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On the Natural Faculties5 mentions across 5 issues

On the Natural Faculties is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between April 09, 2021 and August 05, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "I chose to review the longest piece I could find, which is On the Natural Faculties"; "Book One of On the Natural Faculties is divided into 17 sections"; "the finalists are: 2: On The Natural Faculties". It most often appears alongside Addiction By Design, COVID, Darwin.

Article page: On the Natural Faculties
Mention count: 5
Issue count: 5
First seen: April 09, 2021
Last seen: August 05, 2022
Book title: On the Natural Faculties
Likely author: ELP

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: On The Natural Faculties April 09, 2021
Vote In The Book Review Contest! June 18, 2021
Book Review Contest: Winners July 10, 2021
Grading My 2021 Predictions January 24, 2022
Your Book Review: Exhaustion August 05, 2022

Addiction By Design 2 shared issues
COVID 2 shared issues
Darwin 2 shared issues
Double Fold 2 shared issues
Down and Out in Paris and London 2 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: On The Natural Faculties

April 09, 2021 · Original source

It’s hard not to notice just how famous Galen was in his own time. Marcus Aurelius described him as “primum sane medicorum esse, philosophorum autem solum” — first among doctors and unique among philosophers (one wonders if Galen might have influenced the Emperor’s own philosophy). Forgeries and unscrupulous editions of his work were such a problem during his lifetime, he had to write a book called On My Own Books to try to sort it all out. Among other things, he complains that his servants were stealing private letters he had written to friends and circulating bootleg copies of them as medical advice. Galen was an incredibly prolific writer. Wikipedia claims that he produced more works than any other author in antiquity, maybe up to 600 treatises, and possibly employed 20 scribes at one point. While these particular claims are hard to substantiate, he did leave behind a whole lot of books. Fires and the various other mishaps that are guaranteed to happen to classical texts destroyed many of his works. Some of this even happened during his own lifetime, and in On My Own Books he seems surprisingly relaxed about so many of his works being lost: The books of many others perished at that time, as did all those of mine which were located in that storehouse; and none of my friends in Rome admitted to having copies of the first two books. Since, then, my followers prevailed upon me to write the same treatise again, I thought that I should give this explanation regarding the previously distributed books, in case anyone in the future finds them and wonders why I should have written a treatise twice on the same subject. Even with these losses, huge amounts of his work has survived. It’s hard to get an exact count, but Claudii Galeni Opera Omnia by Karl Gottlob Kühn, compiled around 1833 and for a long time the definitive edition, contains 122 different works in 22 volumes. That’s a lot. Despite this, I was surprised how hard it was to get my hands on primary source copies of his works (in English). Because of our own plague, I was limited to finding sources online — but for most classical works, this is pretty easy. Marcus Aurelius was a contemporary of Galen, and it’s not too hard to find multiple different translations of Meditations (though admittedly Marcus may have a slightly wider appeal). Part of this might be that Galen’s works are very badly organized. Every secondary source I read on the Galenic corpus is full of griping about how confusing the whole thing is. Galen wrote in Greek, but many of the original versions of his books are lost, leaving us only with Arabic or Latin translations, or Latin translations of earlier Arabic translations. Some of the books appear under different titles in different places, and sometimes the works are only indexed under abbreviations of those titles. Some of them probably were never intended for publication (those bootleg letters I mentioned above), and so may not have official titles or versions at all. Forgeries of his works in various languages continued well on into the Renaissance. Galen himself was very unclear on how to think about the documents he produced. At one point in On My Own Books, he starts off by talking about a piece of writing he did “as an exercise for myself”, and then immediately turns around and mentions that he gave it to friends, who in turn gave it to their friends. Needless to say, the whole thing is a mess, the scholars seem very agitated. I chose to review the longest piece I could find, which is On the Natural Faculties, specifically the translation by Arthur John Brock, which was the only translation I was able to track down. This also seemed like a good choice because, instead of being a treatise on a more limited topic like diet, the pulse, or bones, this book serves as more of an introductory textbook to what today we would call biology. III. On the Natural Faculties is divided into three books, though if the three books have any structure to them, I wasn’t able to figure it out. Galen is pretty straightforward in naming his pieces, and this book is about him trying to describe all of the “natural faculties”. This doesn’t really correspond to any modern concept, but essentially he means the fundamental or basic biological functions common to all living things. He begins by contrasting the functions of the soul, like feeling and voluntary motion (we might say “mental functions”), which occur only in animals, with the natural functions common to both animals and plants. You could maybe translate “natural faculties” as something like “basic biological functions”. I had always heard that Galen was a Hippocrates stan, but right from the get-go he’s mentioning Aristotle in the very same breath (though he reminds us that Hippocrates “lived much earlier than Aristotle”). When describing the natural faculties, he seems to base them off of Aristotle’s physics more than Hippocrates’ humors. Aristotle’s physics is a system I mostly know secondhand from the descriptions offered by Thomas Kuhn (for an example, take a look at this piece). Kuhn stresses that this system is hard for a modern mind to understand and even harder to explain, so I was surprised at how intelligible Galen’s account is. Maybe reading Kuhn’s description prepared me to understand what Galen has to say, but either way, it’s great. I think Galen does a better job than Kuhn. Basically he says, look, there are different kinds of motion: If that which is white becomes black, or what is black becomes white, it undergoes motion in respect to colour; or if what was previously sweet now becomes bitter, or, conversely, from being bitter now becomes sweet, it will be said to undergo motion in respect to flavour … when a warm thing becomes cold, and a cold warm, here too we speak of motion; similarly also when anything moist becomes dry, or dry moist. He goes on to suggest that the natural faculties are more advanced forms of motion, possibly built up out of the combination of simpler forms of motion. (Kuhn treats the Aristotelian perspective as if it was the common sense of the ancient world, but the fact that Galen has to describe it in such detail makes me wonder if that was really the case.) That’s the framework. What the exact set of natural faculties are, however, is less clear. In book one he focuses on three faculties in particular — genesis, growth, and nutrition — and provides lots of arguments that (for example) the body’s ability to grow is different from its ability to sustain itself. In book three he gives a different list of four — the attractive, retentive, expulsive, and alterative faculties — but he also suggests that these are “handmaids of Nutrition”. Elsewhere he says that genesis is not “a simple activity of Nature” but instead is “compounded of alteration and of shaping.” He also mentions faculties like “adhesion” and “presentation”. The particulars are pretty confusing, but the general gist is clear. Galen wants to lay out all the different faculties and their sub-faculties (and sub-sub-faculties?) so that the reader can understand the workings of the body. Galen makes it pretty plain that he thinks that diseases are caused by failures or overactivity of the different principles. For example, he says that in leprosy “there is adhesion of the nutriment but no real assimilation”. One faculty is working but the other is disordered. If you want to be a good physician, he says, you need to understand all these faculties so you can identify diseases (tell what faculties are misfunctioning) and treat them — “how are you going to be successful in treatment, if you do not understand the real essence of each disease?” he says. The four humors do make their way into this mix eventually, especially in the second and third books. (Though the translator often insists on translating “humor” as “juice”, which makes me very uncomfortable.) The relationship seems to be that the humors are the building material of the body, but that all the activity is carried out through the natural faculties. The student needs to know the humors to understand what is being moved around, but the humors are primitive. To Galen, biology is all about these faculties shuffling, transforming, and combining different humors. VI. Anyways, that’s what Galen wants to be talking about. But about halfway through book one, he goes entirely off the rails and never really gets back on track. The thing that sets him off is other schools of medicine. It’s clear that Galen cannot stop thinking about them. They invade his every thought; he is beleaguered by them. I would seriously believe that he loses sleep over them. Some of the commentators I’ve read suggested that Galen was an arrogant man — one said he saw in Galen “the blind assumption that he alone was graced with the ability to bring Hippocrates’ work to completion”. My sense of Galen was that he is a man who is constantly exasperated. He is just trying to write basic pieces about how to be a good physician and philosopher, and people keep descending on him with the most unbelievably pedantic arguments. Book One of On the Natural Faculties is divided into 17 sections, and he spends half of the first section hedging around ways people could potentially take his words in the wrong ways. These sound more than a little like intrusive thoughts, and it’s tempting to think that he’s blowing this all out of proportion. But from what I know about Galen’s life, it seems likely that he really was getting into disagreements all the time, and probably really did need to worry about people quoting his work out of context. One article in The Lancet describes him as “a public figure, known and recognised by many, accosted in the streets, challenged to debate.” It’s easy to imagine how being accosted in the streets might work its way into your head. Either way, these concerns absolutely consume him. He keeps getting drawn off on different tangents, before trying to return to the main thread with statements like: I said, however, that I was not going to enter into an argument with these people, and it was only because the example was drawn from the subject-matter of medicine, and because I need it for the present treatise, that I have mentioned it. Let us pass on, then, again to another piece of nonsense; for the sophists do not allow one to engage in enquiries that are of any worth, albeit there are many such; they compel one to spend one’s time in dissipating the fallacious arguments which they bring forward. What, then, is this piece of nonsense? Now, we usually refrain from arguing with people whose principles are wrong from the outset. Still, having been compelled by the natural course of events to enter into some kind of a discussion with them, we must add this further to what was said… Since, then, we have talked sufficient nonsense — not willingly, but because we were forced, as the proverb says, “to behave madly among madmen” — let us return again to the subject of urinary secretion. But, as I have said, one is driven to talk nonsense whenever one gets into discussion with such men. Having, therefore, given a concise and summary statement of the matter, I wish to be done with it. Of course, in the very next paragraph, he is immediately drawn back into a discussion of their shortcomings! In some ways, On the Natural Faculties is less of a medical treatise and more of a fascinating snapshot of the state of the academic medical world in the latter half of the second century CE. The tone sounds really contemporary in a lot of ways, and has a quality of acrimonious quibbling that is more than a little familiar, though I don’t think modern physicians are likely to be poisoned by their colleagues (but what do I know). V. We’ve established that Galen has a problem with other experts and schools of medical thought. That leaves us wondering how justified he is. Is he criticizing them for real problems in their work, or is this just partisan squabbling? What are the things that he takes such issue with from these other schools? I think there are two things he’s mostly complaining about. The first thing that really sets Galen off is sectarian dogmatism. “Everyone becomes like the first teacher that he comes across,” he says, “without waiting to learn anything from anybody else.” He bemoans sectarian partisanship and, in classic doctor fashion, uses a weird hygiene metaphor, calling it “excessively resistant to all cleansing process”. It is “harder to heal than any itch”. The fact is that those who are enslaved to their sects are not merely devoid of all sound knowledge, but they will not even stop to learn! This is kind of tragicomic, because two of the main things Galen is accused of are 1) blindly following whatever Hippocrates said about medicine and 2) leading centuries of physicians to blindly follow whatever he wrote! It’s hard to know how blindly Galen is following the teachings of Hippocrates. On the one hand, he does refer to him as “most divine Hippocrates” at least once. On the other hand, he is open to pointing out the (rare) cases where he thinks Hippocrates has overlooked something, and even talks about how he wishes his opponents would criticize Hippocrates more directly! When someone disagrees with a whole suite of his intellectual heroes, he says, “now, one cannot be blamed for not agreeing with all these great men, nor for imagining that one knows more than they; but not to consider such distinguished teaching worthy either of contradiction or even mention shows an extraordinary arrogance.” Maybe other physicians really did follow Galen’s writing blindly in the centuries following his death. I’m not sure anymore. But Galen certainly can’t be blamed for it. He could not be clearer in stating that this is exactly what the student of medicine should avoid doing. It would be tempting to pass this all off as one-sided; “stop listening blindly to your teachers and listen blindly to me!” I don’t get that sense. First, we know that Galen studied all over the ancient world, so he was exposed to all sorts of ways of doing medicine. He practiced what he preached. It’s hard to know how fair a representation he’s giving of the other schools of thought, but he writes as though he has them all memorized, and he certainly was in a position to frequently get into debates with them. When he tells us that they’re uncritical, I’m tempted to believe him. Second, Galen makes a serious point to try to convince the reader of his positions. He’s not just stating “facts” and expecting you to bow down at his feet. He’s engaging with opposing points of view and trying to make compelling arguments that he thinks will convince his readers. VI. Finally, I don’t buy this because nowhere is Galen asking people to listen blindly to anyone, least of all himself. Because the second thing that REALLY sets Galen off is when people aren’t empirical enough! He constantly ridicules, in pretty harsh language, those who remain unconvinced by observation and experiment. Asclepiades, one particularly hated adversary, is charged with “bidding us distrust our senses where obvious facts plainly overturn his hypotheses.” Asclepiades has rather unusual opinions about the urinary system, and in one particularly strong example, Galen asks rhetorically (and sarcastically!), I do not suppose that Asclepiades ever saw a stone which had been passed by one of these sufferers, or observed that this was preceded by a sharp pain in the region between the kidneys and the bladder as the stone traversed the ureter, or that, when the stone was passed, both the pain and the retention at once ceased. It is worth while, then, learning how his theory account for the presence of urine in the bladder, and one is forced to marvel at the ingenuity of a man who puts aside these broad, clearly visible routes, and postulates others which are narrow, invisible—indeed, entirely imperceptible. Other schools are also attacked for denying “observed facts” or even “obvious facts”. Meanwhile, people who draw incorrect conclusions but respect the facts are praised. Galen cares a lot about physicians basing decisions on empirical observation. We know that he’s serious about this because of the many disturbing vivisection experiments he describes in great detail. In discussing digestion, he says, “I have personally, on countless occasions, divided the peritoneum of a still living animal and have always found all the intestines contracting peristaltically upon their contents.” He describes an experiment where you vivisect an animal, cutting away different coats of the esophagus, “then give the animal food and you will see that it still swallows although the peristaltic function has been abolished”. When describing the action of the stomach, he suggests that you can fill an animal with liquid food — “an experiment I have often carried out in pigs” — and cut them open “after three or four hours.” He really seems to want his readers to try these macabre exercises at home. “You may observe this yourself,” he says, “if you will try to hit upon the time at which the descent of food from the stomach takes place.” Fellow physicians are criticized for their lack of anatomical experience in the same way. “If he had ever practised anatomy, he might have known that the outer coat of the bladder springs from the peritoneum and is essentially the same as it.” The most extreme example comes from a debate with the disciples of Asclepiades about the function of the ureters, trying to convince this rival school that urine flows from the kidneys to the bladder through these channels. After exhausting his rhetorical options, Galen turns to empirical anatomy. First he shows them, in a dead animal, that the ureters connect the two structures. This isn’t enough. Next he shows them “in a still living animal, the urine plainly running out through the ureters into the bladder.” This doesn’t change their minds either. Next he takes a live animal, ligates the ureters, bandages the animal up, and lets it go. When he opens it up again later, he finds the ureters “quite full and distended”, and when he removes the ligature, everyone can see the urine flow into the bladder. You’d think the story would end there, but not so. Instead, says Galen, “tie a ligature round [the animal’s] penis and then … squeeze the bladder all over.” He points out that nothing goes back through the ureters to the kidneys, demonstrating that the conveyance is a special, one-way action. He goes on like this for a while. Let the animal urinate and tie a ligature around one ureter but not the other. Cut open both the ureters and see the urine “spurt out of it”. Bandage the animal up and open him up later to discover his insides full of urine and the bladder empty. “Now, if anyone will but test this for himself on an animal,” Galen concludes, “I think he will strongly condemn the rashness of Asclepiades.” Today we know that Galen was wrong, and that humorism isn’t a great way to think about medicine. But whatever Galen might have been lacking, it certainly was not the empirical bent. He was no armchair philosopher, and was more than happy to cut up lots of animals to make a point about the function of the ureters. This is funny because, again, this is the opposite of the story we’re told about Galen. He’s described as a pre-scientific or even unscientific thinker, believing that experimentation and investigation are a waste of time. Clearly this isn’t the case, and he made full use of all the resources available to him. We know that human dissection was prohibited in the empire, but Galen worked with gladiators, so we know that he had firsthand experience with human anatomy. He certainly was unafraid, even eager, to practice animal dissection and vivisection. Other doctors of the time didn’t seem to do either of these things, or at least didn’t do nearly as much, and so Galen starts looking more and more like a lone light of empiricism in the wilderness. (However extreme and disturbing his methods may be.) VII. In view of this, it’s extremely depressing to see Tetlock write, “yet Galen never conducted anything resembling a modern experiment.” Galen isn’t here to respond, but if he were, I imagine he would say: and yet Tetlock never conducted anything resembling a basic literature review! Galen definitely isn’t as charitable as we might want him to be. He calls some of the ideas he disagrees with “impossible, nay, perfectly nonsensical”, or “stupid—I might say insane”. His intellectual rivals “are like slaves” he says, “caught in the act of stealing … quite bewildered, and while the one says nothing, the other indulges in shameless lying.” But I’m pretty sympathetic to Galen’s position, because his contemporaries really do sound like idiots. Of course, all this is being filtered through Galen’s own account, but if he’s describing them with any accuracy, he is totally fair in saying that they have no idea what they are talking about. Some of the positions he argues against include: Urine passes into the bladder in the form of vapors, rather than being secreted by the kidneys and passed through the ureters to the bladder. Galen argues against this first by pointing out that the kidneys and bladder are connected by the ureters (which must have some purpose), and second by the extensive evidence from vivisection that I mentioned above.

