers. So whenever possible he prefers to act through witches. The rest of this part is just corollaries of these basic points. But there sure are a lot of corollaries, like: Question III: Whether Children Can Be Generated By Incubi And Succubi So, we all know that sometimes demons who look like hot men come and have sex with women in the middle of the night. But can these demons make a woman pregnant? It would seem that the answer should be no, because the Bible says God created Man in His own image, which suggests the conception of new humans is pretty holy, which makes it sound kind of blasphemous to suggest demons could do it. On the contrary side, we know that demons can have kids with humans. The Bible says so: Genesis 6 talks about nephilim, children of “the sons of God” by “the daughters of men”. And St. Augustine seems to think all those stories about Greek gods impregnating women were incubus demons. So “it is just as Catholic a view to hold that men may at times be begotten by means of incubi and succubi, as it is contrary to the words of the Saints and even to the tradition of Holy Scripture to maintain the opposite opinion.” Since the incubi cannot produce semen themselves, probably they steal it from some other human, then bring it to the womb of the person they are having sex with. Question VI: Concerning Witches Who Copulate With Devils - Why Is It That Women Are Chiefly Addicted To Evil Superstitions? Why are most witches women? Probably because women are awful: John Chrystotom says . . . what else is woman but a foe to friendship, an unescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil of nature, painted with fair colors! Therefore if it be a sin to divorce her when she ought to be kept, it is indeed a necessary torture, for either we commit adultery by divorcing her, or we must endure daily strife. In fact, the word for woman in Latin is femina, which can also have the form feminus, which is literally just fe minus (lesser in faith)! Because women are less faithful, more carnal, and mentally weaker, they are more easily tempted by the Devil, and make up the majority of witches. Question IX: Whether Witches May Work Some Prestidigitory Illusion So That The Male Organ Appears To Be Entirely Removed And Separate From The Body. IE: can witches steal your penis? It would seem that witches can steal your penis. After all, many people claim to have had their penis stolen by witches. The fifteenth-century peasants among whom Kramer went witch-hunting claimed this. And modern people claim it even today. Frank Bures’ The Geography Of Madness is a great book about recent penis-stealing-witch-related panics, which happened until the mid-20th century in Asia and still happen in Africa. For some reason, this is a classic concern across cultures and centuries. But on the contrary side, God created the human body, and charged Man to be fruitful and multiply. So if the Devil could steal people’s penises it would seem that he must be more powerful than God, which is blasphemous. Kramer answers that witches cannot steal men’s penises, but they can cast an illusion that causes it to look and feel like the penis has been stolen. Classic namby-pamby liberal centrist compromise! Question XIV: The Enormity Of Witches Is Considered, And It Is Shown That The Whole Matter Should Be Rightly Set Forth And Declared This is is one of those “more a comment than a question” questions. Kramer suggests that not only is witchcraft a sin, but it is the worst sin. This section (plus the next few) is a list of all the different things witches are worse than, and why. Witches are worse than pagans, because pagans never knew about Christianity. But witches know about it and deliberately reject it. Witches are worse than Jews, because Jews never claimed to be Christian. But witches were once Christian and then renounced the faith. Witches are worse than ordinary heretics, because ordinary heretics only reject some parts of the faith. But witches implicitly reject all of it by supporting the Devil himself. Witches are worse than Adam, because although Adam’s sin had terrible consequences for the human race, this wasn’t really his direct decision. If we limit our consideration to the specific act, Adam just disobeyed God once, but witches are disobeying God all the time. In fact witches are more sinful than the Devil himself (!), and the Devil’s sin “is in many respects small in comparison with the crimes of witches”. For “both sin against God; but [the Devil] against a commanding God, and [witches] against One who dies for us, Whom, as we have said, wicked witches offend above all.” Witches are literally the worst thing in the entire universe. Whatever else you are concerned about, there is no way it is anywhere close to as bad as witches. If you had the faintest idea how bad witches really were, you would be freaking out all the time. You need to stop whatever you were doing before and become some kind of witch-minimizer instead. This ends Part 1, but if you’re interested you might want to look at further questions from this section, including What Is The Source Of The Increase Of Works Of Witchcraft? Whence Comes It That The Practice Of Witchcraft Hath So Notably Increased?
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!BmDQ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0d8cbda2-8ffa-4d5a-9929-81981494f499_720x960.jpeg, The Geography Of Madness, need to, What Is The Source Of The Increase Of Works Of Witchcraft? Whence Comes It That The Practice Of Witchcraft Hath So Notably Increased?
Did you know: the German name for Malleus Maleficarum is “Der Hexenhammer” His arguments ring hollow to modern ears, and honestly neither God nor the Devil comes out looking very good. God isn’t trying to maximize a 21st century utilitarian view of the Good, He’s trying to maximize His own glory. Allowing some evil helps with this, because then He can justly punish it (and being just is glorious) or mercifully forgive it (and being merciful is also glorious). But, if God let the Devil kill everyone in the world, then there would be no one left to praise God’s glory, plus people might falsely think God couldn’t have stopped the Devil if He’d wanted to. So the glory-maximizing option is to give the Devil some power, but not too much. Meanwhile, the Devil isn’t trying to maximize 21st century utilitarian evil. He’s trying to turn souls away from God. So although he could curse people directly, what he actually wants is for humans to sell their soul to him in exchange for curse powers. So whenever possible he prefers to act through witches. The rest of this part is just corollaries of these basic points. But there sure are a lot of corollaries, like: Question III: Whether Children Can Be Generated By Incubi And Succubi So, we all know that sometimes demons who look like hot men come and have sex with women in the middle of the night. But can these demons make a woman pregnant? It would seem that the answer should be no, because the Bible says God created Man in His own image, which suggests the conception of new humans is pretty holy, which makes it sound kind of blasphemous to suggest demons could do it. On the contrary side, we know that demons can have kids with humans. The Bible says so: Genesis 6 talks about nephilim, children of “the sons of God” by “the daughters of men”. And St. Augustine seems to think all those stories about Greek gods impregnating women were incubus demons. So “it is just as Catholic a view to hold that men may at times be begotten by means of incubi and succubi, as it is contrary to the words of the Saints and even to the tradition of Holy Scripture to maintain the opposite opinion.” Since the incubi cannot produce semen themselves, probably they steal it from some other human, then bring it to the womb of the person they are having sex with. Question VI: Concerning Witches Who Copulate With Devils - Why Is It That Women Are Chiefly Addicted To Evil Superstitions? Why are most witches women? Probably because women are awful: John Chrystotom says . . . what else is woman but a foe to friendship, an unescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil of nature, painted with fair colors! Therefore if it be a sin to divorce her when she ought to be kept, it is indeed a necessary torture, for either we commit adultery by divorcing her, or we must endure daily strife. In fact, the word for woman in Latin is femina, which can also have the form feminus, which is literally just fe minus (lesser in faith)! Because women are less faithful, more carnal, and mentally weaker, they are more easily tempted by the Devil, and make up the majority of witches. Question IX: Whether Witches May Work Some Prestidigitory Illusion So That The Male Organ Appears To Be Entirely Removed And Separate From The Body. IE: can witches steal your penis? It would seem that witches can steal your penis. After all, many people claim to have had their penis stolen by witches. The fifteenth-century peasants among whom Kramer went witch-hunting claimed this. And modern people claim it even today. Frank Bures’ The Geography Of Madness is a great book about recent penis-stealing-witch-related panics, which happened until the mid-20th century in Asia and still happen in Africa. For some reason, this is a classic concern across cultures and centuries. But on the contrary side, God created the human body, and charged Man to be fruitful and multiply. So if the Devil could steal people’s penises it would seem that he must be more powerful than God, which is blasphemous. Kramer answers that witches cannot steal men’s penises, but they can cast an illusion that causes it to look and feel like the penis has been stolen. Classic namby-pamby liberal centrist compromise! Question XIV: The Enormity Of Witches Is Considered, And It Is Shown That The Whole Matter Should Be Rightly Set Forth And Declared This is is one of those “more a comment than a question” questions. Kramer suggests that not only is witchcraft a sin, but it is the worst sin. This section (plus the next few) is a list of all the different things witches are worse than, and why. Witches are worse than pagans, because pagans never knew about Christianity. But witches know about it and deliberately reject it. Witches are worse than Jews, because Jews never claimed to be Christian. But witches were once Christian and then renounced the faith. Witches are worse than ordinary heretics, because ordinary heretics only reject some parts of the faith. But witches implicitly reject all of it by supporting the Devil himself. Witches are worse than Adam, because although Adam’s sin had terrible consequences for the human race, this wasn’t really his direct decision. If we limit our consideration to the specific act, Adam just disobeyed God once, but witches are disobeying God all the time. In fact witches are more sinful than the Devil himself (!), and the Devil’s sin “is in many respects small in comparison with the crimes of witches”. For “both sin against God; but [the Devil] against a commanding God, and [witches] against One who dies for us, Whom, as we have said, wicked witches offend above all.” Witches are literally the worst thing in the entire universe. Whatever else you are concerned about, there is no way it is anywhere close to as bad as witches. If you had the faintest idea how bad witches really were, you would be freaking out all the time. You need to stop whatever you were doing before and become some kind of witch-minimizer instead. This ends Part 1, but if you’re interested you might want to look at further questions from this section, including What Is The Source Of The Increase Of Works Of Witchcraft? Whence Comes It That The Practice Of Witchcraft Hath So Notably Increased?
Inline links: The Geography Of Madness, need to, What Is The Source Of The Increase Of Works Of Witchcraft? Whence Comes It That The Practice Of Witchcraft Hath So Notably Increased?
Derveni Papyrus1 mentions across 1 issues

Derveni Papyrus is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 29, 2022 and September 29, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "The introduction discusses the Derveni Papyrus, an ancient discussion of the Orphic hymns". It most often appears alongside 1 Kings 10-11, 2008 Democratic National Convention, Adam Scheffer.

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Derveni Papyrus
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Derveni Papyrus
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Universe-Hopping Through Substack
September 29, 2022 · Original source
He offers a sneak peek at his upcoming book, Music To Raise The Dead: The Secret Origins Of Musicology. The introduction discusses the Derveni Papyrus, an ancient discussion of the Orphic hymns which Gioia says is the first known work of music criticism.
Inline links: a sneak peek
We shouldn’t be surprised by this—the old codes never went away. Eventually the bardic tales of Celtic culture entered the mainstream of Western society, but only because the singers had taken such care in giving them a veneer of Christian respectability. Yet behind the superficial orthodoxy of the resulting Arthurian romances—the most influential body of quest narratives in the history of Western culture—dark coded messages of musical origin still lurk, and are well worth studying. Like Sun Ra’s seemingly crazy pamphlet, these Arthurian narratives are surprisingly congruent with the Derveni papyrus—a document no bard could have read or knew existed (not even Sun Ra when he wrote “Solaristic Precepts”), if only because its uncovering in Derveni didn’t happen until 1962.
Design of Everyday Things1 mentions across 1 issues

Design of Everyday Things is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 29, 2021 and January 29, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "See, for example, Don Norman's Design of Everyday Things". It most often appears alongside @slatestarcodex, AEAweb, Audrey Tang.

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1
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January 29, 2021
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January 29, 2021
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Design of Everyday Things
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Weyl Contra Me On Technocracy
January 29, 2021 · Original source
...nomous "technology" allow. Communication and collaboration outside of affordances of the technology itself are always critical to success. See, for example, Don Norman's Design of Everyday Things, or anything else in the field of human-centered design. 6. I think @slatestarcodex's insistence on breaking apart mechanisms v. judgement from top-down v. bottom-up mis...
...eeds than those focused on autonomous "technology" allow. Communication and collaboration outside of affordances of the technology itself are always critical to success. See, for example, Don Norman's Design of Everyday Things, or anything else in the field of human-centered design. 6. I think @slatestarcodex's insistence on breaking apart mechanisms v. judgement from top-down v. bottom-up mis...
Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will1 mentions across 1 issues

Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 17, 2024 and May 17, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "List of all books reviewed below. Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will". It most often appears alongside A Canticle For Leibowitz, A Farewell to Alms, A Husband.

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1
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May 17, 2024
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May 17, 2024
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Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will
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Choose Book Review Finalists 2024
May 17, 2024 · Original source
...Therapy Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother Biophilia Carpentaria Cat's Cradle Catkin Choosing Elites Collected Poems by C.P. Cavafy Consequences of Language Defining Death Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will Discrimination and Disparities Djinn Dominion Don Juan Don't Make No Waves, Don't Back No Losers Egypt's Golden Couple Elon Musk End Times Eothen Eve Food of the Gods Fo...
...Therapy Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother Biophilia Carpentaria Cat's Cradle Catkin Choosing Elites Collected Poems by C.P. Cavafy Consequences of Language Defining Death Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will Discrimination and Disparities Djinn Dominion Don Juan Don't Make No Waves, Don't Back No Losers Egypt's Golden Couple Elon Musk End...
Dilbert Achieves Self Awareness And Realizes That If He’s So Smart Then He Ought To Be Able To Become The Pointy-Haired Boss, Devotes His Whole Life To This Effort, Achieves About 50% Success, Ends Up In An Uncanny Valley Where He Has Neither The Virtues Of The Honest Engineer Nor Truly Those Of The Slick Consultant, Then Dies Of Cancer Right When His Character Arc Starts To Get Interesting1 mentions across 1 issues

Dilbert Achieves Self Awareness And Realizes That If He’s So Smart Then He Ought To Be Able To Become The Pointy-Haired Boss, Devotes His Whole Life To This Effort, Achieves About 50% Success, Ends Up In An Uncanny Valley Where He Has Neither The Virtues Of The Honest Engineer Nor Truly Those Of The Slick Consultant, Then Dies Of Cancer Right When His Character Arc Starts To Get Interesting is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 16, 2026 and January 16, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "title would be Dilbert Achieves Self Awareness And Realizes That If He’s So Smart Then He Ought To Be Able To Become The Pointy-Haired Boss, Devotes His Whole Life To This Effort, Achieves About 50% Success, Ends Up In An Uncanny Valley Where He Has Neither The Virtues Of The Honest Engineer Nor Truly Those Of The Slick Consultant, Then Dies Of Cancer Right When His Character Arc Starts To Get Interesting". It most often appears alongside Adams, Alice, All-Seeing Eye.

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Dilbert Achieves Self Awareness And Realizes That If He’s So Smart Then He Ought To Be Able To Become The Pointy-Haired Boss, Devotes His Whole Life To This Effort, Achieves About 50% Success, Ends Up In An Uncanny Valley Where He Has Neither The Virtues Of The Honest Engineer Nor Truly Those Of The Slick Consultant, Then Dies Of Cancer Right When His Character Arc Starts To Get Interesting
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The Dilbert Afterlife
January 16, 2026 · Original source
Lesser lights may distance themselves from their art, but Adams radiated contempt for such surrender. He lived his whole life as a series of Dilbert strips. Gather them into one of his signature compendia, and the title would be Dilbert Achieves Self Awareness And Realizes That If He’s So Smart Then He Ought To Be Able To Become The Pointy-Haired Boss, Devotes His Whole Life To This Effort, Achieves About 50% Success, Ends Up In An Uncanny Valley Where He Has Neither The Virtues Of The Honest Engineer Nor Truly Those Of The Slick Consultant, Then Dies Of Cancer Right When His Character Arc Starts To Get Interesting.
Dilbert's Guide to the Rest of Your Life1 mentions across 1 issues

Dilbert's Guide to the Rest of Your Life is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 16, 2026 and January 16, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "Dilbert's Guide to the Rest of Your Life". It most often appears alongside Adams, Alice, All-Seeing Eye.

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Dilbert's Guide to the Rest of Your Life
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The Dilbert Afterlife
January 16, 2026 · Original source
Adams was willing to sacrifice everything for the right to say “It’s Okay To Be White”. I can’t help wondering what his life would have been like if he’d been equally willing to assert the okayness of the rest of his identity. Dilbert's Guide to the Rest of Your Life In case it’s not obvious, I loved Scott Adams.
Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men1 mentions across 1 issues

Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 10, 2022 and June 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Rousseau’s submission, Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men, became an intellectual sensation". It most often appears alongside 50,000 BC, Africa, Altamira.

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Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men
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Your Book Review: The Dawn Of Everything
June 10, 2022 · Original source
In 1754 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, at the comfortable age of 42, was composing a monograph for an essay contest not dissimilar to this one. Hosted by a local university, the prompt for the contest was "What is the origin of inequality among people, and is it authorized by natural law?” Rousseau’s submission, Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men, became an intellectual sensation. In its long life as one of the foundational documents of the Western world it has been, at times, blamed for the bloody slaughter of The Terror, and, at other times, lauded as the inventor of the progressive Left.
Disqualified from winning the contest due to its unapologetic length, the Discourse’s depiction of an original state of nature populated by noble savages, a state eventually sundered by agriculture and the invention of private property, was monumentally influential. His genius move was to politicize the past, offering up an alternative mirror to Hobbes’ view, itself already political, which portrayed life in prehistorical societies with that oft-repeated phrase: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Hobbes, founder of the political Right, and Rousseau, founder of the political Left, both built their arguments on the bedrock of prehistory. But on different bedrocks. The lesson being: if you want to change human society, change the past first.
The indigenous critique served as a shock to the European system, setting the path to Rousseau’s Discourses by creating an entire genre of literature, as
Discourses1 mentions across 1 issues

Discourses is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 10, 2022 and June 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "setting the path to Rousseau’s Discourses". It most often appears alongside 50,000 BC, Africa, Altamira.

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Discourses
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Your Book Review: The Dawn Of Everything
June 10, 2022 · Original source
The indigenous critique served as a shock to the European system, setting the path to Rousseau’s Discourses by creating an entire genre of literature, as
Discrimination and Disparities1 mentions across 1 issues

Discrimination and Disparities is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 17, 2024 and May 17, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "List of all books reviewed below. Discrimination and Disparities". It most often appears alongside A Canticle For Leibowitz, A Farewell to Alms, A Husband.

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May 17, 2024
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Discrimination and Disparities
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Choose Book Review Finalists 2024
May 17, 2024 · Original source
...ia Carpentaria Cat's Cradle Catkin Choosing Elites Collected Poems by C.P. Cavafy Consequences of Language Defining Death Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will Discrimination and Disparities Djinn Dominion Don Juan Don't Make No Waves, Don't Back No Losers Egypt's Golden Couple Elon Musk End Times Eothen Eve Food of the Gods For Whom the Bell Tolls Frankenst...
Discworld1 mentions across 1 issues

Discworld is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 28, 2023 and April 28, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Terry Pratchett’s Discworld treats the fantasy universe". It most often appears alongside Ancient Progenitor Civilization, Aragorn, Arya Stark.

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Discworld
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April 28, 2023
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Discworld
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The Psychology Of Fantasy
April 28, 2023 · Original source
The fantasy universe is so familiar that subverting it has become nearly as big a business as playing it straight. Diana Wynne Jones’ Dark Lord of Derkholm, Jacqueline Carey’s Banewreaker, Order Of The Stick. There are a million jokes along the lines of “what if the Dark Lord’s henchmen unionized?” or “what if there were performance reviews at the Adventurers’ Guild”? Terry Pratchett’s Discworld treats the fantasy universe as a given, something everyone will obviously understand, and then uses it as a foil in order to investigate everything else.
Distinction1 mentions across 1 issues

Distinction is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 04, 2021 and October 04, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Distinction by Bourdieu". It most often appears alongside 19th century African art, 20th century, 9-11.

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Distinction
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October 04, 2021
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October 04, 2021
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Distinction
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Bourdieu
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Highlights From The Comments On Modern Architecture
October 04, 2021 · Original source
I also got some comments from a professional sociologist, Cicada Meth Orgy Fungus (look, people on Twitter have weird names sometimes). He writes: @slatestarcodex discusses under the headings \"Signaling Wealth To Signaling Taste\" (Bourdieu's Distinction) and \"Split Between Art And Mass Culture\" (a bunch of recent stuff coming out of econ soc) ","username":"RogueWPA","name":"Cicada Meth Orgy Fungus","profile_image_url":"","date":"Thu Sep 23 23:10:44 +0000 2021","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":0,"like_count":12,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{"url":"https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria","image":"https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/b3dd92b6-ee7c-4d6d-94f9-7d2e5ab1aef1_1024x709.jpeg","title":"Whither Tartaria?","description":"...","domain":"astralcodexten.substack.com"},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM"> …with the recent stuff being this and this.
Inline links: this, this
The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction From Bauhaus To Our House The Rite of Spring by Modris Eksteins Art and Culture: Critical Essays by Clement Greenberg The Intellectuals and the Masses. Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939 Shock of the New (TV series) The Civilizing Process by Norbert Elias Distinction by Bourdieu
Disunited Nations vs. Dawn Of Eurasia1 mentions across 1 issues

Disunited Nations vs. Dawn Of Eurasia is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 10, 2021 and July 10, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "READERS' CHOICE AWARD: Disunited Nations vs. Dawn Of Eurasia , reviewed by Misha Saul". It most often appears alongside Addiction By Design, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are, Astral Codex Ten.

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July 10, 2021
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July 10, 2021
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Disunited Nations vs. Dawn Of Eurasia
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Misha Saul
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Book Review Contest: Winners
July 10, 2021 · Original source
READERS' CHOICE AWARD: Disunited Nations vs. Dawn Of Eurasia, reviewed by Misha Saul
Inline links: Disunited Nations vs. Dawn Of Eurasia
Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World1 mentions across 1 issues

Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 21, 2021 and May 21, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "It gets even more attention in his follow-up books, The Absent Superpower and Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World (2020)"; "his follow-up books, The Absent Superpower and Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World (2020)". It most often appears alongside 1992 treaty, ACX, Africa.

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May 21, 2021
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May 21, 2021
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Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World
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Your Book Review: The Accidental Superpower
May 21, 2021 · Original source
7 It gets even more attention in his follow-up books, The Absent Superpower and Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World (2020).
Inline links: 7
Divina Comedia1 mentions across 1 issues

Divina Comedia is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 09, 2024 and October 09, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "an atheist competitor to the Divina Comedia , the Bodhicaryāvatāra and the Mahābhāratam". It most often appears alongside 16th of August, Bodhicaryāvatāra, CAT scan.

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Divina Comedia
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October 09, 2024
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October 09, 2024
Book title
Divina Comedia
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Triple Tragedy And Thankful Theory
October 09, 2024 · Original source
I have been doing way more than that by writing the Seven Secular Sermons - an atheist competitor to the Divina Comedia, the Bodhicaryāvatāra and the Mahābhāratam - for exactly the 12 years that I have evidently been hosting this tumor. And I did have a lot of headaches, which should have been my other clue, but which I had heroically/stupidly tolerated for years.
Inline links: Seven Secular Sermons, Divina Comedia, Bodhicaryāvatāra, Mahābhāratam
Divine Comedy1 mentions across 1 issues

Divine Comedy is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 26, 2022 and August 26, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Dante had when he began the Divine Comedy". It most often appears alongside 1917, aesthetics, American.