Inline links: this piece, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!6Gdb!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbb854d87-de36-4173-ab8a-2728bd8605b5_1024x635.jpeg

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

THIRD PLACE: On The Natural Faculties, reviewed by ELP.

Inline links: On The Natural Faculties

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

Your Book Review: Exhaustion

August 05, 2022 · Original source

She opens her account with Galen’s humoral theory, where exhaustion was linked closely with melancholia, that famous over-production of black bile. I won’t detail Galen’s theories here; instead, I’ll point you towards last year’s ACX review contest entry of On the Natural Faculties. But it is worth noting here that many of the symptoms Galen describes are familiar to us – I described some of them earlier, but there are prominent features of not only what we would now call CFS but also what we have now carved off into the related concept of depression. The link between CFS and psychological distress is fraught with controversy, and we’ll deal with it more later on.

Inline links: On the Natural Faculties

Odyssey4 mentions across 4 issues

Odyssey is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between August 26, 2022 and August 08, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "references an event in the Odyssey"; "stories from the Bible and Homeric epics (the Iliad and Odyssey)"; "Most pagan myths have nothing to do with ... the Odyssey". It most often appears alongside Europe, Friedrich Nietzsche, Iliad.

Article page: Odyssey
Mention count: 4
Issue count: 4
First seen: August 26, 2022
Last seen: August 08, 2024
Book title: Odyssey

Issue trail

Your Book Review: Kora In Hell August 26, 2022
Your Book Review: The Educated Mind July 14, 2023
Book Review: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning November 17, 2023
Highlights From The Comments On Nietzsche August 08, 2024

Europe 3 shared issues
Friedrich Nietzsche 3 shared issues
Iliad 3 shared issues
Socrates 3 shared issues
Aristotle 2 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: Kora In Hell

August 26, 2022 · Original source

Kandinsky also had a theory of color, in which he claimed colors have physical and psychical effects and are also part of a system of correspondences. White is birth, black is death, green is nature, yellow is happiness, blue is peace and so on. Literary critics will sometimes talk about a text by mapping such correspondences, because the craft is descended from the hermeneutics of Holy Books, where correct interpretation could turn out to be the key to salvation or enlightenment or knowledge of divine will, and this often scares people away from reading primary sources. For example, every chapter in James Joyce’s Ulysses references an event in the Odyssey, sure, but how the hell are you supposed to figure out on your own that each one is dominated by a particular color and a particular part of the body and so on if an expert doesn’t tell you that. Well, it turns out it’s not that important. It’s just something Joyce did to encourage himself to continue writing his Holy Book dedicated to the God of Art. You can extract meaning from his fried inner organs of beasts and fowls, but that’s because you can extract meaning from anywhere. What Joyce really wanted was an excuse to show off his verbal powers. It’s hard and complicated on purpose, like getting into a fight with ten people to justify that you’ve been doing martial arts every day for decades.