Reference entry
Divine Comedy
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 26, 2022
Last seen
August 26, 2022
Book title
Divine Comedy
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Your Book Review: Kora In Hell
August 26, 2022 · Original source
As its name implies, the Improvisations is not a meticulously planned book. It’s not a high concept type of thing where you literally move the Eleusinian Myth to New Jersey. William Carlos Williams simply went to work in the morning and when he returned home at night, no matter how late it was, before going to bed, he wrote something, anything, and at the end of the year he had a pile of texts in front of him which were now the rough precursor of a book. Those texts were loosely based on what had happened to him throughout that day, or on something he had seen or thought about. Williams wrote the book during 1917, when he was around 34 years old. That’s the age Dante had when he began the Divine Comedy:
Djinn1 mentions across 1 issues

Djinn is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 17, 2024 and May 17, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "List of all books reviewed below. Djinn". It most often appears alongside A Canticle For Leibowitz, A Farewell to Alms, A Husband.

Reference entry
Djinn
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
May 17, 2024
Last seen
May 17, 2024
Book title
Djinn
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Choose Book Review Finalists 2024
May 17, 2024 · Original source
...kin Choosing Elites Collected Poems by C.P. Cavafy Consequences of Language Defining Death Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will Discrimination and Disparities Djinn Dominion Don Juan Don't Make No Waves, Don't Back No Losers Egypt's Golden Couple Elon Musk End Times Eothen Eve Food of the Gods For Whom the Bell Tolls Frankenstein Fr...
Doctrines and Covenants1 mentions across 1 issues

Doctrines and Covenants is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 01, 2024 and November 01, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "In the book Doctrines and Covenants, Joseph Smith reports that God told him". It most often appears alongside /r/BadMTGCombos, @cremieuxrecuel, @justin_garson.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
November 01, 2024
Last seen
November 01, 2024
Book title
Doctrines and Covenants
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Links For November 2024
November 01, 2024 · Original source
…and makes the extreme claim that something like this might demonstrate hypercomputation, ie the visual system has semi-magic computational properties beyond those permitted by normal physical laws. I am skeptical but appreciate the survey of visual computing (as well as the callback to one of my older posts). 22: Material implication in Mormonism: In the book Doctrines and Covenants, Joseph Smith reports that God told him that if he lived to be 85, he would see the Second Coming (which would place it in 1890 - 1891). Mormon apologists note that Joseph Smith did not live to be 85, so no conclusion can be drawn. 23: More old-timey psychiatric ads (this one is from 1952, source: @justin_garson): This was before they invented what we would call antidepressants today; Dexedrine is an amphetamine related to Adderall. 24: Congratulations to Open Philanthropy, the biggest effective altruist foundation… …whose grantee David Baker recently won a Nobel Prize for his research on synthetic proteins. Potential applications include new drugs, vaccines, and materials. 25: Rich Kid Memes And The Online Culture Of The One Percent. Rich people who want to signal group membership to other rich people online can’t boast about how rich they are; that would be gauche. Instead, they’ve settled on the solution of making fun of rich people in hyperspecific language that proves familiarity with the culture. 26: Tap Water Sommelier: Vladimir Putin has two sons, ages 5 and 9. They are kept in luxurious but total isolation from the outside world and raised by flunkies who are too scared to punish/restrain them in any way. Also some discussion of an unexpected historical analogue. 27: Experiment from Colombia: replacing experienced teachers with less-experience but higher-scoring-on-tests teachers significantly decreased student performance. Got to admit I was expecting the opposite of this, I’d seen US data saying that experience didn’t matter and teacher intelligence did. Looking over this more, I find lots of studies on both sides and will go back to agnosticism on this question until someone I trust investigates further. 28: Large scale-formal Intellectual Turing Test finds that people can imitate partisans effectively; ie nobody on either side can tell the difference between a Democrat arguing for Democrat values vs. a Republican-pretending-to-be-a-Democrat arguing for Democrat values (and vice versa). This study used a 100 word essay on why you supported your party (you can see if you can do better here), but past attempts with different structures (religion, vegetarianism, polyamory) have shown broadly the same results. The researchers try to put this in the context of various studies showing that people do misunderstand their opponents (eg think they’re more extreme, underestimate the level of common ground), but it seems like intellectual Turing Tests aren’t a good way to measure or tease out this misunderstanding. 29: Congratulations to Substacker WoolyAI for doing the impossible and providing a genuinely novel and interesting (to me) take on pickup artistry: 30: Did you know: if you Google “cool websites”, our subreddit (r/slatestarcodex) is the first result. 31: Moshe Koppel, who works at the intersection of computer science and Talmud, is writing a series of posts (presumably) based off of my Every Bay Area House Party, titled Jerusalem Area House Party (it’s multiple part, you have to go to the main Substack page to find the others). I won’t necessarily link everyone who riffs off one of my posts - but honestly I probably will if you also have a Wikipedia page that describes you as working on computational Talmudology. 32: David Roman says it’s a myth that Arabic scholars rescued and preserved the works of the great classical authors. 33: Medications often decrease “secondary endpoints” (eg stroke, heart attack), but the holy grail of pharma studies is proving that a certain drug decreases all-cause mortality. This is much harder (not all heart attacks kill people, and people die from lots of other things), but is the strongest possible endorsement for the drug (without it, you might worry that it only prevented non-fatal heart attacks, or that it killed as many people through side effects as it saves through heart attack prevention). Even great medications that we’re confident in can’t always clear this bar. But a new JAMA article adds another member to this select club: Adderall decreases all-cause mortality in ADHD, probably because it prevents drug addiction, car accidents, and impulsive actions. 34: Before the Gulf War got in the way, Saddam Hussein was building some crazy mosques: 35: Italy bans surrogacy - quite strictly, too, Italians aren’t even allowed to go abroad and do it. I am so sorry for all the Italians who will never get to be mothers and fathers because their government hates progress. You might hope that, whatever the other disadvantages of anti-immigrant parties, at least they’re incentivized to let natives have children, but looks like they can’t even get that one right. Starting to wonder whether the trains even run on time. 36: Elsewhere in “Italy sucks” news - did you know Italy’s tax code effectively bans startups? Companies are taxed before making any money, based on how many assets they have. If they have lots of assets but aren’t making money (eg because they’re still doing research / in stealth) then tax officials get confused and hostile and run increasingly punitive audits. Related: size of the European tech sector. It’s the red line on this chart; if you can’t see a red line at your screen resolution, then you’ve learned something important about the the EU tech sector. 37: Seen on @cremieuxrecuel’s twitter (preliminary, needs replication): Jews may have gone from 65-29 Democrat/Republican in 2020 to 58-40 this election. 38: Extelligence has a post responding to my critique of the cultural Christianity argument (among, uh, many other things), but I don’t really think it connects. I’m not telling atheists they can’t go to church/synagogue if it makes them feel happy and fulfilled - I’ve done this myself sometimes. My post was meant to argue against the claim that, for pragmatic reasons, atheists should support the Christianization of society as a defense against Islam or postmodernism or some other philosophical enemy. 39: Related: Extelligence is finally going for their Trust Assembly project/idea/startup for online consensus-based truth-seeking (I think something like a cross between Community Notes and Wikipedia, but as a browser extension, and for everything). He’s looking for potential developers/testers/users. 40: Jiankui He is the Chinese geneticist who made history with the first germline gene editing in humans (resulting in three babies supposedly immune to AIDS, although nobody has tested this). China sentenced him to three years in prison for unauthorized experimentation, but now he’s out of jail, has an English-language Twitter account, has a new lab, wants to work on Alzheimers, and seems pretty based (although not infinitely based): 41: Anthropic has a new version of their AI Claude which can use your computer. You give it permission, put it on a virtual desktop, and ask it to do things for you (eg “please find and download a picture of a cat” or “please research these ten things and put them in a text file”.) It moves your cursor, browses the Internet, and creates and saves files. People keep saying they’ll care about AI “when it operates autonomously” or “when it becomes an agent”. But this is a trivial barrier, and one which Computer Use Claude has arguably already passed. So far this feature is limited to developers (though anyone with computer knowledge can sign up for it) but I expect it to be the near future of consumer AI, to get better quickly, and to shade gradually into the “autonomous” “agentic” AI that you all think will require a paradigm shift. 42: Claim (from the IDF): Hamas faked polls showing that most Palestinians supported the October 7 attack; the real numbers are 31% in favor, 64% against. 43: Otto von Bismarck wanted to trick France into declaring war on Germany. In order to provoke the French, he sent the Ems Dispatch, a statement describing recent diplomatic events in a way that sounded maximally offensive. The French were so offended that “crowds” in Paris demanded war, and the Franco-Prussian War was declared soon afterwards. The part of this that I find most interesting is the text of the dispatch itself, which read: After the news of the renunciation of the Prince von Hohenzollern had been communicated to the Imperial French government by the Royal Spanish government, the French Ambassador in Ems made a further demand on His Majesty the King that he should authorize him to telegraph to Paris that His Majesty the King undertook for all time never again to give his assent should the Hohenzollerns once more take up their candidature. His Majesty the King thereupon refused to receive the Ambassador again and had the latter informed by the Adjutant of the day that His Majesty had no further communication to make to the Ambassador. I’m fascinated by the idea that only 150 years ago, it was obvious that if someone sent you this statement, you had to declare war or abandon all honor. If I read it carefully, I can sort of parse out that it sounds like the Prussians are unhappy, but that’s the most emotion I gather from it. Anyway, the Franco-Prussian War led to World War I which led to World War II - so if you don’t like 50 million people dying and the total devastation of Europe, blame this statement about ambassadors. 44: The first use of artificial insemination in humans: The first recorded case of artificial insemination by donor didn’t occur until 1884, when Dr. William Pancoast decided to treat a couple’s infertility by secretly inseminating the woman with sperm obtained from a medical student. The insemination happened while the patient was under anesthesia and Dr. Pancoast did not tell her what had occurred. She gave birth to a baby boy nine months later, but it was several years before the doctor finally confessed to her husband what he had done. Neither man ever informed the mother. It was 25 years later the result of this case was published. Dr. Pancoast was roundly condemned for his actions, but it did open the door for consensual sperm donor insemination. 45: ClearerThinking administers several personality tests to the same people to learn more about their comparative accuracy. I am most interested in their finding that tests with “factors” (eg the Big Five, where you rate people on a numeric scale) are inherently more accurate than those with “types” (eg Myers-Briggs, where you assign someone a specific category) and that, adjusting for this, Big Five is no more predictive than the Enneagram: 46: In 2022, I wrote Whither Tartaria, where I asked why ornate classical styles switched to more austere modernist styles around 1900 - 1950 in a variety of different arts (painting, architecture, literature, poetry, etc). I proposed seven theories, but was unsure which if any were true. Since then, Samuel Hughes of Works In Progress has been investigating. In May, he wrote a well-researched article showing that it wasn’t just increasing cost, because ornate classical architecture now costs less than ever. Now in a new article he demolishes a different theory - it’s not just decreasing cost (and subsequent lack of ability to signal wealth) - because costs didn’t decrease in several other arts, and the change was led by artists with rich people as reluctant followers. He concludes: Modernism may well be a status game of some kind; it may well signal taste more than it signals wealth; and this latter feature may be one of the things that distinguishes it from older artistic styles. But the mechanism by which this change came about must be different to the one Alexander describes. 47: Sort of kind of related - When Hamilton Lost Its Snob Appeal. The musical Hamilton was briefly an artistic/cultural phenomenon, but tastemakers eventually switched to making fun of it. Why? Rob Henderson says it happened after ticket prices came down and the common people could enjoy it. I disagree: everyone I knew who was into Hamilton got into it from the free online soundtrack long before they’d seen the show; I think this is more likely the usual fad cycle where anybody who’s too into yesterday’s fad is behind the curve and therefore uncool. 48: Related: Why are people such jerks to public intellectuals? And more. I agree this is a great mystery. 49: Some prominent Substack psychiatrists doing a video Q&A, submit your questions here. 50: Naomi Kanakia: The Literacy Delusion had a number of explanations for why reading books seemed to be so much worse for human beings (in terms of emotional wellness and productivity) than other forms of narrative entertainment, but its main theory was the integration hypothesis. That the stream of words in a book trained the human brain into a habit of self-consciousness, that reading books forced human beings to think of themselves as a stream of text, processed through time, making a coherent argument of some sort. And that this overall flattening effect forced readers to ignore aspects of their personality or their situation that were not otherwise in line with the overarching story they'd created about themselves. Basically, reading books causes repression and neurosis. The Literacy Delusion argued that, yes, human beings are storytelling machines, but that a stream of written text is a particular kind of story—a story that is particularly flat, particularly devoid of conflicting or harmonizing information—and that this flatness creates a peculiar effect on the human brain. 51: Last month, I linked Sasha Gusev’s No, Intelligence Is Not Like Height and asked people who disagreed to share their arguments; they sure did. First, several people pointed me to a new preprint, Family-GWAS Reveals Effects Of Environment And Mating On Genetic Associations, which finds that one of the main papers Gusev cited to make his case, Howe 2022, made a mistake - imputing sibling genotypes using a process designed for non-sibling genotypes - and that once that mistake is corrected, the finding disappears and intelligence and height appear similar. Second, Joseph Bronski has a more specific post where he responds to Gusev’s points one by one. He accuses Gusev of “[making] up his own chart to remove the error bars [from the originals], to obscure the fact that the study found no evidence for this in IQ”, and says that the cases where he didn’t do that are just “population stratification and range restriction”. Third, Noah Carl at Aporia, instead of writing a direct response like Bronski, argues that the usual method of attacking twin studies is obsolete; not only have the most-debated assumptions behind twin studies been thoroughly validated, but there are now other lines of evidence besides twin studies which confirm high IQ heritability. Fourth, Leonardo Parro (not framed as a response to Gusev) goes into more depth about one of those ways, a “pedigree-based analysis” demonstrating heritability of 54 - 69%, ie no “missing heritability” compared to twin studies. He summarizes this as the effect of “rare variants” compared to the usual SNPs - ie if you only look at the most common genes that are easiest to find, you get “missing heritability” compared to twin studies, but if you widen your search to rare genes that are hard to find, you don’t. 52: Extremely related: Heliospect is a startup promising polygenic selection for IQ and other traits; they were trying to stay in stealth mode but The Guardian spied on them and nonconsensually revealed their existence. The discussion on the r/ssc subreddit centered on their claim that (given enough embryos to choose from) they could increase a baby’s expected IQ by 6 points (I’ve also heard 7.5). Sasha Gusev had previously argued that current technology maxed out at 3.5 and future technology would max out at 6, so a claim of 6 - 7.5 is pretty extreme; Gwern, who wrote the pioneering analysis of this technology, was also skeptical. But Heliospect says they’ve got better predictors than academia that use the rare variants everyone else misses; after talking to the company, Gwern retracted his objections and says he finds their claim “pretty plausible”. Local ACX commenter geneticist Gene Smith also redid some calculations, changed his mind, and says “probably pretty realistic”. I find this interesting not just because of the polygenic selection angle, but because if Heliospect is right then their predictor is able to predict more genetic IQ than the “missing heritability” people believe exists, and it should be able to put this argument to bed once and for all. 53: This month in censorship: X/Twitter banned journalist Ken Klippenstein for sharing the Trump campaign’s dossier on JD Vance. Twitter’s side of the story is that the dossier was probably originally stolen by Iranian agents and they don’t want to support that kind of thing by letting people signal-boost the illicitly obtained goods; you can read Klippenstein’s side here. He appears to be unbanned now.
Inline links: one of my older posts, reports, note, @justin_garson, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!EF4p!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4b7af4c0-ac0f-4c9a-88bc-6c00e57ca977_479x639.jpeg, https://x.com/albrgr/status/1844527064956928009, won a Nobel Prize, Rich Kid Memes And The Online Culture Of The One Percent, Tap Water Sommelier, Experiment from Colombia, experience didn’t matter, teacher intelligence did, Large scale-formal Intellectual Turing Test, you can see if you can do better here, religion, vegetarianism, polyamory, WoolyAI, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!4FRI!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F558ad67a-bfca-469e-abd8-2edc7c8b888a_590x916.png, if you Google “cool websites”, r/slatestarcodex, who works at the intersection of computer science and Talmud, Jerusalem Area House Party, says it’s a myth, Adderall decreases all-cause mortality in ADHD, some crazy mosques, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!2W0c!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc2be0549-aa2b-411d-b6a6-da50c34f7f86_1000x572.jpeg, Italy bans surrogacy, Italy’s tax code effectively bans startups?, Related, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!T3h-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F08b011b3-ef20-42e5-91b2-33946b8ca7b6_1761x1355.jpeg, @cremieuxrecuel, responding to my critique of the cultural Christianity argument, My post, is finally going for, Trust Assembly, has an English-language Twitter account, has a new lab, wants to work on Alzheimers, and seems pretty based, not infinitely based, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!fY_K!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6b3b61c8-6c48-4eb7-9608-426b738ab9c8_592x111.png, which can use your computer, Claim, Ems Dispatch, The first use of artificial insemination in humans, administers several personality tests to the same people, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!epEc!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F47c474c6-d68a-41e4-954e-d24cd00ec040_740x388.webp, Whither Tartaria, a well-researched article showing, in a new article he demolishes a different theory, When Hamilton Lost Its Snob Appeal, Why are people such jerks to public intellectuals?, more, Some prominent Substack psychiatrists doing a video Q&A, submit your questions here, Naomi Kanakia, No, Intelligence Is Not Like Height, Family-GWAS Reveals Effects Of Environment And Mating On Genetic Associations, Howe 2022, a more specific post where he responds to Gusev’s points one by one, argues that the usual method of attacking twin studies is obsolete, goes into more depth about one of those ways, The Guardian spied on them and nonconsensually revealed their existence, discussion, previously argued, the pioneering analysis of this technology, Gwern retracted his objections, says, polygenic selection, banned journalist Ken Klippenstein, you can read Klippenstein’s side here., appears to be unbanned now
Dog Sense1 mentions across 1 issues

Dog Sense is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 22, 2021 and April 22, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Cat Sense and Dog Sense". It most often appears alongside ACX, African Gray Parrots, Animal Cognition.

Reference entry
Dog Sense
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
April 22, 2021
Last seen
April 22, 2021
Book title
Dog Sense
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Source context
Your Book Review: Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are?
April 22, 2021 · Original source
Honorable mention: The Horse, Wheel, and Language, which weaves together linguistics, archaeology, history, poetics, and genetics (a teeny bit - but it was published right before a lot of this data became available) to give the most comprehensive view possible of the development and early spread of Proto-Indoeuropean and its immediate daughter languages. War won out as my recommendation for having both a wider scope and I thought a more deft weaving of multiple fields. HWL reads very much as the writing of a professional archaeologist who has dipped into other fields to better understand his work. There's a lot of detail about pot sherds and midden heaps and such, which can drag, even if you're interested in that kind of thing. Cat Sense and Dog Sense Read to: better understand and relate to your pet with a side helping of pure joy of learning. Each of these books gives an overview of what we know about the domestication process of each animal, which also serves as a mini-primer on what domestication is and how it works. Spoiler alert: cats are barely domesticated and have had way less intentional selective pressure placed on them by humans than dogs. Did you know friendly domesticated cats might be the product of the TEMPLE-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX/CAPITALISM? Egypt's veneration of cats led to lots of folks wanting to have/gift cat mummies as spiritual protectors in graves, which led to kitty mills where cats were bred to turn into mummies (I know, sad). Any cats that didn't get along so well with the temple workers would either escape or not be allowed to breed (nobody wants to get the crap scratched out of them every time they bring the food), all of which would combine into selective pressure enforced over short (and therefore plentiful) generations for cats that get along with people.
Don Quixote1 mentions across 1 issues

Don Quixote is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 10, 2023 and November 10, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "it was actually using Don Quixote as the text". It most often appears alongside #EEGManyLabs, 23andme, @freeshreeda.

Reference entry
Don Quixote
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
November 10, 2023
Last seen
November 10, 2023
Book title
Don Quixote
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Source context
Followup: Quests And Requests
November 10, 2023 · Original source
4 sounds a lot like donquixote.fun (which has content in Spanish, Italian, German and French) except that it progresses one sentence at a time. (When I last saw it, it was actually using Don Quixote as the text, but people didn't like the archaic language https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26601643 )
Inline links: donquixote.fun, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26601643
Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes1 mentions across 1 issues

Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 15, 2023 and September 15, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes was a discussion". It most often appears alongside @campeters4, A Strange Dream, a_reader.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
September 15, 2023
Last seen
September 15, 2023
Book title
Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes
Instagram handle
@shoppingtheatre.inc
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Book Review Contest 2023 Winners
September 15, 2023 · Original source
Some extra praise: Man's Search For Meaning placed 4th; I thought it was a good review of an important book by someone who's clearly thought about these issues a lot. I loved Public Citizen; I had a vague sense that a lot of government happens by lawsuit now and it hadn't always been this way, but I wouldn't have even known where to start in figuring out why and how this happened, and I had always thought of Nader as "that car guy who everyone mysteriously thought was important who then lost the 2000 election", so I'm glad to get more clarity there. Zuozhuan was oddly haunting and I will remember the part about Zichan and the law code for a long time. Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes was a discussion of the Piraha (the weird tribe that doesn't seem to have supposedly universal features of language and culture) which gave a great sense of how it might feel to be a primitive rainforest tribe.
Don’t Be A Feminist1 mentions across 1 issues

Don’t Be A Feminist is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 06, 2022 and September 06, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "29: Caplan will be publishing a new book, Don’t Be A Feminist". It most often appears alongside 80,000 Hours, @itsahousingtrap, Ajeya Cotra.

Reference entry
Don’t Be A Feminist
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
September 06, 2022
Last seen
September 06, 2022
Book title
Don’t Be A Feminist
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Links For September 2022
September 06, 2022 · Original source
29: Related: Caplan will be publishing a new book, Don’t Be A Feminist. He asked me to write a blurb, then rejected my first few suggestions (“Bryan Caplan committed career suicide by writing this book; you owe it to him to make his sacrifice meaningful by reading it” and “I didn't think Bryan was ever going to be able to top the ‘education is bad’ book, but he definitely did”). He did end up including something by me on the back cover. I must admit I was kind of hoping it would be hidden among many other reviewer blurbs so that my name wasn’t too prominent, but I guess all those other potential reviewers chickened out, like I almost did.
Inline links: Don’t Be A Feminist
Don’t Give Up On Having Kids Because Of Climate Change1 mentions across 1 issues

Don’t Give Up On Having Kids Because Of Climate Change is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 24, 2022 and January 24, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "I finish + post Don’t Give Up On Having Kids Because Of Climate Change". It most often appears alongside 538, ACX, AstraZeneca.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
January 24, 2022
Last seen
January 24, 2022
Book title
Don’t Give Up On Having Kids Because Of Climate Change
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Grading My 2021 Predictions
January 24, 2022 · Original source
BLOG 86. ACX is earning more money than it is right now: 70% 87. [redacted]: 10% 88. [redacted]: 50% 89. [redacted]: 20% 90. There is another article primarily about SSC/ACX/me in a major news source: 10% 91. I subscribe to at least 5 new Substacks (so total of 8): 20% 92. I've read and reviewed How Asia Works: 90% 93. I've read and reviewed Nixonland: 70% 94. I've read and reviewed Scout Mindset: 60% 95. I've read and reviewed at least two more dictator books: 50% 96. I've started and am at least 25% of the way through the formal editing process for Unsong: 30% 97. Unsong is published: 10% 98. I've written at least five chapters of some non-Unsong book I hope to publish: 40% 99. “On The Natural Faculties” wins the book review contest: 60% 100. I run an ACX reader survey: 50% 101. I run a normal ACX survey (must start, but not necessarily finish, before end of year): 90% 102. By end of year, some other post beats NYT commentary for my most popular post: 10% 103. I finish + post Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars: 90% 104. I finish + post Don’t Give Up On Having Kids Because Of Climate Change: 80% 105. I finish + post Carbon Costs Quantified: 80% 106. I have a queue of fewer than ten extra posts: 70%
Inline links: Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars, Don’t Give Up On Having Kids Because Of Climate Change, Carbon Costs Quantified
Don’t Make No Waves, Don’t Back No Losers1 mentions across 1 issues

Don’t Make No Waves, Don’t Back No Losers is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 17, 2024 and May 17, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "List of all books reviewed below. Don’t Make No Waves, Don’t Back No Losers". It most often appears alongside A Canticle For Leibowitz, A Farewell to Alms, A Husband.