Your Book Review: The Educated Mind

July 14, 2023 · Original source

From trivial to rich: the trick What could an intellectually rich elementary school curriculum look like, if we built it on kids’ cognitive strengths? He gives us one suggestion to help us do this: ask where each discipline came from in the first place. What was math before it was math, for example — or science before it was science? Q: How on Earth could that help? That’ll become clear later, when we finally uncover what Egan thinks “education” actually is, and see what job he wants us to give schools. For now, take it as a tantalizing hint… or, y’know, just ignore it. Elementary literature & language What was literature before it was literature? Before people invented writing, they had rich oral traditions: they told simple stories, recited poems, and shared proverbs. Egan suggests that these bits of oral tradition should form the backbone of the elementary literature curriculum. Q: What sorts of stories? As many as we can, and from as many diverse cultures as possible! Folktales are wonderful, as are myths. Think the Aboriginal story of “The Rainbow Serpent”, episodes from the Sumerian “Epic of Gilgamesh”, the Egyptian story of Osiris & Isis, the Greek story of Orpheus & Eurydice, the Chinese Legend of the White Snake, the Japanese Tale of Amaterasu and Susanoo, the Ashanti tales of Anansi, the Aztec myth of Quetzalcoatl, the English legend of King Arthur, the Maori myth of Maui and the Sun, the Roman story of Romulus and Remus, selections from the Indian Mahabharata, the Anglo-Saxon epic of Beowulf, the Inca legend of the Sun and Moon, the Iroquois Myth of the Flying Head (a real thing! look it up!), and the Ojibwe story of Turtle Island. Q: That was a lot of examples. Are you going to keep giving so many? I’ve got a [mumble mumble mumble] to get to. Sorry about that. Sometimes, though, I feel that a limitation of reading Educated Mind is that, in trying to keep his book to a manageable size, Egan skimped on examples in some places that it matters. It’s easy to read his occasional example and assume he intends that it hold some central place in the curriculum — when all he wants to do is display how rich and diverse the curriculum could be. (Also: good God, I didn’t even include an example from Norse mythology!) So from now on, just assume that every category could be filled with oodles of examples. Q: What sorts of poems? Lots of poems, first of all. We shouldn’t steer toward “fancy” poems — rather, we should find poems that appeal to kids immediately — think Shel Silverstein, Mother Goose, Dr. Seuss, Jack Prelutsky, Edward Lear, or Ogden Nash… that sort of thing. In a biting essay, Egan suggests these poets like these appeal to kids precisely because they leverage kids’ cognitive strengths: “we should find, and encourage saying and singing and shouting aloud verse with strong narrative forms, thumping rhymes and rhythms, the most vivid images, fun with metaphors, and a rollicking story.” Q: Why proverbs? Proverbs stick in your mind almost effortlessly. (“All’s fair in love and war!” “When in Rome, do as the Romans do!” “You can’t judge a book by its cover!”) They’re also useful; they capture general truths. Kids can apply them to all sorts of situations, but also discuss them — to what extent are they wise or foolish? (I remember my surprise when I realized that they couldn’t all be true — because you can’t follow “look before you leap” and “he who hesitates is lost” at the same time! I’m embarrassed to say that I think I only realized this when I was in college.) Elementary science What was science before it was science? Egan suggests: being immersed in the natural world. We might, he writes, encourage elementary students to “adopt” some feature of the natural world — a patch of grass, a cat, a branch, a stream — and simply observe it at length. To do this, we can use the cognitive strength of reverie. Q: Oh, do you mean like kids sometimes do in science class nowadays — describe a thing to a partner, make notes, draw it, and label its parts? No, the exact opposite! That’s all about squeezing the experience into words and forms that we understand. What we want “is less an attempt to know about nature as to know it in some participatory way, to know it as something we are an intimate part of, not set off from”. Q: That sounds a little… “woo” to me. It did to me, too… until I remembered my childhood climbing tree. I didn’t much like to go outside as a child, but I had this one tree that I’d climb up and read for hours and hours. If I close my eyes I can bring to mind the precise texture of its bark, the roughness of its broken-off branches, the coolness of its leaves, the always-surprising solidness of its trunk… I’m bigger now, but I think if I were back in my parent’s yard, I could still navigate its limbs with my eyes closed. I have, at this point in my life, read a fair number of books about trees, but I’d be surprised if all of them together more than equaled the amount I learned from that tree — my tree. Elementary math What was math before it was math? Egan suggests: counting and logic. We might, then, use rhythms, metaphors, stories, and jokes to help kids become fond of these. Q: Counting is pretty… basic. Could it really be improved? Beware of “the curse of knowledge”: Steven Pinker’s phrase for forgetting that something was once difficult! Egan suggests we should spend time helping kids count wonderfully. We can start early with counting rhymes. (“One, two, buckle my shoe! Three, four, out the door! Five, six…”) But we can also help kids use their fingers as metaphors. There are some pretty cool ways of using your hands as an abacus — and did you know that you can count up to 1,023 using just your fingers on both hands, and a knowledge of binary? Q: Logic — I’m intrigued! Aristotelian, or Boolean? Neither, for the time being — Piaget was presumably onto something when he found that young children couldn’t reason abstractly, but he was looking at logic in a vacuum. When we put logic into the context of stories, we find that kids can deal with logic just fine. There’s an entire worldwide network of educators, in fact, called Philosophy for Children, who have written whole books about how to do this, and Egan loves it all. Sometimes they read stories and ask simple questions: “What is friendship?” or “What does it mean to be brave?” They also pose ethical questions: “Is it ever right to spill a secret?” And they pose paradoxes: “Can you step in the same river twice?” Q: You mentioned “jokes” a moment ago. Care to elaborate? Egan thinks that, to help kids get good at math, you should tell kids jokes. Q: That’s… new. I think so, too — but he backs it up pretty well. To be funny, jokes (or at least most kid jokes) rely on a leap in logic: Why can’t you trust an atom? They make up everything. Knock-knock. Who’s there? Boo. Boo-hoo? Don’t cry, it’s just a joke! To understand the joke, kids have to follow the logic — spotting patterns, making connections, and tracking what their audience expects a word to mean. That’s a lot of cognitive lifting. And Egan goes further, suggesting that we grit our teeth and create methods to help kids invent their own jokes, no matter how horrible they’ll be at first. (The things we do for learning…) Q: Wait wait wait! What about addition facts, and multiplication tables, and fractions? Egan emphasizes that his methods are designed to be add-ons to the standard math curriculum. In general, he’s a don’t-blow-up-the-system sort of guy, and if something seems especially weird, you should probably assume it’s an add-on to the regular curriculum rather than a replacement, even if I forget to say so. Elementary arts What was art before it was art? Egan suggests we pop our heads into Paleolithic caves for our inspiration. Whatever the specific meaning of all those charcoal elk and aurochs and mammoths (communication with the spirit world? art for art’s sake? a way to impress babes?), Egan thinks it obvious that they were also an attempt to capture an intense experience that would be difficult to express in words alone. What did it feel like to be near an aurochs, or a saber-toothed tiger? “The arts help us,” Egan writes, “to hear and see afresh, to force our perceptions and sensations to experience again the immediacy and vividness of the world”. If we follow this, then, we don’t want to help kids build “art skills” so they can draw like an adult — rather, we want to help them amass a repository of diverse aesthetic feelings that they’ll want to express. We should provide them with a riot of experiences. Q: That couldn’t be more opaque. Examples, please! Egan writes that we should have children learn to whistle, sing, and click their tongue; we should help them emulate the ways a skunk or a hawk or a stick bug might move through a space. We should expose them to scores of different temperatures and materials. In music, we should help them love Beethoven, yes, but also the Beatles; Tchaikovsky, yes, but also Tuvan throat singers, and also John Cage, whale song, and bird song. Q: That’s a lot of experiences, but what would they be doing? An interesting aspect of Egan’s view of education is that he doesn’t seem to think we should push kids right to the “doing” phase. He wants to help kids cultivate an affective relationship with the world. In any case, he writes that as students get more experienced, we should prompt them to move from merely enjoying these experiences to trying to systematically shape similar experiences. And drawing, painting, and playing music could easily be folded into other parts of the curriculum. Elementary social studies What was social studies before it was social studies? Well. Remember how, just a moment ago, I wrote that you could assume that you should probably assume that Kieran isn’t in favor of junking the curriculum as it currently stands? He suggests we very carefully pick up the elementary social studies curriculum, place it into a trash can, and set the whole mess on fire. He isn’t worried about much of importance being lost. (Remember that the “expanding horizons” model is, to him, the original sin of 20th century educational reform, and he repeatedly quotes student surveys showing that “social studies” regularly wins the title of “most boring subject”.) In its place, he suggests we put history — which, he hints, we should think of as the centerpiece of the elementary curriculum. So the real question is what was history before it was history? His answer, surprisingly, is myth. Q: Egan wants us to teach myths as if they were history? Not at all. What he suggests, though, is that we look at how myths operate as narratives — so we can design an intellectually vivid history curriculum. And myths really are special: each is built on at least one binary (like weak vs. strong, or lies vs. truth, or so on), and uses that to tell the story of the big picture of the world. They’re so powerful that people can understand it, remember it, and love it — even if that thing never happened. We should take that power, Egan says, and apply it to things that really did happen. Q: So what history does he think kids should learn in elementary school? The great struggles of humanity from across the whole. Flippin’. World. We’re still talking about young children, so these should be done as simple stories. The goal isn’t to make them history PhD’s, so we needn’t even try to put them in any sort of order. Egan suggests that, in first grade, we pick a single binary like “freedom against oppression” and tell kids a welter of stories, again from as many cultures as possible, and as many times in history as possible. Q: Can you give examples? Oh, all right — in first grade we can tell kids the stories of the war of the Greek city-states against the Persian empire, and the slave uprising of Spartacus against the Romans. We can tell them about the plight of Jews in medieval Europe, and of the unsuccessful Sepoy Rebellion in India against the British. We can tell the stories of the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions, and about the Chinese Taiping Rebellion against the Qing Dynasty. We can tell them the story of the escaped slave Harriet Tubman returning to the South to rescue her kinsmen, the story of six-year-old Ruby Bridges facing threats to integrate her elementary school, and the story of how the Mau-Mau uprising led to modern-day Kenya. We can tell the stories of Mexican-American union organizer Cesar Chavez and of Malala Yousafzai surviving an assassination attempt to advocate for female literacy. The world does not lack for stories of oppression and liberation that can capture the attention of a six-year-old. Q: That’s… huh. What stories might they hear in second and third grade? Egan gives examples, but I won’t list them here. He suggests we use a similar approach for each, except that we swap out the binary each year. He thinks “the struggle for security against danger” would work well for year two, and “the struggle for knowledge against ignorance” would work well for year three. (That year could have a lot of overlap with the science curriculum.) Q: Anything else, for history? Yes — they should get a sense of Big History. They should get some simple stories about the ice age, the Cenozoic, the age of dinosaurs, the Paleozoic, the origins of our solar system, and the Big Bang. (Because if the ancient Norse can tell their story of the beginning of the universe, by gum, we can tell ours, too.) To sum up Egan argues that the problem of early schooling is that it’s trivial — and it’s trivial because the dominant theories of educational psychology see children as lesser versions of adults. What else would we teach them, except dumbed-down versions of what adults learn? But children have certain cognitive strengths that schools aren’t making systematic use of. If we rebuild elementary schools on those strengths, we could turn schooling upside down. We could stop seeing the curriculum as a bag of information to impart, and start seeing it as a set of great stories to tell — and invite kids into. Kids could experience (both intellectually and emotionally) the great struggles of humanity and see that they can join in them. Students could experience the story of education as the beginning of a very real adventure. Egan’s elementary school: some skeptical questions Q: I’m not sure I’m understanding what you mean by “mental images”. Care to explain? It’s an interesting fact of human cognition that just a few words can whip up a complex mental experience. Egan doesn’t just mean what we might call “visual imagery” — the ability to hold, say, the image of a bespectacled, spat-wearing duck in your mind without seeing a photograph. He’s also including what psychologists call auditory imagery, olfactory imagery, gustatory imagery, and tactile imagery. Q: How could all of that be helpful in schools? Humanity has a built-in VR system, and we’re not using it! Egan invites us to pretend we’re teaching a class about the humble earthworm. We might list off facts — “earthworms are so many centimeters long, move through soil by means of their something-or-other muscles…” but he suggests we can evoke images, say, “of what it would be like to slither and push through the soil, hesitantly exploring in one direction then another, looking for easier passages, contracting and expanding our sequence of muscles segment by segment, and sensing moisture, scents, grubs, or whatever”. Those facts are now felt by the student; the knowledge has become part of them. And just a few words can spark a complex mental experience, one going beyond literal images to include imagined sounds, smells, tastes, and more. These experiences can feel real and stick with us. (That these mental images are so easy to evoke, and so meaningfully felt, feels something like the proverbial hundred dollar bill on the ground.) Q: How could metaphors be helpful? It really is interesting that so much of the “constructivist” turn in psychology — that is, the notion that children don’t absorb knowledge, but construct it — has continued to focus on logics-mathematical reasoning, when there’s been mounting evidence for decades that metaphors are more