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Don’t Make No Waves, Don’t Back No Losers
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Choose Book Review Finalists 2024
May 17, 2024 · Original source
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Don’t Sleep There Are Snakes1 mentions across 1 issues

Don’t Sleep There Are Snakes is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 19, 2024 and July 19, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "( Don’t Sleep There Are Snakes , Ch. 1, pg. 13-14)"; "Don’t Sleep There Are Snakes , Ch. 1, pg. 13-14". It most often appears alongside Alan Turing, Amazon, Amazon jungle.

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Don’t Sleep There Are Snakes
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Your Book Review: How Language Began
July 19, 2024 · Original source
This is what he looks like. According to Wikipedia, the context for this picture is: “Noam Chomsky speaks about humanity's prospects for survival” Since around 1957, Chomsky has dominated linguistics. And this matters because he is kind of a contrarian with weird ideas. Is language for communicating? No, it’s mainly for thinking: (What Kind of Creatures Are We? Ch. 1, pg. 15-16) It is, indeed, virtual dogma that the function of language is communication. ... there is by now quite significant evidence that it is simply false. Doubtless language is sometimes used for communication, as is style of dress, facial expression and stance, and much else. But fundamental properties of language design indicate that a rich tradition is correct in regarding language as essentially an instrument of thought, even if we do not go as far as Humboldt in identifying the two. Should linguists care about the interaction between culture and language? No, that’s essentially stamp-collecting: (Language and Responsibility, Ch. 2, pg. 56-57) Again, a discipline is defined in terms of its object and its results. Sociology is the study of society. As to its results, it seems that there are few things one can say about that, at least at a fairly general level. One finds observations, intuitions, impressions, some valid generalizations perhaps. All very valuable, no doubt, but not at the level of explanatory principles. … Sociolinguistics is, I suppose, a discipline that seeks to apply principles of sociology to the study of language; but I suspect that it can draw little from sociology, and I wonder whether it is likely to contribute much to it. … You can also collect butterflies and make many observations. If you like butterflies, that’s fine; but such work must not be confounded with research, which is concerned to discover explanatory principles of some depth and fails if it has not done so. Did the human capacity for language evolve gradually? No, it suddenly appeared around 50,000 years ago after a freak gene mutation: (Language and Mind, third edition, pg, 183-184) An elementary fact about the language faculty is that it is a system of discrete infinity, rare in the organic world. Any such system is based on a primitive operation that takes objects already constructed, and constructs from them a new object: in the simplest case, the set containing them. Call that operation Merge. Either Merge or some equivalent is a minimal requirement. With Merge available, we instantly have an unbounded system of hierarchically structured expressions. The simplest account of the “Great Leap Forward” in the evolution of humans would be that the brain was rewired, perhaps by some slight mutation, to provide the operation Merge … There are speculations about the evolution of language that postulate a far more complex process … A more parsimonious speculation is that they did not, and that the Great Leap was effectively instantaneous, in a single individual, who was instantly endowed with intellectual capacities far superior to those of others, transmitted to offspring and coming to predominate. At best a reasonable guess, as are all speculations about such matters, but about the simplest one imaginable, and not inconsistent with anything known or plausibly surmised. It is hard to see what account of human evolution would not assume at least this much, in one or another form. I think all of these positions are kind of insane for reasons that we will discuss later. (Side note: Chomsky’s proposal is essentially the hard takeoff theory of human intelligence.) Most consequential of all, perhaps, are the ways Chomsky has influenced (i) what linguists mainly study, and (ii) how they go about studying it. Naively, since language involves many different components—including sound production and comprehension, intonation, gestures, and context, among many others—linguists might want to study all of these. While they do study all of these, Chomsky and his followers view grammar as by far the most important component of humans’ ability to understand and produce language, and accordingly make it their central focus. Roughly speaking, grammar refers to the set of language-specific rules that determine whether a sentence is well-formed. It goes beyond specifying word order (or ‘surface structure’, in Chomskyan terminology) since one needs to know more than just where words are placed in order to modify or extend a given sentence. Consider a pair of sentences Chomsky uses to illustrate this point in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (pg. 22), his most cited work: (1a) I expected John to be examined by a specialist. (2a) I persuaded John to be examined by a specialist. The words “expected” and “persuaded” appear in the same location in each sentence, but imply different ‘latent’ grammatical structures, or ‘deep structures’. One way to show this is to observe that a particular way of rearranging the words produces a sentence with the same meaning in the first case (1a = 1b), and a different meaning in the second (2a != 2b): (1b) I expected a specialist to examine John. (2b) I persuaded a specialist to examine John. In particular, the target of persuasion is “John” in the case of (2a), and “the specialist” in the case of (2b). A full Chomskyan treatment of sentences like this would involve hierarchical tree diagrams, which permit a precise description of deep structure. You may have encountered the famous sentence: “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” It first appeared in Chomsky’s 1957 book Syntactic Structures, and the point is that even nonsense sentences can be grammatically well-formed, and that speakers can quickly assess the grammatical correctness of even nonsense sentences that they’ve never seen before. To Chomsky, this is one of the most important facts to be explained about language. A naive response to Chomsky’s preoccupation with grammar is: doesn’t real language involve a lot of non-grammatical stuff, like stuttering and slips of the tongue and midstream changes of mind? Of course it does, and Chomsky acknowledges this. To address this point, Chomsky has to move the goalposts in two important ways. First, he famously distinguishes competence from performance, and identifies the former as the subject of any serious theory of language: (Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Ch. 1, pg. 4) The problem for the linguist, as well as for the child learning the language, is to determine from the data of performance the underlying system of rules that has been mastered by the speaker-hearer and that he puts to use in actual performance. Hence, in the technical sense, linguistic theory is mentalistic, since it is concerned with discovering a mental reality underlying actual behavior. Observed use of language or hypothesized dispositions to respond, habits, and so on, may provide evidence as to the nature of this mental reality, but surely cannot constitute the actual subject matter of linguistics, if this is to be a serious discipline. Moreover, he claims that grammar captures most of what we should mean when we talk about speakers’ linguistic competence: (Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Ch. 1, pg. 24) A grammar can be regarded as a theory of a language; it is descriptively adequate to the extent that it correctly describes the intrinsic competence of the idealized native speaker. Another way Chomsky moves the goalposts is by distinguishing E-languages, like English and Spanish and Japanese, from I-languages, which only exist inside human minds. He claims that serious linguistics should be primarily interested in the latter. In a semi-technical book summarizing Chomsky’s theory of language, Cook and Newson write: (Chomsky’s Universal Grammar: An Introduction, pg. 13) E-language linguistics … aims to collect samples of language and then describe their properties. … I-language linguistics, however, is concerned with what a speaker knows about language and where this knowledge comes from; it treats language as an internal property of the human mind rather than something external … Not only should linguistics primarily be interested in studying I-languages, but to try and study E-languages at all may be a fool’s errand: (Chomsky’s Universal Grammar: An Introduction, pg. 13) Chomsky claims that the history of generative linguistics shows a shift from an E-language to an I-language approach; ‘the shift of focus from the dubious concept of E-language to the significant notion of I-language was a crucial step in early generative grammar’ (Chomsky, 1991b, pg. 10). … Indeed Chomsky is extremely dismissive of E-language approaches: ‘E-language, if it exists at all, is derivative, remote from mechanisms and of no particular empirical significance, perhaps none at all’ (Chomsky, 1991b, pg. 10).1 I Am Not A Linguist (IANAL), but this redefinition of the primary concern of linguistics seems crazy to me. Is studying a language like English as it is actually used really of no particular empirical significance? And this doesn’t seem to be a one-time hyperbole, but a representative claim. Cook and Newson continue: (Chomsky’s Universal Grammar: An Introduction, pg. 14) The opposition between these two approaches in linguistics has been long and acrimonious, neither side conceding the other’s reality. … The E-linguist despises the I-linguist for not looking at the ‘real’ facts; the I-linguist derides the E-linguist for looking at trivia. The I-language versus E-language distinction is as much a difference of research methods and of admissible evidence as it is of long-term goals. So much for what linguists ought to study. How should they study it? The previous quote gives us a clue. Especially in the era before Chomsky (BC), linguists were more interested in description. Linguists were, at least in one view, people who could be dropped anywhere in the world, and emerge with a tentative grammar of the local language six months later. (A notion like this is mentioned early in this video.) Linguists catalog the myriad of strange details about human languages, like the fact that some languages don’t appear to have words for relative directions, or “thank you”, or “yes” and “no”. After Chomsky's domination of the field (AD), there were a lot more theorists. While you could study language by going out into the field and collecting data, this was viewed as not the only, and maybe not even the most important, way to work. Diagrams of sentences proliferated. Chomsky, arguably the most influential linguist of the past hundred years, has never done fieldwork. In summary, to Chomsky and many of the linguists working in his tradition, the scientifically interesting component of language is grammar competence, and real linguistic data only indirectly reflects it. All of this matters because the dominance of Chomskyan linguistics has had downstream effects in adjacent fields like artificial intelligence (AI), evolutionary biology, and neuroscience. Chomsky has long been an opponent of the statistical learning tradition of language modeling, essentially claiming that it does not provide insight about what humans know about languages, and that engineering success probably can’t be achieved without explicitly incorporating important mathematical facts about the underlying structure of language. Chomsky’s ideas have motivated researchers to look for a “language gene” and “language areas” of the brain. Arguably, no one has yet found either—but more on that later. How Chomsky attained this stranglehold on linguistics is an interesting sociological question, but not our main concern in the present work2. The intent here is not to pooh-pooh Chomsky, either; brilliant and hard-working people are often wrong on important questions. Consider that his academic career began in the early 1950s—over 70 years ago!—when our understanding of language, anthropology, biology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence, among many other things, was substantially more rudimentary. Where are we going with this? All of this is context for understanding the ideas of a certain bomb-throwing terrorist blight on the face of linguistics: Daniel Everett. How Language Began is a book he wrote about, well, what language is and how it began. Everett is the anti-Chomsky. II. THE MISSIONARY We all love classic boy-meets-girl stories. Here’s one: boy meets girl at a rock concert, they fall in love, the boy converts to Christianity for the girl, then the boy and girl move to the Amazon jungle to dedicate the rest of their lives to saving the souls of an isolated hunter-gatherer tribe. Daniel Everett is the boy in this story. The woman he married, Keren Graham, is the daughter of Christian missionaries and had formative experiences living in the Amazon jungle among the Sateré-Mawé people. At seventeen, Everett became a born-again Christian; at eighteen, he and Keren married; and over the next few years, they started a family and prepared to become full-fledged missionaries like Keren’s parents. First, Everett studied “Bible and Foreign Missions” at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. After finishing his degree in 1975, the natural next step was to train more specifically to follow in the footsteps of Keren’s parents. In 1976, he and his wife enrolled in the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) to learn translation techniques and more viscerally prepare for life in the jungle: They were sent to Chiapas, Mexico, where Keren stayed in a hut in the jungle with the couple’s children—by this time, there were three—while Everett underwent grueling field training. He endured fifty-mile hikes and survived for several days deep in the jungle with only matches, water, a rope, a machete, and a flashlight. Everett apparently had a gift for language-learning. This led SIL to invite Everett and his wife to work with the Pirahã people (pronounced pee-da-HAN), whose unusual language had thwarted all previous attempts to learn it. In 1977, Everett’s family moved to Brazil, and in December they met the Pirahã for the first time. As an SIL-affiliated missionary, Everett’s explicit goals were to (i) translate the Bible into Pirahã, and (ii) convert as many Pirahã as possible to Christianity. But Everett’s first encounter with the Pirahã was cut short for political reasons: (Don’t Sleep There Are Snakes, Ch. 1, pg. 13-14) In December of 1977 the Brazilian government ordered all missionaries to leave Indian reservations. … Leaving the village under these forced circumstances made me wonder whether I’d ever be able to return. The Summer Institute of Linguistics was concerned too and wanted to find a way around the government’s prohibition against missionaries. So SIL asked me to apply to the graduate linguistics program at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. It was hoped that UNICAMP would be able to secure government authorization for me to visit the Pirahãs for a prolonged period, in spite of the general ban against missionaries. … My work at UNICAMP paid off as SIL hoped it would. Everett became a linguist proper sort of by accident, mostly as an excuse to continue his missionary work. But he ended up developing a passion for it. In 1980, he completed Aspects of the Phonology of Pirahã, his master’s thesis. He continued on to get a PhD in linguistics, also from UNICAMP, and in 1983 finished The Pirahã Language and Theory of Syntax, his dissertation. He continued studying the Pirahã and working as an academic linguist after that. In all, Everett spent around ten years of his life living with the Pirahã, spread out over some thirty-odd years. As he notes in Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: (Prologue, pg. xvii-xviii) I went to the Pirahãs when I was twenty-six years old. Now I am old enough to receive senior discounts. I gave them my youth. I have contracted malaria many times. I remember several occasions on which the Pirahãs or others threatened my life. I have carried more heavy boxes, bags, and barrels on my back through the jungle than I care to remember. But my grandchildren all know the Pirahãs. My children are who they are in part because of the Pirahãs. And I can look at some of those old men (old like me) who once threatened to kill me and recognize some of the dearest friends I have ever had—men who would now risk their lives for me. Everett interviewing some Pirahã people. (source) Everett did eventually learn their language, and it’s worth taking a step back to appreciate just how hard that task was. No Pirahã spoke Portuguese, apart from some isolated phrases they used for bartering. They didn’t speak any other language at all—just Pirahã. How do you learn another group’s language when you have no languages in common? The technical term is monolingual fieldwork. But this is just a fancy label for some combination of pointing at things, listening, crude imitation, and obsessively transcribing whatever you hear. For years. It doesn’t help that the Pirahã language seems genuinely hard to learn in a few different senses. First, it is probably conventionally difficult for Westerners to learn since it is a tonal language (two tones: high and low) with a small number of phonemes (building block sounds) and a few unusual sounds3. Second, there is no written language. Third, the language has a variety of ‘channels of discourse’, or ways of talking specialized for one or another cultural context. One of these is ‘whistle speech’; Pirahãs can communicate purely in whistles. This feature appears to be extremely useful during hunting trips: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 11, pg. 187-188) My first intense contact with whistle speech came one day when the Pirahãs had given me permission to go hunting with them. After we’d been walking for about an hour, they decided that they weren’t seeing any game because I, with my clunking canteens and machete and congenital clumsiness, was making too much noise. “You stay here and we will be back for you later.” Xaikáibaí said gently but firmly. … As I tried to make the best of my solitary confinement, I heard the men whistling to one another. They were saying, “I’ll go over there; you go that way,” and other such hunting talk. But clearly they were communicating. It was fascinating because it sounded so different from anything I had heard before. The whistle carried long and clear in the jungle. I could immediately see the importance and usefulness of this channel, which I guessed would also be much less likely to scare away game than the lower frequencies of the men’s normal voices. Fourth, important aspects of the language reflect core tenets of Pirahã culture in ways that one might not a priori expect. Everett writes extensively about the ‘immediacy of experience principle’ of Pirahã culture, which he summarizes as the idea that: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 7, pg. 132) Declarative Pirahã utterances contain only assertions related directly to the moment of speech, either experienced by the speaker or witnessed by someone alive during the lifetime of the speaker. One way the language reflects this is that the speaker must specify how they know something by affixing an appropriate suffix to verbs: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 12, pg. 196) Perhaps the most interesting suffixes, however (though these are not unique to Pirahã), are what linguists call evidentials, elements that represent the speaker’s evaluation of his or her knowledge of what he or she is saying. There are three of these in Pirahã: hearsay, observation, and deduction. To see what these do, let’s use an English example. If I ask you, “Did Joe go fishing?” you could answer, “Yes, at least I heard that he did,” or “Yes, I know because I saw him leave,” or “Yes, at least I suppose he did because his boat is gone.” The difference between English and Pirahã is that what English does with a sentence, Pirahã does with a verbal suffix. Everett also convincingly links this cultural principle to the lack of Pirahã number words and creation myths. On the latter topic, Everett recalls the following exchange: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 7, pg. 134) I sat with Kóhoi once and he asked me, after hearing about my god, “What else does your god do?” And I answered, “Well, he made the stars, and he made the earth.” Then I asked, “What do the Pirahãs say?” He answered, “Well, the Pirahãs say that these things were not made.” And all of this is to say nothing of the manifold perils of the jungle: malaria, typhoid fever, dysentery, dangerous snakes, insects, morally gray river traders, and periodic downpours. If Indiana Jones braved these conditions for years, we would consider his stories rousing adventures. Everett did this while also learning one of the most unusual languages in the world. People on the bank of the Maici river. (source) By the way, he did eventually sort of achieve his goal of translating the Bible. Armed with a solid knowledge of Pirahã, he was able to translate the New Testament’s Gospel of Mark. Since the Pirahã have no written language, he provided them with a recorded version, but did not get the reaction he expected: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 17, pg. 267-268) When we returned to the village, I recorded Mark’s gospel in my own voice for the Pirahãs to listen to. I then brought in a wind-up tape recorder to play the recording, and I taught the Pirahãs how to use it, which, surprisingly enough, some of the children did. Keren and I left the village and returned a few weeks later. The people were still listening to the gospel, with children cranking the recorder. I was initially quite excited about this, until it became clear that the only part of the book that they paid attention to was the beheading of John the Baptist. “Wow, they cut off his head. Play that again!” One reaction to hearing the gospel caught Everett even more off-guard: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 17, pg. 269) "The women are afraid of Jesus. We do not want him." "Why not?" I asked, wondering what had triggered this declaration. "Because last night he came to our village and tried to have sex with our women. He chased them around the village, trying to stick his large penis into them." Kaaxaóoi proceeded to show me with his two hands held far apart how long Jesus's penis was—a good three feet. But the Pirahã had an even more serious objection to Jesus: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 17, pg. 265-266) Part of the difficulty of my task began to become clear to me. I communicated more or less correctly to the Pirahãs about my Christian beliefs. The men listening to me understood that there was a man named Hisó, Jesus, and that he wanted others to do what he told them. "The Pirahã men then asked, "Hey Dan, what does Jesus look like? Is he dark like us or light like you?" I said, "Well, I have never actually seen him. He lived a long time ago. But I do have his words." "Well, Dan, how do you have his words if you have never heard him or seen him?" They then made it clear that if I had not actually seen this guy (and not in any metaphorical sense, but literally), they weren't interested in any stories I had to tell about him. Period. This is because, as I now knew, the Pirahãs believe only what they see. Sometimes they also believe in things that someone else has told them, so long as that person has personally witnessed what he or she is reporting. In the end, Everett never converted a single Pirahã. But he did even worse than converting zero people—he lost his own faith after coming to believe that the Pirahã had a good point. After keeping this to himself for many years, he revealed his loss of faith to his family, which led to a divorce and his children breaking contact with him for a number of years afterward. But Everett losing his faith in the God of Abraham was only the beginning. Most importantly for us, he also lost his faith in the God of Linguistics—Noam Chomsky. III. THE WAR In 2005, Everett’s paper “Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirahã: Another look at the design features of human language” was published in the journal Cultural Anthropology. An outsider might expect an article like this, which made a technical observation about the apparent lack of a property called ‘recursion’ in the Pirahã language, to receive an ‘oh, neat’ sort of response. Languages can be pretty different from one another, after all. Mandarin lacks plurals. Spanish sentences can omit an explicit subject. This is one of those kinds of things. But the article ignited a firestorm of controversy that follows Everett to this day. Praise for Everett and his work on recursion in Pirahã: He became a pure charlatan, although he used to be a good descriptive linguist. That is why, as far as I know, all the serious linguists who work on Brazilian languages ignore him. Noam Chomsky, MIT professor and linguist
Inline links: Wikipedia, hard takeoff, grammar, 1, this video, don’t appear to have words for relative directions, “thank you”, “yes” and “no”, long been an opponent, 2, Daniel Everett, Sateré-Mawé people, prepared, Bible and Foreign Missions, 1975, SIL, viscerally prepare, Pirahã people, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!42Ji!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5c899185-e1a2-4358-ae6a-e9298f6c7cdb_1600x1002.jpeg, source, 3, number words, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!yx-R!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F77975f2c-ef0f-47d7-9ed9-f22bbe04f78b_1024x768.jpeg, source, Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirahã: Another look at the design features of human language
Everett interviewing some Pirahã people. (source) Everett did eventually learn their language, and it’s worth taking a step back to appreciate just how hard that task was. No Pirahã spoke Portuguese, apart from some isolated phrases they used for bartering. They didn’t speak any other language at all—just Pirahã. How do you learn another group’s language when you have no languages in common? The technical term is monolingual fieldwork. But this is just a fancy label for some combination of pointing at things, listening, crude imitation, and obsessively transcribing whatever you hear. For years. It doesn’t help that the Pirahã language seems genuinely hard to learn in a few different senses. First, it is probably conventionally difficult for Westerners to learn since it is a tonal language (two tones: high and low) with a small number of phonemes (building block sounds) and a few unusual sounds3. Second, there is no written language. Third, the language has a variety of ‘channels of discourse’, or ways of talking specialized for one or another cultural context. One of these is ‘whistle speech’; Pirahãs can communicate purely in whistles. This feature appears to be extremely useful during hunting trips: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 11, pg. 187-188) My first intense contact with whistle speech came one day when the Pirahãs had given me permission to go hunting with them. After we’d been walking for about an hour, they decided that they weren’t seeing any game because I, with my clunking canteens and machete and congenital clumsiness, was making too much noise. “You stay here and we will be back for you later.” Xaikáibaí said gently but firmly. … As I tried to make the best of my solitary confinement, I heard the men whistling to one another. They were saying, “I’ll go over there; you go that way,” and other such hunting talk. But clearly they were communicating. It was fascinating because it sounded so different from anything I had heard before. The whistle carried long and clear in the jungle. I could immediately see the importance and usefulness of this channel, which I guessed would also be much less likely to scare away game than the lower frequencies of the men’s normal voices. Fourth, important aspects of the language reflect core tenets of Pirahã culture in ways that one might not a priori expect. Everett writes extensively about the ‘immediacy of experience principle’ of Pirahã culture, which he summarizes as the idea that: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 7, pg. 132) Declarative Pirahã utterances contain only assertions related directly to the moment of speech, either experienced by the speaker or witnessed by someone alive during the lifetime of the speaker. One way the language reflects this is that the speaker must specify how they know something by affixing an appropriate suffix to verbs: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 12, pg. 196) Perhaps the most interesting suffixes, however (though these are not unique to Pirahã), are what linguists call evidentials, elements that represent the speaker’s evaluation of his or her knowledge of what he or she is saying. There are three of these in Pirahã: hearsay, observation, and deduction. To see what these do, let’s use an English example. If I ask you, “Did Joe go fishing?” you could answer, “Yes, at least I heard that he did,” or “Yes, I know because I saw him leave,” or “Yes, at least I suppose he did because his boat is gone.” The difference between English and Pirahã is that what English does with a sentence, Pirahã does with a verbal suffix. Everett also convincingly links this cultural principle to the lack of Pirahã number words and creation myths. On the latter topic, Everett recalls the following exchange: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 7, pg. 134) I sat with Kóhoi once and he asked me, after hearing about my god, “What else does your god do?” And I answered, “Well, he made the stars, and he made the earth.” Then I asked, “What do the Pirahãs say?” He answered, “Well, the Pirahãs say that these things were not made.” And all of this is to say nothing of the manifold perils of the jungle: malaria, typhoid fever, dysentery, dangerous snakes, insects, morally gray river traders, and periodic downpours. If Indiana Jones braved these conditions for years, we would consider his stories rousing adventures. Everett did this while also learning one of the most unusual languages in the world. People on the bank of the Maici river. (source) By the way, he did eventually sort of achieve his goal of translating the Bible. Armed with a solid knowledge of Pirahã, he was able to translate the New Testament’s Gospel of Mark. Since the Pirahã have no written language, he provided them with a recorded version, but did not get the reaction he expected: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 17, pg. 267-268) When we returned to the village, I recorded Mark’s gospel in my own voice for the Pirahãs to listen to. I then brought in a wind-up tape recorder to play the recording, and I taught the Pirahãs how to use it, which, surprisingly enough, some of the children did. Keren and I left the village and returned a few weeks later. The people were still listening to the gospel, with children cranking the recorder. I was initially quite excited about this, until it became clear that the only part of the book that they paid attention to was the beheading of John the Baptist. “Wow, they cut off his head. Play that again!” One reaction to hearing the gospel caught Everett even more off-guard: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 17, pg. 269) "The women are afraid of Jesus. We do not want him." "Why not?" I asked, wondering what had triggered this declaration. "Because last night he came to our village and tried to have sex with our women. He chased them around the village, trying to stick his large penis into them." Kaaxaóoi proceeded to show me with his two hands held far apart how long Jesus's penis was—a good three feet. But the Pirahã had an even more serious objection to Jesus: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 17, pg. 265-266) Part of the difficulty of my task began to become clear to me. I communicated more or less correctly to the Pirahãs about my Christian beliefs. The men listening to me understood that there was a man named Hisó, Jesus, and that he wanted others to do what he told them. "The Pirahã men then asked, "Hey Dan, what does Jesus look like? Is he dark like us or light like you?" I said, "Well, I have never actually seen him. He lived a long time ago. But I do have his words." "Well, Dan, how do you have his words if you have never heard him or seen him?" They then made it clear that if I had not actually seen this guy (and not in any metaphorical sense, but literally), they weren't interested in any stories I had to tell about him. Period. This is because, as I now knew, the Pirahãs believe only what they see. Sometimes they also believe in things that someone else has told them, so long as that person has personally witnessed what he or she is reporting. In the end, Everett never converted a single Pirahã. But he did even worse than converting zero people—he lost his own faith after coming to believe that the Pirahã had a good point. After keeping this to himself for many years, he revealed his loss of faith to his family, which led to a divorce and his children breaking contact with him for a number of years afterward. But Everett losing his faith in the God of Abraham was only the beginning. Most importantly for us, he also lost his faith in the God of Linguistics—Noam Chomsky. III. THE WAR In 2005, Everett’s paper “Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirahã: Another look at the design features of human language” was published in the journal Cultural Anthropology. An outsider might expect an article like this, which made a technical observation about the apparent lack of a property called ‘recursion’ in the Pirahã language, to receive an ‘oh, neat’ sort of response. Languages can be pretty different from one another, after all. Mandarin lacks plurals. Spanish sentences can omit an explicit subject. This is one of those kinds of things. But the article ignited a firestorm of controversy that follows Everett to this day. Praise for Everett and his work on recursion in Pirahã: He became a pure charlatan, although he used to be a good descriptive linguist. That is why, as far as I know, all the serious linguists who work on Brazilian languages ignore him. Noam Chomsky, MIT professor and linguist
Inline links: source, monolingual fieldwork, 3, number words, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!yx-R!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F77975f2c-ef0f-47d7-9ed9-f22bbe04f78b_1024x768.jpeg, source, Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirahã: Another look at the design features of human language
People on the bank of the Maici river. (source) By the way, he did eventually sort of achieve his goal of translating the Bible. Armed with a solid knowledge of Pirahã, he was able to translate the New Testament’s Gospel of Mark. Since the Pirahã have no written language, he provided them with a recorded version, but did not get the reaction he expected: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 17, pg. 267-268) When we returned to the village, I recorded Mark’s gospel in my own voice for the Pirahãs to listen to. I then brought in a wind-up tape recorder to play the recording, and I taught the Pirahãs how to use it, which, surprisingly enough, some of the children did. Keren and I left the village and returned a few weeks later. The people were still listening to the gospel, with children cranking the recorder. I was initially quite excited about this, until it became clear that the only part of the book that they paid attention to was the beheading of John the Baptist. “Wow, they cut off his head. Play that again!” One reaction to hearing the gospel caught Everett even more off-guard: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 17, pg. 269) "The women are afraid of Jesus. We do not want him." "Why not?" I asked, wondering what had triggered this declaration. "Because last night he came to our village and tried to have sex with our women. He chased them around the village, trying to stick his large penis into them." Kaaxaóoi proceeded to show me with his two hands held far apart how long Jesus's penis was—a good three feet. But the Pirahã had an even more serious objection to Jesus: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 17, pg. 265-266) Part of the difficulty of my task began to become clear to me. I communicated more or less correctly to the Pirahãs about my Christian beliefs. The men listening to me understood that there was a man named Hisó, Jesus, and that he wanted others to do what he told them. "The Pirahã men then asked, "Hey Dan, what does Jesus look like? Is he dark like us or light like you?" I said, "Well, I have never actually seen him. He lived a long time ago. But I do have his words." "Well, Dan, how do you have his words if you have never heard him or seen him?" They then made it clear that if I had not actually seen this guy (and not in any metaphorical sense, but literally), they weren't interested in any stories I had to tell about him. Period. This is because, as I now knew, the Pirahãs believe only what they see. Sometimes they also believe in things that someone else has told them, so long as that person has personally witnessed what he or she is reporting. In the end, Everett never converted a single Pirahã. But he did even worse than converting zero people—he lost his own faith after coming to believe that the Pirahã had a good point. After keeping this to himself for many years, he revealed his loss of faith to his family, which led to a divorce and his children breaking contact with him for a number of years afterward. But Everett losing his faith in the God of Abraham was only the beginning. Most importantly for us, he also lost his faith in the God of Linguistics—Noam Chomsky. III. THE WAR In 2005, Everett’s paper “Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirahã: Another look at the design features of human language” was published in the journal Cultural Anthropology. An outsider might expect an article like this, which made a technical observation about the apparent lack of a property called ‘recursion’ in the Pirahã language, to receive an ‘oh, neat’ sort of response. Languages can be pretty different from one another, after all. Mandarin lacks plurals. Spanish sentences can omit an explicit subject. This is one of those kinds of things. But the article ignited a firestorm of controversy that follows Everett to this day. Praise for Everett and his work on recursion in Pirahã: He became a pure charlatan, although he used to be a good descriptive linguist. That is why, as far as I know, all the serious linguists who work on Brazilian languages ignore him. Noam Chomsky, MIT professor and linguist
Inline links: source, Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirahã: Another look at the design features of human language
Dorien Gray1 mentions across 1 issues