central. It’s not just that we use metaphors to better understand things we already know, we also use them to grasp new knowledge. What’s more, psychologists have devised tests to measure the skill at metaphor-making, and have given them to people of different ages. What they found was that eleven-year-olds make more metaphors (and higher quality metaphors) than do undergraduates — and that four-year-olds have both groups beat. Again, hundred dollar bills on the sidewalk. Q: Your talk of “binaries” has me worried — binaries like good/evil and male/female are the source of so many of our most pernicious stereotypes! Isn’t the purpose of education to get us beyond stuff like this? Yes, it is! Education is supposed to complicate our understanding — but that means we’ve gotta start somewhere, and binaries provide us a natural starting place. As an uncontroversial example, think about temperature. We all begin as babies by perceiving two temperatures — hot and cold. Later, we add on intermediate categories — warm and cool. (Note that the human body is the assumed mid-point to temperature. Binaries often work like this; “big” and “small” mean “bigger or smaller than me”, “nasty” and “kind” mean “nastier or kinder than I am, except when my brother is really asking for it”, and so on.) A good story (and an Egan-inspired elementary curriculum is, in a sense, nothing but good stories) will go further, and transform the binary. Toy Story is grounded in the binary of abandonment/belonging: at the beginning, the toy cowboy Woody belongs to his owner, and has his affection. Then a rival comes who threatens his belonging. In trying to get back to belonging, Woody is entirely lost — and to save the day, he has to come to a deeper understanding of what belonging means. Now, all lessons can’t be Pixar movies. But the good stories (especially in literature and history) will challenge and subvert the binaries they begin with. Q: I see the pattern of Egan drawing from “as many cultures as possible”. Why so many? Is this a political correctness thing? If it helps to think of it as such, then, sure! I don’t think Egan would have had a problem with that. But his ultimate reason for including so much diversity goes deeper. For Egan, including such world-wide diversity isn’t optional, and the answer to why is bound up in his definition of education. (Keep reading.) His answer also insists that we, whenever possible, also include stories from the Bible and Homeric epics (the Iliad and Odyssey). Q: Mmm, stories from the Bible aren’t going to fly in my local school! So be it! Egan doesn’t spend much time obsessing over the practicalities of… His interest is in describing what an ideal education might look like, if it were possible. Every lesson, every classroom, and every school is necessarily a compromise. Q: You make a big deal of poems. But isn’t poetry dead? An interesting contrast can be made to classical education, which also has kids read a lot of poems — they see knowing great poems as one of the marks of an educated person; again, for an academicist, it’s the information that transforms. Egan begs to disagree. Poems are important because they’re a wonderful way to train their cognitive strengths, like rhythm (poems are language fueling by thumping). We want to help kids learn to use this tool better, and a great way to do that is to help them recite poems that they’ve learned by heart. Q: “Learn by heart” — is that code for “memorize”?! It is! Egan is actually quite big on memorization — he points out that all the knowledge in the world can do nothing for a person once they’ve forgotten it. He didn’t, however, appreciate the academicist focus on memorizing without understanding (or at least enjoyment). Q: I’m still worried about the science curriculum, as you’re describing it. Can you allay my fears? Honestly, while I feel there’s something profoundly right to how Egan is describing early experiences of nature, I feel the same way. Note that there’s more science coming in the social studies curriculum. But if that’s still not enough, one could bring down aspects of the middle school science stage. Q: Anything else that Egan suggests we do in elementary school literature and language? He suggests that we help kids learn a second language! This is so obviously true (why do American schools typically wait until kids lose the ability to naturally absorb languages to start teaching languages?) he doesn’t belabor it, though. Q: You had mentioned that Egan’s vision seems more internal-focused. Should we be worried about that? While I strongly suspect that his curriculum would make kids more creative in any way you’d like to measure it, Egan wasn’t particularly interested in “creativity” — he was more about helping kids find the world interesting. I get the sense that he thinks kids will do things with minimal prompting once they’re loaded up with complex internal experiences. Q: I think I’m beginning to understand Egan — is he basically saying “make learning fun”? “Fun”, applied to education, is a dangerous word. Egan worries about the dangers of an emotionally unserious curriculum producing emotionally stunted adults. That doesn’t mean we need to tell students only “serious” stories — only that we treat the world honestly. “Disney-esque sentimentality is the exact emotional equivalent to intellectual contempt”. Q: But aren't some of these stories too dark for children who have themselves experienced oppression and disaster? Egan argues that these stories may be especially helpful to them — they can help them understand their struggles better, and give voice to them. Q: At the very start of this, you promised us “rationality”… but I’m not seeing rationality here! All this talk of “adventure” almost seems to go the opposite direction. What gives? Wait for it. But for a hint right now — Egan is fond of citing his fellow educational theorist Jerome Bruner, who claimed “any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development”. Bruner was criticized for that; his critics charged that he was ignoring learning differences and socio-economic realities. Egan thinks he was profoundly right. Part 3: A new kind of middle school What’s the matter with middle school? What was middle school like for you? In math, I recall a jumble of barely-related topics. In literature, I remember reading great literature — Frankenstein, Romeo and Juliet — only in their dumbed-down summary formats. In social studies, I remember teachers proclaiming on the first day of class that unlike all of our previous history classes, this class wouldn’t be about names and dates… and then going on to memorize names and dates. And in science, I remember being forced to dissect a frog only to discover that frogs are — you guessed it — made of slimy frog parts. Your mileage may vary, but for a lot of us, middle school feels like getting booted out of the (in retrospect) Eden of elementary school, and like marking time before the serious studying of high school. It feels meaningless. In my favorite of his books, Egan calls so much middle school curricula “human deserts”, noting “we have created a system in which the importance of human emotions for meaning seems barely noticed”. Why so meaningless? If our dominant approaches to educational psychology fundamentally misinterpret younger children, Egan suggests, they basically throw up their hands when faced with pre-teens and teenagers. Mainstream schools begin to introduce vocational training to help lighten the load, and Maria Montessori famously suggests that adolescents should be sent to go run a farm. Egan is sympathetic to those responses, but points out that they don’t do much to lighten the load that the academic curriculum often becomes at this age. This feeling of meaninglessness, he argues, is utterly tragic — it comes just when a hunger for meaning blossoms in adolescents! We can see that hunger for meaning in their lives outside the classroom, where their interests ramp up into veritable obsessions. What are adolescents obsessed with? What might we see, if we become Jane Goodalls of early adolescence? First, teens are obsessed with gossip. The motivations of others — why did he do that? and what was he THINKING? — are hypothesized and talked to death. Second, that they’re pulled toward idealism. Many feel a dissatisfaction with the world as it is, and feel a romantic urge to make it a better place. They’re often lured into simplistic beliefs that promise to help them do that. Third, they love extremes: they want to find limits, and test them. Obviously, this can show up as risky behavior, but we can also see it in their love for the bizarre — note adolescents’ fascination in things like aliens, cryptids, and ghosts. (Egan loves pointing out that The Guinness Book of World Records is a perennial bestseller among kids at this age. How else would they find out who had the world’s longest fingernails?) Fourth, they gravitate toward heroes — people who push the edges of those limits. By celebrating heroes, they can vicariously share in their transcendence. Look for the posts hanging up in a teenager’s bedroom to guess what boundaries they feel most hemmed in by: athletes push against physical limits; a death metal guitarist might push against authority and conventional morality. An activist or entrepreneur might push against our dulled morality or our sense of what’s possible. Finally, we might spot teens taking up hobbies and making collections. Hobbies can be a way to identify yourself as part of a group against the rest of the world (“I’m the sort of person who goes bird-watching!”), and collections can be a way to climb the status ladder inside the community. Egan points out that a collection can also be a way to feel like you have control over what you’re discovering is a very big and complex world of detailed information (“I’ve spotted every one of the fifty most common birds of Texas — even the black-capped vireo!”) Egan’s insight is that these obsessions give teenagers a sense of meaning, and that we can use them as tools to make middle schools that overflow with meaning. From meaningless to meaning-soaked Again, Egan sketches out a new kind of curriculum subject-by-subject. Before, his trick was to ask where the subject first evolved out of; now, it’s to ask who first discovered or created the specific content we’re teaching. “All knowledge”, he writes, “is human knowledge. Everything we know is knowable through the lives of its inventors, discoverers, or users, and we can have access to that knowledge through the hopes, fears, or intentions that drove them”. Middle school math Who first discovered the concepts students learn in math? The answer, of course, is a wide diversity of curious men and women living across the world over the last few thousand years. Egan says: bring those people into how we teach math. If we used gossip and heroes to help students find it meaningful, what kind of math would result? When we teach the Pythagorean theorem, we should give a sense of who Pythagoras was — a cult-founder who worshiped numbers to find God, whose followers (according to a piece of ancient gossip) murdered one of their members who discovered irrational numbers! Q: Well, sure, that works for Pythagoras, but he’s a known nut job; surely most math doesn’t come from such interesting roots? When we teach the Cartesian coordinate system, students should meet Rene Descartes, the Calvinist French polymath who saw the possibility that math could decipher the world, if only we could unite algebra and geometry… and invented the xy-plane to do exactly that. When we teach scientific notation, we should call our students’ attention to the importance of the number zero, and tell them the story of the Pope who tried to introduce Arabic numerals to Christian Europe and may have been assassinated because of it. When we teach algebra, we should ask students why “algebra” is Arabic for “the fixing of bones”, and tell the story of what Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi was up to. We could do this all day. Literally everything students learn in school was first invented or discovered by some interesting person who was struggling to accomplish something hard. To learn is to connect with those people, whether we know it or not. Egan says: help kids know it. Math has been dehumanized: re-humanize it. Q: So the math curriculum needs to become a history of math curriculum, and math teachers need to become history teachers? No, the content needn’t change. But with surprisingly little work, we can bring in the gossipy stories of heroes, and their obsessions can spread to students. Middle school science Who first discovered the things students learn about in science? If you’re thinking “scientists”, you’re only partially right. Most of the big-picture ideas that we now think of as “science” were discovered before the word “scientist” was invented, or the discipline was professionalized. Frequently, they were hatched by true amateurs, working in their free time, hungry to unlock the secrets of nature. We can use gossip and heroes to spread their obsessions to students just as we taught math, but Egan points out two twists. The first is that the content itself can take on heroic qualities: everything is impressive, when you look at it in a certain light. In an interview, Egan once said: “My book is an attempt to show that, indeed, everything in the world is wonderful, but that schools are designed almost to disguise this slightly shameful fact. We represent the world to children as mostly known and rather dull. The opposite is the case: we are surrounded by mystery, and what we know is fascinating”. What would even the most boring subjects look like, if we emphasized their heroic qualities? Well: What’s a tooth? Bone, wrapped in rock, surrounding tiny cells that your body feeds with blood. What’s a bar of chocolate? A crystal of jellyfish-shaped fat molecules stacked together; when you put it in your mouth you shake them apart into a writhing confusion. What’s the air around you? The bottom of a 10-mile-deep ocean; when you put your tongue over a soda straw and your Pepsi stops leaking out, it’s not because a “vacuum” is “sucking” it up, but because that ocean is squeezing it into your face. Again, we could do this all day! And in middle school science, we can. Everything in the world is wonderful; we can help students see this again and again. The second twist is that science is a subject rich in extremes. Here Egan introduces a concept that we’ll see crop up again: “15-minute segments”. To help us fit as much wonder as possible into a school day, he suggests we supplement the usual school subjects with a few quick lessons. To infuse science with extremes, he suggests we add on three: “human & natural records”, “extremes of animals & plants”, and “cosmology”. Middle school history Who first made the things students learn about in history? Why, the historical characters themselves! Since we’ve given kids a grounding in history in elementary school, now we can build on that, going through many of the same events as before, but in more depth, and more vividly. We’ll leverage the interest with other people’s inner lives to tell stories focusing on the perspectives of the people who made history — zooming in, when possible, on scandalous details. We’ll leverage the tool of idealism to choose historical characters who chafed against their surroundings, and understand what they were trying to accomplish. What was their vision of the world? What did they hope for, and what did they fear? Q: Isn’t the “great man” approach to history out of fashion? Egan’s approach doesn’t say that “great men” made history — it’s just leveraging gossip to help kids see history as something meaningful that can expand their own possibilities. “Early adolescence is commonly a time of intense and vivid emotional life, and also a time of deepest boredom and depression… [We] can give shape to the intermediate curriculum and offer the students a world that is rich, complex, varied, and as intense and vivid as their own emotional lives”. We also should add on another “15-minute segment” just to pump in as many biographies as possible, and from people who don’t always fit