Dorien Gray is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 17, 2024 and May 17, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Dorien Gray". It most often appears alongside A Canticle For Leibowitz, A Farewell to Alms, A Husband.

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Dorien Gray
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1
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1
First seen
May 17, 2024
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May 17, 2024
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Dorien Gray
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Choose Book Review Finalists 2024
May 17, 2024 · Original source
...of Mass Opinion / Win Bigly The Old Testament The Oldest Documents of the Human Race The Pale King The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention The Picture of Dorien Gray The Remains of the Day The Revelations The Signal and the Noise The Sixth Day and Other Tales The Story of Ferdinand The Structure of Scientific Revolutions The Sunset L...
Dover Beach1 mentions across 1 issues

Dover Beach is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 09, 2021 and November 09, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Matthew Arnold who wrote Dover Beach". It most often appears alongside Aage Bohr, Abanindranath Tagore, Aldous Huxley.

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Dover Beach
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1
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1
First seen
November 09, 2021
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November 09, 2021
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Dover Beach
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Secrets Of The Great Families
November 09, 2021 · Original source
Overall I’m not sure I can find any commonalities in these families’ educational styles except that they were all pretty weird. Did I mention Aldous Huxley went to normal school but his schoolteacher there was his mother? Who was also the niece of Matthew Arnold who wrote Dover Beach?
Down and Out1 mentions across 1 issues

Down and Out is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 10, 2021 and June 10, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "vic makes Down and Out an appealing book in general". It most often appears alongside 1984, American, American ‘hobo’ culture.

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Down and Out
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1
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1
First seen
June 10, 2021
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June 10, 2021
Book title
Down and Out
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Your Book Review: Down And Out In Paris And London
June 10, 2021 · Original source
George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London is at least three things; a highly entertaining, almost picaresque tale of rough-and-tumble living in Europe, a serious attempt to catalogue the numerous humiliations and injustices impoverished people were exposed to in Orwell’s time, and a stark comparison between life as a tramp who makes use of robust, if hellish and kafkaesque welfare resources, and as one who tries to get by working terrible jobs and living in disgusting places.
The notion that Orwell might be lying never occurs to the major. The fact that Orwell is now a tramp like all the others doesn’t matter either. What matters is that he was a gentleman, and therefore still is a gentleman, deep down in chakras. I suppose this is the cultural groundwork for the income-independent classism dicussed at length in Scott’s review of Fussell on Class. I imagine Orwell was laughing at himself on the inside, dissapointed in the knowledge that even months of starving and working as a scullion couldn’t change the fact that he was a upper middle class Etonian that served in the imperial police. But of course it’s that tension that makes this and all the rest of Orwell’s non-fiction so interesting. Whether he’s taking down a stampeding Burmese elephant in Shooting an Elephant or fighting Franco’s fascists alongside anarcho-syndicalists in Homage to Catalonia, there’s alway a sense that he’s somewhere he’s not supposed to be, bringing back forbidden knowledge from unexplored moral territory, so that it might sit comfortably on middle-class and public school library bookshelves. Orwell’s genius, as I see it, is in not being a genius. He was merely among the first to realize that ugly, uncouth, and unconscionable places and people might be worth a closer look, and that the lives of such people had much broader political and social significance than the reading public had yet dared to imagine. If nothing else, Down and Out in Paris and London should serve as inspiration to journalists and writers everywhere; it’s proof that if one wishes to write an important book, one need only write truthfully about the vaguely terrifying parts of society that the average person often sees, but never enters.
Inline links: Fussell on Class, Shooting an Elephant, Homage to Catalonia
Earlier I mentioned that this section is reminescent of Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, a book whose very success proves that we cleanliness obsessed moderns get a voyeuristic kick out of stories such as Orwell’s. I think it’s this same voyeuristic kick that makes Down and Out an appealing book in general. Just as we all go to restaraunts and know almost nothing of what goes on behind kitchen doors, all of us see tramps most everyday and know little about how they live and think. And just like in the case of the kitchens, as much as we get a kick of being let in on the secrets of the unknown underworld, we also have very little desire to actively seek out that information for ourselves. Because a lot of the time, that information hurts.
Down and Out in San Francisco, Portland, Honolulu and Every other American City that has a Homelessness Crisis1 mentions across 1 issues

Down and Out in San Francisco, Portland, Honolulu and Every other American City that has a Homelessness Crisis is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 10, 2021 and June 10, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "I can’t fully convey how much I think a book like Down and Out in San Francisco, Portland, Honolulu and Every other American City that has a Homelessness Crisis needs to be written". It most often appears alongside 1984, American, American ‘hobo’ culture.

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1
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1
First seen
June 10, 2021
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June 10, 2021
Book title
Down and Out in San Francisco, Portland, Honolulu and Every other American City that has a Homelessness Crisis
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Your Book Review: Down And Out In Paris And London
June 10, 2021 · Original source
But unfortunately, though this might have been a beginning for Orwell, it wasn’t much of a beginning for the rest of the literary world. Though careful studies of homelessness have been made, there’s no other popular book that attempts to do what Orwell did, unless you count stuff like On the Road, which I think obscures more than illuminates what a life in poverty is actually like. I can’t fully convey how much I think a book like Down and Out in San Francisco, Portland, Honolulu and Every other American City that has a Homelessness Crisis needs to be written, because I think our collective attitude towards homelessness isn’t so different from the one Orwell notices in his middle-to-upper-class fellows. It is something that everyone knows knows about as a general phenomenon, but that almost no one knows about in its particulars. We tend to regard it as something inevitable, unchangeable, or at least, unchangeable by us. Like litter and terrible traffic. But then, there are plenty of places on earth that don’t have much litter or traffic.
Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde1 mentions across 1 issues

Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 16, 2024 and August 16, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "a scientific-filtered version of Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde". It most often appears alongside 20th Century Fox, Abomination, Abomination.

Reference entry
Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde
Mention count
1
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1
First seen
August 16, 2024
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August 16, 2024
Book title
Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde
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Your Book Review: Silver Age Marvel Comics
August 16, 2024 · Original source
Showcase #6, and the first appearance of the Challengers of the Unknown, by Jack Kirby Visually the Challengers and the Fantastic Four were similar. Both wore skin tight uniforms with belts and minimal decoration. The Fantastic Four’s relatively simple characterizations were practically pulled from Challengers. Reed takes on the traits of both Kyle, the leader, and Walter, the scientist. Johnny, the Human Torch is the daredevil. The Thing is “strong and slow-witted”. Sue, the only woman on the team, seems like a new addition, but is likely based on June Robbins who joined the Challengers team in Showcase #7, as an “honorary” or “girl-Challenger”. After surviving their respective “miraculous” crashes, both the Challengers and the Fantastic Four band together to help the world. They both travel through space and other dimensions, fighting mad scientists and monsters. The Fantastic Four’s early antagonists were not traditional super villains. In the first few issues they fight monsters from under the Earth (Issue #1), shape changing aliens (#2), and a charlatan who uses hypnotism to steal from his audience (#3). In issue #4 Kirby and Lee re-introduce Namor, the Submariner, one of Marvel’s top IP from the 1940s, and have him kidnap Sue. Only in Issue #5 and #6 (June and August 1962) and do we get a more standard-supervillain when Dr Doom attempts to steal the Fantastic Four headquarters and throw it into space. The next superhero Lee created was even less heroic than the Fantastic Four. In April 1962 (pull date), Marvel published The Incredible Hulk. If it was even a superhero story in disguise it was a very good disguise. The story was a scientific-filtered version of Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde. It was a pure monster-story with nothing very super about it. Nothing on the cover suggests this has anything to do with superheroes: It is not clear if even Lee at the time thought the Hulk would be a superhero. In Fantastic Four #5 Johnny is reading a “great new comic mag” and mocks the Thing by comparing him to the Hulk. It seems pretty clear at this point that in the Fantastic Four’s world, the Hulk is just a fictional comic book, like in ours (more on that later): The other two superheroes the Marvel introduces in this period have even more subtle introductions. At the time Marvel had a number of generic-sounding titles and told science fiction and fantasy stand-alone stories: Tales to Astonish
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!lfiM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc23c3ad1-5fed-4063-8ac2-d9d89e69bee6_252x398.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!oV4t!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F346f85d9-580b-4eb2-b91c-3422003613d5_591x572.png
Dream Machines1 mentions across 1 issues

Dream Machines is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 19, 2025 and September 19, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "he started work on another book at the same time, called Dream Machines". It most often appears alongside 1987, 1988, Adleman.

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Dream Machines
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1
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1
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September 19, 2025
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September 19, 2025
Book title
Dream Machines
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Your Review: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been
September 19, 2025 · Original source
“About six years later they started building computers like this at Xerox PARC.” Around the same time, Nelson claims to have called Vannevar Bush and told him about Project Xanadu. Bush “wanted very much to discuss it with” Nelson, but Nelson “hated him instantly [because] he sounded like a sports coach” and never contacted him again. This, of course, proved to be extremely self-destructive (though I can’t honestly say I would’ve done otherwise). Because Xanadu was as good as dead. No one would give him the money he needed to work on it, especially not after Doug Engelbart poisoned the idea of hypertext. Nelson went where there was funding, working briefly on an early word processor called Juggler of Text (JOT). …And then he lost investment, stopped working on the project, and moved to Chicago, where he’d been offered a job teaching at the University of Illinois, to start work on a book. He would call it Computer Lib. In fact, he started work on another book at the same time, called Dream Machines. By the time he completed each of them, in 1974, ARPANET had been released, and his vision for Project Xanadu had evolved. He published the two works together—Computer Lib was his lamentation over the industry’s disdain for hypertext, and Dream Machines was Xanadu’s manifesto. Nelson designed and printed the book himself. Its pages mostly look like this: Self-referential, multimedia, creative, and fun—they were a blueprint for the internet he was building. In the Dream Machines half, Nelson writes, “The real dream is for ‘everything’ to be in the hypertext. Everything you read, you read from the screen (and can always get back to right away; everything you write, you write at the screen (and can cross-link to whatever you read).” In one section Nelson asks himself, “Can It Be Done?” His answer: “I dunno.” Remember, Xanadu wouldn’t only involve links between works—it required hyperlinks, which as Nelson understood them, would need to contain the targets in themselves. (Eventually, Nelson would give these embeddings a new name—“transclusions”—and hyperlink came to simply mean “link between hypertext files.”) Every link would run both ways, each hypertext file would know exactly which other files were linked to it and how. This introduced a few problems, in the new interconnected ARPANET age: How do you keep track? Where’s the metadata stored? Can you afford enough space for it all?
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kp4P!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff55d10e8-ef84-43a9-9f39-422d87ea182e_1600x952.png
Self-referential, multimedia, creative, and fun—they were a blueprint for the internet he was building. In the Dream Machines half, Nelson writes, “The real dream is for ‘everything’ to be in the hypertext. Everything you read, you read from the screen (and can always get back to right away; everything you write, you write at the screen (and can cross-link to whatever you read).” In one section Nelson asks himself, “Can It Be Done?” His answer: “I dunno.” Remember, Xanadu wouldn’t only involve links between works—it required hyperlinks, which as Nelson understood them, would need to contain the targets in themselves. (Eventually, Nelson would give these embeddings a new name—“transclusions”—and hyperlink came to simply mean “link between hypertext files.”) Every link would run both ways, each hypertext file would know exactly which other files were linked to it and how. This introduced a few problems, in the new interconnected ARPANET age: How do you keep track? Where’s the metadata stored? Can you afford enough space for it all?
A pay-per-click system like Nelson described would first be implemented in 1996. Computer Lib/Dream Machines became a cult favorite, and Nelson began to gather a small following. In 1979, he moved back to Swarthmore with a group of disciples, and they got to work. The crack team included:7 Roger Gregory, a University of Michigan graduate and Ann Arbor local who’d been corresponding over telephone with Nelson since reading Computer Lib in 1974. Gregory was a whiz with hardware, but suffered from regular bouts of depression, sometimes so strong they would render him “incapable of working.” Gregory paid for the house in Pennsylvania.
Inline links: 7
Dudley and Stephens1 mentions across 1 issues

Dudley and Stephens is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 08, 2021 and April 08, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "he points us to Dudley and Stephens and a book named Cannibalism and the Common Law". It most often appears alongside ACX, amoral familialism, An Introduction to Law and Economics.

Reference entry
Dudley and Stephens
Mention count
1
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1
First seen
April 08, 2021
Last seen
April 08, 2021
Book title
Dudley and Stephens
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Your Book Review: Order Without Law
April 08, 2021 · Original source
This is kind of a weird example, as he all-but-admits in a footnote: “This statement assumes the continuing presence of foundational rules that forbid the firefighters from killing, maiming or imprisoning each other.” If we want to know what actually happens in this situation, he points us to Dudley and Stephens and a book named Cannibalism and the Common Law. ↩
Inline links: Dudley and Stephens, ↩
Dune Messiah1 mentions across 1 issues

Dune Messiah is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 13, 2022 and August 13, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Dune Messiah seeks to show them that power in action". It most often appears alongside ACX, AI, ancient Greeks.

Reference entry
Dune Messiah
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 13, 2022
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August 13, 2022
Book title
Dune Messiah
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Your Book Review: God Emperor Of Dune
August 13, 2022 · Original source
Herbert’s books all have a theme. Dune is about teaching the reader about the untapped power of the desert, while Dune Messiah seeks to show them that power in action. Children of Dune is a warning that success can make you soft - since the harshness of the desert is what brings you power in this universe, bringing it under your control domesticates it and cuts into the very power base you rely on. When Paul Atreides blinks in the face of an overwhelming fate and is usurped by a younger, more vital generation, it’s no surprise.
Dying Outside1 mentions across 1 issues

Dying Outside is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 01, 2023 and January 01, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Hal Finney and his essay Dying Outside (about getting the disease ALS)". It most often appears alongside 2023 Prediction Contest, ACX, Albion’s Seed.

Reference entry
Dying Outside
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1
Issue count
1
First seen
January 01, 2023
Last seen
January 01, 2023
Book title
Dying Outside
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Open Thread 257
January 01, 2023 · Original source
4: At a recent IRL event I discussed pioneering rationalist Hal Finney and his essay Dying Outside (about getting the disease ALS). Thanks to whoever informed me that Hal’s widow is holding a fundraiser for an ALS charity - you can check it out here.
Inline links: Hal Finney, Dying Outside, here
Dynamic Hedging: Managing Vanilla and Exotic Options1 mentions across 1 issues

Dynamic Hedging: Managing Vanilla and Exotic Options is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 21, 2023 and July 21, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Dynamic Hedging: Managing Vanilla and Exotic Options". It most often appears alongside 2008 Financial Crisis, 2023 book review contest, 30-Year Mortgage.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
July 21, 2023
Last seen
July 21, 2023
Book title
Dynamic Hedging: Managing Vanilla and Exotic Options
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Your Book Review: The Laws of Trading
July 21, 2023 · Original source
The book actively used by traders is perhaps the driest thing that Nassim Taleb has ever written: Dynamic Hedging: Managing Vanilla and Exotic Options.