into the normal history curriculum. Call it “Brief Lives”, and throw in anyone who’s struggled to push some limit — Mary Wollstonecraft, Jesse Owen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the students’ great-aunts, whoever. As students get older, this can transition to “People and Their Ideas”. Here, we’d focus less on the details of the person’s life, and use it as a backdrop to showing how meaningful some of history’s most important ideas could be. Think Aristotle and syllogisms, Edward Said and orientalism, Confucius and propriety, Cornel West and race, Buddha on the four noble truths, Muhammad and the five pillars, Karl Marx and communism, Adam Smith and the invisible hand, Thomas Hobbes and the state of nature, John Locke and natural rights, Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism, Thomas Aquinas on the sacraments, Martin Luther on faith, Voltaire on the freedom of speech… you get the idea. Q: Can you really get a profound understanding of utilitarianism in 15 minutes? Yes! The point of this segment isn’t to develop a systematic understanding of any one idea, it’s to introduce students to the exciting possibilities of human thought. (As a bonus, this might make them less likely to fall for the first ideology that they encounter later in life.) Diversity is important for this — as it is with culture. Throughout this, we should also be trying to expose students to as much cultural diversity as possible, because in high school, we’ll be trying to make sense of our society, and it’s impossible to do that unless we have something to compare it against. Middle school literature & language You might think that this subject would be easy — that middle school literature is already filled with “strong and clear narratives”, that it deals with “transcendent human qualities such as courage, love, and persistence”, that it focuses on “extremes of human experience”, that it examines “something strange and exotic”. You’d be right! Egan’s pretty happy with a bog-standard middle school literature curriculum, done well. In this part of the book, his spends most of his limited space suggesting three rather odd activities which could also be useful — especially for increasing students’ awareness of language, so they can use it better. The first is etymology — not, however, memorizing lists of roots, but in being told the entertaining backstories of specific words. Take the word “berserk”, for example — we now use it to mean something relatively mild (“if my mom catches me coming home late, she’ll go berserk”), but it comes from an old Norse word meaning “a raging warrior of superhuman strength”. And that’s because ber meant “bear” and serk meant “shirt”: soldiers of the bear cult would don the skin of a bear to, in their minds, transform into one — howling, foaming at the mouth, and gnawing the rims of their shields. (Most adults walk through life with little understanding that the words falling out of their mouths are entities, with their own back-stories. Communication is, at the very least, more interesting when we become aware of this.) The second is to add on another language to learn — not, this time, to become fluent in it, but just to become aware of how very different human languages can be. (For native English speakers, Sanskrit might work well, or Cantonese, or perhaps even ancient Egyptian. Again, the point isn’t for this language to be useful — it’s to explore diversity.) The final one is to study humor — not just jokes anymore, but comedy at its finest. Egan cites (at length!) Monty Python as a group of people who were particularly brilliant in their use of the English language. Examining their skits can lead us into not just an appreciation of semantics (the study of how meaning is made from smaller pieces, like etymology) but also pragmatics (the study of how meaning is made in social situations). Pretty heady stuff, for a conversation about a dead parrot. Part 4: A new kind of high school I’ll confess — I loved parts of high school… and among nerdy folks, I suspect I’m not alone. For some of us, this was a golden time. Even at my local public high school, I had access to academically thrilling classes — especially, in my last two years, advanced literature and history. I felt like I was finally understanding the ideas that mattered. In any case, Egan is quick to acknowledge that, at this level, the sort of education he advocates really is being practiced in some places. What he can add is an understanding of what makes it wonderful, how to make it even more wonderful, and how to make it wonderful for many, many more people. What’s the matter with high school? Far too often, even when high school classes are intellectual, they’re dry. For the majority of students, all this academic stuff is experienced as utterly lifeless, a mass of dead information to be squeezed inside one’s head for a test and then left to evaporate. Egan mocks the curriculum wars that seem to be a permanent feature of the teaching life; quoting the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, he says “while the academic left and right bicker over whether the curriculum is too traditional or too radical, they fail to recognize that most students absorb so little of academic culture that the bickering is largely irrelevant”. Why so dry? Egan suggests three reasons to explain this. First, because high school academic classes are too often masses of small details with no sign of the big picture. Second, because they’re typically slavishly disciplinary, and aren’t able to address the questions that span the disciplines. Third, because they’re often designed to bring students through what everyone is sure of, and hide away any controversies. In all of these, Egan suggests that what’s called “academics” in high school is too often a dim imitation of what real academics are actually practicing. There’s a fourth reason, though, and it’s probably the biggest of all — by the time they get to high school, most students haven’t actually learned that much! An academic approach is designed to connect small details into the big picture; for people who arrive in high school (and college) classes without having already collected much in their heads, academics are going to taste dry. (An implication of this for anyone trying to improve schools is that we might not want to start with high schools. If your goal is to create a new kind of academic learning, first start at elementary school — or barring that, middle school.) What motivates mad scientists? When we wanted to re-conceive the elementary and middle school curriculums, we looked at what students were already good at — kids’ cognitive strengths and adolescents’ obsessions. For this level it might be easier to look — for reasons that will become clear when we finally unveil Egan’s crazy-sounding definition of education — at the sorts of things that bring intellectuals joy. Q: Which intellectuals? Take your pick. Galileo, Einstein, Smith, Marx, Goodall, Chomsky, Curie… all the people who took to the life of the mind like fish to water. But that’s a lot to hold in my mind at once, so I’m just going to think about Doc Brown from Back to the Future: He was high on intellectualism I’ve never been there, but the brochure looks nice Let’s call these people “mad scientists”. And let’s pretend we once again took up our job of being primatologists, and snooped on these folks “in the wild” (“in the lab”? this is beginning to get recursive…)… what would we find motivating them? Asking simple questions, for one. (What is space? What is society? What is a human? What is language?) Building general schemes (big theories) that hold lots of evidence together. Finding their place in the cosmos. And (perhaps above all) seeking certainty. Once again, Egan suggests we use these as tools to remake the curriculum. From dry to daring What could a high school curriculum look like, if it were rebuilt on these tools? Once again, Egan has a trick. This time, it’s to ask what fights have driven the development of each of these fields forward — and how we can help students enter them. First, a mini-segment! Intellectuals invented the academic disciplines to better pursue the life of the mind, but the disciplines can get in the way. Some of the most important intellectual discoveries that could help students are too big to fit into any of the disciplines. We need a place to introduce them plainly. Egan proposes another mini-segment — again, just 15 minutes a day, a few times a week — called “Metaknowledge”. Q: Isn’t that already in the International Baccalaureate program? Yes, he acknowledges that he’s borrowing from that! This segment would introduce ideas that would enrich student thinking across the disciplines: game theory, cognitive biases, systems thinking, Bayesian reasoning, epistemology, ethics, logic, cultural evolution, and so on. High school literature How can we help students enter the big fights of literature? Intellectuals of a literary bent — professors, critics, poets, novelists — delight in arguing over literature like rabbis arguing over the Talmud. Take, just for one example, the debates over Shakespeare’s character of Ophelia. Does she love Hamlet, or is she a victim of his emotional abuse? Is she truly insane, or is she acting? Is she passive, or is she pulling the strings? Oceans of ink have been spilled arguing over questions like these; our students can, perhaps, spill a few ounces more. The usefulness of arguing literature, for Egan, isn’t that it’s oh-so important for educated adults to know a lot about Ophelia. (This, again, was where the academicists went wrong — in thinking that being educated was about getting the best knowledge in your head.) Rather, arguing over literature is a training arena for the all-important intellectual move of this kind of understanding: building general schemes out of evidence, and struggling with anomalies. One person, for example, might hold that Ophelia is insane, and cite all sorts of obvious evidence — her father just was murdered by her lover, she rants nonsense while (bizarrely) handing out flowers to friends… But then he’s challenged when he reads a scholar pointing out that, to people in Elizabethan England, types of flowers have symbolic meanings. How does he deal with that? He could ignore it, claiming it an over-reading of Shakespeare. (Sometimes a flower is just a flower!) Or he could address it, complicating his own scheme. This intellectual work is best done with other people, who are incentivized to challenge your understanding of something, and go back and forth, building competing models and calling attention to anomalies. This process — the “dialectic” — pops up again and again in the academic disciplines. It’s the center of how understanding works, at this stage. And the nice thing about practicing it on literature is that, more so than in history or science, the evidence is shared knowledge — it’s right in front of everyone, written out. But there are other ways literature class can be helpful to the general life of the mind. Egan also suggests that we’ll want to specially include literature that helps students understand complex ideas. Camus, Orwell, Borges, Calvino might be particularly helpful here… and I imagine that genres like science fiction and magical realism might be particularly useful, too. (Note, though, that once again none of this requires a radical remaking of the curriculum, or of the canon of texts that we traditionally assign to high schoolers.) Q: Oh yes, the canon — what does Egan have to say about the canon wars? When he wrote Educated Mind in the nineties, the long-brewing canon war was approaching its inevitable apocalyptic climax. On one side of this Plain of Megiddo were the pro-canon traditionalists, arguing that we should keep assigning the texts that had been argued over for centuries. Facing them were the anti-canon reformers, arguing the standard texts over-represented the perspective of dead white men. Onto the middle of the plain rides Egan on a white horse, who bellows above the din: “I’VE GOT A BUSLOAD OF HIGH SCHOOLERS WHO WANTS TO JOIN IN, EVERYONE OKAY WITH THAT?” To do so, he says, we need to give students the arguments from both sides. So, for example, bell hooks, Edward Said, and China Achebe should be on the syllabus, as should Allan Bloom, Mortimer Adler, and Diane Ravitch. And of course they should actually read the texts cherished by both sides, too, so they can argue better. High school history How could entering the big fights help us reinvent high school history? First, we might look for dueling histories. It’s time for students to get into historiography and understand that history isn’t just what happened, it’s something we make. We might help kids read chapters from Howard Zinn’s socialist history of America alongside the corresponding chapters from Paul Johnson’s conservative history of America. How could big questions help? We want to help students see how various people have disagreed over some of the big questions of what human history is, at its most basic. We can have them compare Steven Pinker’s theory of civilization’s progress (Better Angels of our Nature) with Yuvah Noah Harari’s theory of civilization’s woes (Sapiens). We could have them compare so-and-so’s account of human history as an ever-expanding unlatching of energy sources with Robert Wright’s account of human history as unlatching more and more positive-sum games (Nonzero). What role could the lure of certainty play? To help them grow their skills at finding anomalies, we might help them work through pseudo-histories and conspiracy theories. Q: Conspiracy theories! Oh, come now, you’re playing with fire. Well, the world is on fire. Our students will spend the rest of their lives encountering terrible-but-beguiling arguments about how the world works; if we don’t prepare them for those, what have we been doing? So we should introduce arguments that the Moon landing was a hoax, that the Illuminati founded America, that aliens built the pyramids, and so on. At no point can we demean students for falling for any of these theories — the job of a teacher at this stage, Egan writes, is to support students in their reasoning even when their beliefs are offensive and stupid, gradually offering anomalies. There’s no way out of bad theories except through them. By the time students graduate, we want them to have wrestled with terrible ideas and — for a while — lost. They need to experience what it’s like to change their minds about something they felt strongly about. They need to viscerally realize, in Feynman’s famous phrase, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” High school natural science How could entering the big fights reinvent high school science? At present, so much of the high school science curriculum — especially “honors” classes — is oriented toward helping amass details. (The same is true of 100-level university classes, which famously “survey” the field to prepare for more advanced studies. I always thought this was stupid — of the huge lecture hall of students in my Geology 100 class, how many went on to take even a second course?) The meaty debates that propel science forward are held back. Egan complains: “The more general and speculative theories in any discipline are treated like an unconventional and disreputable relation who, even though the children find her exciting and entertaining, must be kept hidden from view, her very existence denied as long as possible”. This is a stupid approach — students with an adventurous bent are convinced that science isn’t for them. Egan proposes, simply, that we flip this, and organize high school science classes around the big debates. We shouldn’t be ashamed at how, well, adolescent this might look: “the dramatic, speculative, and contentious theories will be up-front in the early years of the [high school] curriculum”. What might those be? Egan doesn’t give a list, but we can spitball some: instead of explaining what “matter” is from the top down, a physics class could problematize “matter” by following the debates over the nature of dark matter and dark energy, and by becoming familiarized with the various interpretations of quantum mechanics

Inline links: In a biting essay, In my favorite of his books, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ywm7!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff9c9b1ed-a260-4117-8679-0b5a32339748_1600x574.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!WPeH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F62ea55f8-0458-484f-be45-7a011d050756_1600x625.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!FPXt!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb017fc37-3151-4556-87f1-31a097cf7594_1600x574.png

Book Review: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning

November 17, 2023 · Original source

But Girard lost me with the part about the myths. Most pagan myths have nothing to do with the single-victim process (eg labors of Hercules, Jason and the Golden Fleece, rape of Persephone, the Iliad, the Trojan Horse, the Odyssey, etc, etc, etc). The same with most Bible stories (Adam and Eve, Noah’s Flood, the Tower of Babel, the Ten Plagues, the Ten Commandments, etc). It kind of seems like the sort of thing where Freud can claim all myths are about castration. There are lots of myths, and they’re about lots of things. “Person does bad thing, the gods collectively punish humanity, then once we get rid of him the collective punishment stops” is certainly one trope. But it’s not hard to fathom why a primitive community stricken by a plague might think God was punishing them for some iniquity. And if I haven’t committed iniquity lately, and you haven’t committed iniquity lately, it must be some particular bad guy who needs to be stopped.

Highlights From The Comments On Nietzsche

August 08, 2024 · Original source

At nearly 3,000 years old, the Iliad is very much in vogue, with two recent notable translations by women (Emily Wilson and Caroline Alexander) and a book of criticism aimed at a broad audience, Robin Lane Fox's Homer and His Iliad. I think part of the reason the Iliad still hits home is that its central figure, Achilles, fascinates. He's not just stronger and faster and better-looking than everyone else, he's more thoughtful and eloquent too. People point to his appearance in the underworld in the Odyssey, where he says he'd rather be a hired hand on a farm and alive than rule over all the dead. But his rejection of the heroic ethos is found in the Iliad too. His superhuman strength and beauty can’t save him from being dishonored by Agamemnon. It can’t keep his beloved Patroclus alive. All it’s good for, ultimately, is slaughtering Trojans. Which Achilles does magnificently, when he finally returns to battle; but in a sort of frenzy of despair. To a Trojan begging for mercy, he says: Patroclus is dead; I’ll be dead soon; you die too. He calls himself a useless burden on the earth. At the end when he forgoes violence and returns Hector’s body to his aged father Priam, saying sadly as he does so that he is doing nothing to help his own aged father; instead he sits in Troy, afflicting Priam and his children. And he agrees to hold the Greek army back for two weeks so that the Trojans can give Hector a proper burial.

On the Marble Cliffs4 mentions across 4 issues

On the Marble Cliffs is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between July 28, 2023 and July 16, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "I picked On the Marble Cliffs, because it is all of that at the same time"; "Jünger’s memoirs, On the Marble Cliffs does not contain any dialogue"; "I think On the Marble Cliffs is Ernst Jünger’s Unsong". It most often appears alongside Daniel Böttger, Lying For Money, Njal’s Saga.

Article page: On the Marble Cliffs
Mention count: 4
Issue count: 4
First seen: July 28, 2023
Last seen: July 16, 2024
Book title: On the Marble Cliffs
Likely author: Daniel

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: On the Marble Cliffs July 28, 2023
Vote In The 2023 Book Review Contest September 08, 2023
Book Review Contest 2023 Winners September 15, 2023
Consciousness As Recursive Reflections July 16, 2024

Daniel Böttger 2 shared issues
Lying For Money 2 shared issues
Njal’s Saga 2 shared issues
Public Citizens 2 shared issues
Secret Government 2 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: On the Marble Cliffs

July 28, 2023 · Original source

I picked On the Marble Cliffs, because it is all of that at the same time.

Inline links: On the Marble Cliffs

To persuade you that On the Marble Cliffs is so unique, so beautiful and so absurdly courageous that you should at least know about it.

To expose what in my opinion is the actual point of this book, but which (no doubt due to its many other attractions) all reviews of it I have read have missed entirely. The German Catastrophe The obvious frame for this book is what has been fittingly termed the German Catastrophe: the fate of Germany in the late 19th and early 20th century, as viewed from the perspective of German nationalists who were not Nazis — the perspective of people like Ernst Jünger. Germany had entered modernity without democracy. The Kaiserreich (German Empire) had united the many small German states, aggressively worked to catch up with industrialization, built a state to rival France and Great Britain, and remained authoritarian throughout. Commoners had negligible political influence. They did get social insurance, but not through their own political power but granted top-down, as an appeasement to undermine socialist movements. Civil marriage, secularized state education, prospering state universities and a long series of modernizing laws kept increasing state power. And that meant executive power. There were parties, a parliament and a newly homogenized judiciary, but they had little power to check the executive. And this entire development was accompanied by a lot of theorizing about this new German nation. Much of this theorizing ended up justifying authoritarianism, by making quickly-spreading myths about how obedience to authority, respect for aristocracy and love for tradition were uniquely German traits that set Germans apart from the French and the Jews and other dubious foreigners. Such myths, and opposition to them, colored the German population’s hard work to get accustomed to industrialization, urbanization, education, rapid population growth, militarization, national media and various culture wars. This had seemed to work okay-ish while Bismarck, wielding both enormous ruthlessness and enormous political acumen, had navigated Germany through the trials and tribulations of the late 19th century, largely at the expense of France. But in 1890, Emperor Wilhelm II had taken over authority with less ruthlessness and much less political acumen. While his populace remained nearly unable to influence politics, Wilhelm II made critical political mistakes, especially in dealing with other European powers. These mistakes culminated in the first World War. You know how that one went. Germany’s defeat led into Germany’s first real democracy. Everyone was very obviously new to this. The right attacked the new state, falsely claiming it had needlessly capitulated. The left also attacked the new state, because it wasn’t Soviet-Union-like enough. There was a lot of political violence. The massive damage incurred in the war, and the restrictions and reparations Germany had accepted in the peace settlement, put massive strains on an already fragile political system. Elections were tumultuous and frequent. Hyperinflation caused a huge crisis in 1923, and the Great Depression of 1929 was another huge disaster for Germany. Overall, the abolition of authoritarianism was widely felt to be a mistake. This seeming mistake was fixed when Hitler stepped in. And you know how that one went. The author in his time One remarkable witness to this entire catastrophe was Ernst Jünger. In 1938, when he picked up the pen to write Auf den Marmor-Klippen (On the Marble Cliffs), he was 43 years old and a complicated man in a complicated situation. He was first and foremost a highly renowned soldier. He had the Pour le Mérite, the equivalent of the Medal of Honor in the Kaiserreich, which would entitle him to a decent stipend if the Kaiserreich hadn't been gone for twenty years. He was clearly brilliant, especially as a writer, very well connected and exchanged many letters with important men on the political right. He made a living as an author, mostly because his first book, the World War I memoir “Storm of Steel”, was a great success and continually got reprinted. He had followed it up with a string of books, all nonfiction — almost all memoirs, about the war, or both. And he had written a flurry of political articles, mostly in ultraconservative and nationalist magazines. On the Marble Cliffs is his very first fiction novel. Or he claimed it was fiction — but he was fooling nobody. Jünger wrote for an audience that was very familiar with Storm of Steel and, because of the autobiographical nature of all of his preceding work, with him as a person. His books revealed him to be a highly perceptive, highly but coldly intelligent, very erudite, sensation seeking… sociopath. He has masterful eloquence and a keen interest in nature. Even in the trenches of the World War, where he enjoyed “hunting down” enemy soldiers with sniper shots, he seemed more interested in the dealings between the insects that bumbled through this hellscape than in how his fellow soldiers inwardly felt about what was going on. And his protagonist in the Marble Cliffs is both the first-person narrator and almost exactly the same guy! All of the following points are true both for the protagonist of this novel, and the author at the time of writing. He lives with his brother on the edge of a small town in a fairly rural area with an old Christian culture and strong traditional crafts of wine making and fishing, overlooking a large body of water, across which is a mountainous foreign country: Alta Plana in the book, Switzerland in reality.

Vote In The 2023 Book Review Contest

September 08, 2023 · Original source

1: Cities And The Wealth Of Nations / The Question Of Separatism 2: Lying For Money 3: Why Machines Will Never Rule The World 4: Man’s Search For Meaning 5: Njal’s Saga 6: Public Citizens 7: Safe Enough? 8: Secret Government 9: The Educated Mind 10: The Laws Of Trading 11: On The Marble Cliffs 12: The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich 13: The WEIRDest People In The World 14: The Mind Of A Bee 15: Why Nations Fail 16: Zuozhuan

Inline links: Cities And The Wealth Of Nations / The Question Of Separatism, Lying For Money, Why Machines Will Never Rule The World, Man’s Search For Meaning, Njal’s Saga, Public Citizens, Safe Enough?, Secret Government, The Educated Mind, The Laws Of Trading, On The Marble Cliffs, The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich, The WEIRDest People In The World, The Mind Of A Bee, Why Nations Fail, Zuozhuan

Book Review Contest 2023 Winners

September 15, 2023 · Original source

2nd: On the Marble Cliffs, reviewed by Daniel Böttger. Daniel writes the Seven Secular Sermons, a huge rationalist poetry/meditation art project, and has a blog post pitching it to ACX readers in particular.

Inline links: On the Marble Cliffs, Seven Secular Sermons, a blog post pitching it to ACX readers in particular

Consciousness As Recursive Reflections

July 16, 2024 · Original source

[Editor’s note: I accept guest posts from certain people, especially past Book Review Contest winners. Daniel Böttger, who wrote last year’s review of On The Marble Cliffs, has finally taken me up on this and submitted this essay. I don’t necessarily agree with or endorse all guest posts, and I’m still collecting my thoughts (ha!) on this one.]

Inline links: On The Marble Cliffs

Don’t worry, Scott hasn’t gone megalomaniacal. My name is Daniel Böttger. A few of you know me as the author of the Seven Secular Sermons. Most of you have seen my review of On the Marble Cliffs, which won me the right to pitch Scott this guest post.

Inline links: Seven Secular Sermons, review of

Old Testament3 mentions across 3 issues

Old Testament is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between April 21, 2021 and September 13, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "He read the Old Testament with them"; "Cumulatively they have an effect similar to the Old Testament"; "Jesus is the Messiah foretold in the Old Testament". It most often appears alongside Argentina, Central Asia, Jerusalem.

Article page: Old Testament
Mention count: 3
Issue count: 3
First seen: April 21, 2021
Last seen: September 13, 2024
Book title: Old Testament

Outbound links

Issue trail

No, Really, Why Are So Many Christians In Colombia Converting To Orthodox Judaism? April 21, 2021
Your Book Review: Why Nations Fail August 25, 2023
Your Book Review: Nine Lives September 13, 2024

Argentina 2 shared issues
Central Asia 2 shared issues
Jerusalem 2 shared issues
Jesus 2 shared issues
London 2 shared issues

Source context

No, Really, Why Are So Many Christians In Colombia Converting To Orthodox Judaism?

April 21, 2021 · Original source

People screamed. Some shouted accusations of betrayal. But Juan Carlos did not back down. For the next two months, he went door to door, calling on all the congregants. He offered further explanations and gave everyone the opportunity to reproach him in person. He read the Old Testament with them, revisiting passages where he now found evidence to disprove the notion of Jesus as God.

One answer that comes out again and again in interviews is that they used to be Christian, and Jesus was a Jew. On the one hand, “I really like that Jesus guy, maybe Judaism is the religion for me” is an . . . unusual . . . thought process. On the other, it does fit nicely with the evangelical tendency to “get back to fundamentals” - to be open to the idea that all the changes and traditions your religion accreted over thousands of years are bad and wrong, and it must return to the purity of the original teachings. The Christian Bible is 77% Old Testament by length. Read without preconceptions, it sounds a lot more Jewish than Christian. If you’re going to take the Bible really literally, and keep stripping off accreted traditions, then yeah, I guess ending up Jewish makes a lot of sense.

Your Book Review: Why Nations Fail

August 25, 2023 · Original source

Even if correct, it is much less interesting and useful than it appears. Epistemic status: I have a decade-old PhD in economics (not in the field of economic growth) and a handful of peer-reviewed papers in moderately-ranked journals. I'm not claiming to make any original technical points, or to give a comprehensive evaluation of the economic growth literature. My criticisms are largely straight from the authors' own mouths. 1. What is this book about? Why is it not very good? Acemoglu and Robinson (AR) argue that countries are rich or poor because of their political institutions, not culture, geography or policy ignorance. I'll do this as much as possible in AR’s own words. Why Nations Fail was written during the Arab Spring, so the preface begins with Egypt. Some stress that Egypt’s poverty is determined primarily by its geography, by the fact that the country is mostly a desert and lacks adequate rainfall, and that its soils and climate do not allow productive agriculture1. Others instead point to cultural attributes ... Egyptians, they argue, lack the same sort of work ethic and cultural traits that have allowed others to prosper, and instead have accepted Islamic beliefs that are inconsistent with economic success. A third approach, the one dominant among economists and policy pundits, is based on the notion that the rulers of Egypt simply don’t know what is needed to make their country prosperous, and have followed incorrect policies and strategies in the past. Unsurprisingly, those other economists and policy pundits turn out to be wrong and the authors turn out to be right. In this book we’ll argue that the Egyptians in Tahrir Square, not most academics and commentators, have the right idea. In fact, Egypt is poor precisely because it has been ruled by a narrow elite that have organized society for their own benefit at the expense of the vast mass of people. And the Egyptian lesson turns out to be general. Whether it is North Korea, Sierra Leone, or Zimbabwe, we’ll show that poor countries are poor for the same reason that Egypt is poor. Countries such as Great Britain and the United States became rich because their citizens overthrew the elites who controlled power and created a society where political rights were much more broadly distributed, where the government was accountable and responsive to citizens, and where the great mass of people could take advantage of economic opportunities. What are “institutions” anyway? (The economic and political kind, not the prison and mental hospital kind.) Basically, AR mean politics. The word "institutions" occurs over 1000 times in Why Nations Fail2. I'll just focus on how AR use it without worrying about the dictionary, different schools of economics, or other social sciences. They begin with what institutions do rather than what they are. Nogales, Arizona, is in the United States. Its inhabitants have access to the economic institutions of the United States, which enable them to choose their occupations freely, acquire schooling and skills, and encourage their employers to invest in the best technology, which leads to higher wages for them. They also have access to political institutions that allow them to take part in the democratic process, to elect their representatives, and replace them if they misbehave. The word is used dozens more times before ARattempt a more general definition. Each society functions with a set of economic and political rules created and enforced by the state and the citizens collectively. Economic institutions shape economic incentives: the incentives to become educated, to save and invest, to innovate and adopt new technologies, and so on. It is the political process that determines what economic institutions people live under, and it is the political institutions that determine how this process works. So while economic and political institutions can be separated, it is the political institutions that matter in the long run. The good kind of institutions that lead to economic growth are "inclusive", as opposed to "extractive". To be inclusive, economic institutions must feature secure private property, an unbiased system of law, and a provision of public services that provides a level playing field in which people can exchange and contract; it also must permit the entry of new businesses and allow people to choose their careers. ... such rights must exist for the majority of people in society. Political pluralism is necessary, but not sufficient without a strong centralised state. ... political institutions that distribute power broadly in society and subject it to constraints are pluralistic. ... the key to understanding why South Korea and the United States have inclusive economic institutions is not just their pluralistic political institutions but also their sufficiently centralized and powerful states. A telling contrast is with the East African nation of Somalia. I am still a bit hazy as to the relative importance of de jure written rules versus the de facto struggle for power. AR are somewhat circular: Politics is the process by which a society chooses the rules that will govern it. Politics surrounds institutions ... When there is conflict over institutions, what happens depends on which people or group wins out in the game of politics ... The political institutions of a society are a key determinant of the outcome of this game. They are the rules that govern incentives in politics. But overall, you could just say ‘politics’ and not be too far off. AR do this themselves occasionally. South Korea ended up with very different economic institutions than the North because different people with different interests and objectives made the decisions about how to structure society. In other words, South Korea had different politics. AR's academic reputation is based on statistical analysis, but Why Nations Fail tries to do narrative history, IMHO not very well. When Jeffrey Sachs reviewed the book, he complained: They never define their key variables with precision, present any quantitative data or classifications based on those definitions, or offer even a single table, figure, or regression line to demonstrate the relationships that they contend underpin all economic history. Instead, they present a stream of assertions and anecdotes about the inclusive or extractive nature of this or that institution. AR replied baldly: Sachs ... argues that we provide no evidence. Right, we do not in the book. But that’s because a book for a general audience is not the right forum for presenting academic research, and we spent many years of our lives precisely on writing academic papers providing exactly the sort of evidence. ... So yes, we don’t provide the econometric evidence in the book, which isn’t of course the right place to do it, but econometric evidence is abundantly loud in the way it speaks on these topics. So, don't expect Why Nations Fail to be an accessible explanation of AR's academic work, which is what I was hoping for when I first read it. What do they spend over 500 pages on then? Well, after the preface, there's fifteen chapters of, as Sachs says, "assertions and anecdotes". Not just about "the inclusive or extractive nature of this or that institution", to be fair, but how institutions can change at "critical junctures" such as the Black Death or colonisation, and why it can be in elites’ interests to block economic innovation if it threatens their power, so that growth under extractive institutions is unlikely to be sustained. These chapters are not particularly good – I found them poorly organised and repetitive – but not particularly bad, if you are willing to accept the underlying premise that institutions are the main determinant of economic growth. Cumulatively they have an effect similar to the Old Testament, if you are willing to accept the underlying premise that the fortunes of the nation of Israel are determined by the LORD. Only the second chapter, ‘Theories that Don't Work’, makes a sustained argument against alternative theories. Geography is disposed of by noting the stark differences at the US-Mexican, North-South Korean and East-West German borders, and the reversal of fortune by which the present day US and Canada only became richer than Mexico, Central and South America following European colonisation. Culture is hand-waved away with the assertion that institutions determine the any relevant cultural behaviours, not the other way around, referring to the same border examples, the rapid catch up of Catholic Europe despite Weber's Protestant Ethic, the malign influence of the European and Ottoman empires on Africa, the range of outcomes within the former British Empire, and the more European population of Argentina and Uruguay versus the US and Canada, or of Columbia versus Ecuador and Peru. Not a bad list of anecdotes, but one could equally well point to the cross-border success of Ashkenazi Jews, overseas Chinese, or Baltic and Volga Germans. Ignorance is simply dismissed with the assertion that "if ignorance were the problem, well-meaning leaders would quickly learn what types of policies increased their citizens’ incomes and welfare, and would gravitate toward those policies." Various good and bad policy changes are explained as the result of political pressures rather than improved knowledge. The implication seems to be that good policies are so obvious they don’t require expert knowledge or advice, or that the experts never get it wrong. This appears most implausible in the debate over socialism and economic planning. Writing off the entire Communist experience as simply another elite trying to preserve its power feels inadequate, especially considering that some distinguished bourgeois economists thought central planning was a plausible road to riches until quite late in the day. Genetics or race is not mentioned, but would presumably attract the same counterexamples as geography and culture. Another theory AR do not discuss is crude exploitation: while colonial empires are excoriated, it is for setting up persistent extractive political institutions rather than for a direct theft of resources. The prosperity of white-owned South African farms next to poverty-stricken Bantustans is explained by the better quality of the institutions available to whites under apartheid, not relative population densities and land quality. For the rest of the book, I'll just list a few nitpicks to signal I read the whole thing and know a bit of history, but feel free to skip this – the real evidence for AR's thesis is in their academic papers, and I'll discuss those in the next section. I think AR overrate the importance of the Glorious Revolution, to the point of claiming it "created the rule of law" – after all, Parliament had already deposed and executed a king, then brought back the king’s son on their own terms after a decade of republican government. No less a luminary than Edmund Burke asserted "The Revolution was made to preserve our ancient indisputable laws and liberties, and that ancient constitution of government which is our only security for law and liberty." Also, strong signs of British economic uniqueness – the abnormal growth of London and reliance on coal as a fuel – predated 1688.

Inline links: 1, 2, dictionary, schools, economics, social sciences, reviewed, replied, Protestant Ethic, planning, distinguished, bourgeois, Glorious Revolution, Edmund Burke, predated

Your Book Review: Nine Lives

September 13, 2024 · Original source

(An aside: I knew that Jesus is considered a prophet in Islam, but I didn’t know before reading the book how important he is, and I was surprised by the jihadists constantly talking about the return of Jesus. Apparently, Muslims believe that Jesus is the Messiah foretold in the Old Testament, and that he ascended to heaven alive and will return in the End Times to rule gloriously beside another messianic figure, the Mahdi. After that, he will die and be buried in the Green Dome in a tomb left vacant for him next to Muhammad’s. The Last Judgment will happen after his death.)

Inline links: believe

Origins Of Woke3 mentions across 3 issues

Origins Of Woke is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between November 17, 2023 and July 23, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Richard Hanania has a new book out by this title"; "In my review of Origins of Woke"; "Richard Hanania talks about in Origins of Woke". It most often appears alongside cancel culture, Egypt, Europe.

Article page: Origins Of Woke
Mention count: 3
Issue count: 3
First seen: November 17, 2023
Last seen: July 23, 2024
Book title: Origins Of Woke

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Book Review: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning November 17, 2023
Links for May 2024 May 29, 2024
Some Practical Considerations Before Descending Into An Orgy Of Vengeance July 23, 2024

cancel culture 2 shared issues
Egypt 2 shared issues
Europe 2 shared issues
Google 2 shared issues
Israel 2 shared issues

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Book Review: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning

November 17, 2023 · Original source

Which is too bad, because the last two chapters of ISSFLL bring us to: The Origins Of Woke Richard Hanania has a new book out by this title. I hope to review it soon. He claims that wokeness originated in civil rights laws from the 1960s.

Richard Hanania has a new book out by this title. I hope to review it soon. He claims that wokeness originated in civil rights laws from the 1960s.

Links for May 2024

May 29, 2024 · Original source

19: In my review of Origins of Woke, some people suggested that testing whether score on an employment test correlated with performance on the job might get confounded due to Berkson’s Paradox. The Of Aurochs And Angels blog analyzes the question in more depth.

Inline links: Origins of Woke, The Of Aurochs And Angels blog analyzes the question in more depth

Some Practical Considerations Before Descending Into An Orgy Of Vengeance

July 23, 2024 · Original source

Politicians should dismantle the government apparatus propping up cancel culture. Certainly the sorts of things mentioned in the Twitter Files count here, but so do some of the civil rights stuff Richard Hanania talks about in Origins of Woke.

Inline links: Twitter Files, Origins of Woke

Ollantay2 mentions across 2 issues

Ollantay is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between June 23, 2025 and August 22, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Finalists are Ollantay"; "Ollantay is a three-act play written in Quechua"; "he invited José Gabriel ... to a performance of a play ... Valdez told ... Ollantay was a Castilian version of a Quechua play". It most often appears alongside ACX Grants, Alpha School, Andes.

Article page: Ollantay
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: June 23, 2025
Last seen: August 22, 2025
Book title: Ollantay

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Open Thread 387 June 23, 2025
Your Review: Ollantay August 22, 2025

ACX Grants 1 shared issues
Alpha School 1 shared issues
Andes 1 shared issues
Anti 1 shared issues
Anti-suyu 1 shared issues

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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.

Your Review: Ollantay

August 22, 2025 · Original source

Ollantay is a three-act play written in Quechua, an indigenous language of the South American Andes. It was first performed in Peru around 1775. Since the mid-1800s it’s been performed more often, and nowadays it’s pretty easy to find some company in Peru doing it. If nothing else, it’s popular in Peruvian high schools as a way to get students to connect with Quechua history. It’s not a particularly long play; a full performance of Ollantay takes around an hour.1

Inline links: 1

Also, nobody knows where Ollantay was written, when it was written, or who wrote it. And its first documented performance led directly to upwards of a hundred thousand deaths.

Macbeth has killed at most fifty people,2 and yet it routinely tops listicles of “deadliest plays”. I’m here to propose that Ollantay take its place.

Inline links: 2

Order Without Law2 mentions across 2 issues

Order Without Law is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between June 18, 2021 and July 10, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "the finalists are: 1: Order Without Law"; "Order Without Law , reviewed by Phil Hazelden". It most often appears alongside Addiction By Design, Double Fold, Down and Out in Paris and London.

Article page: Order Without Law
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: June 18, 2021
Last seen: July 10, 2021
Book title: Order Without Law
Likely author: Phil Hazelden

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Vote In The Book Review Contest! June 18, 2021
Book Review Contest: Winners July 10, 2021

Addiction By Design 2 shared issues
Double Fold 2 shared issues
Down and Out in Paris and London 2 shared issues
How Children Fail 2 shared issues
Humankind 2 shared issues

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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

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)

Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind2 mentions across 2 issues

Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between November 11, 2022 and September 28, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Reading Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind (see my review here ) convinced me"; "Julian Jaynes’ Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind". It most often appears alongside Aella, 2020 election, @eigenrobot.

Article page: Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: November 11, 2022
Last seen: September 28, 2023
Book title: Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind

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Contra Resident Contrarian On Unfalsifiable Internal States November 11, 2022
Links For September 2023 September 28, 2023

Aella 2 shared issues
2020 election 1 shared issues
@eigenrobot 1 shared issues
@jeremychrysler 1 shared issues
Adam Mastroianni 1 shared issues

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Contra Resident Contrarian On Unfalsifiable Internal States

November 11, 2022 · Original source

I find this all pretty believable for a few reasons. Lots of people (Buddhists, philosophers, psychologists) talk about how the ego is an illusion. And if you’re going to have an illusion, it doesn’t seem significantly weirder to have two illusions. Reading Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind (see my review here) convinced me that all theories of mind are made up, that different cultures make up their theories of mind differently, and that theories of mind which separate the ego and superego and whatever into different entities aren’t inherently dumber or harder to work with than theories which count them all as the same entity.

Inline links: here

Links For September 2023

September 28, 2023 · Original source

26: A few years ago I reviewed Julian Jaynes’ Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind, arguing that Jaynes was on the right track but disagreeing with some of his theories and terminological choices. I didn’t notice until now that orthodox Jaynesian Marcel Kuijsten has an argument here that Jaynes is right and my reinterpretation is wrong.

Inline links: I reviewed Julian Jaynes’, orthodox Jaynesian Marcel Kuijsten has an argument here that Jaynes is right and my reinterpretation is wrong

Oedipus Rex1 mentions across 1 issues

Oedipus Rex is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 16, 2022 and February 16, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "texts range from classical (especially Thucydides and Oedipus Rex)". It most often appears alongside Abercrombie & Fitch, Athenian democracy, Athenians.

Reference entry: Oedipus Rex
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: February 16, 2022
Last seen: February 16, 2022
Book title: Oedipus Rex

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Book Review: Sadly, Porn February 16, 2022

Abercrombie & Fitch 1 shared issues
Athenian democracy 1 shared issues
Athenians 1 shared issues
Athens 1 shared issues
Ayn Rand 1 shared issues

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Book Review: Sadly, Porn

February 16, 2022 · Original source

Sadly, Porn consists of a mid-double-digits-number of short-ish (5-10 pages) interpretations of various texts, vaguely connected by rants and insults. The texts range from classical (especially Thucydides and Oedipus Rex), to Biblical, to modern novels, to movies, to pornos, to dreams. Some of them, on closer inspection, are fictional - not in the sense of being works of fiction, but in the sense where Teach made them up.

Oedipus Tyrannos1 mentions across 1 issues

Oedipus Tyrannos is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 16, 2022 and February 16, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "it's called Oedipus Tyrannos". It most often appears alongside Abercrombie & Fitch, Athenian democracy, Athenians.

Reference entry: Oedipus Tyrannos
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: February 16, 2022
Last seen: February 16, 2022
Book title: Oedipus Tyrannos

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Issue trail

Book Review: Sadly, Porn February 16, 2022

Abercrombie & Fitch 1 shared issues
Athenian democracy 1 shared issues
Athenians 1 shared issues
Athens 1 shared issues
Ayn Rand 1 shared issues

Source context

Book Review: Sadly, Porn

February 16, 2022 · Original source

Not everyone likes the story. There have been a lot of ferocious criticisms of its “theme”. The question is, what is the outcome of these criticisms? Do the criticisms offer an alternative understanding, or do they pretend to criticize in order to maintain the status quo? A popular criticism, heavy with contempt and thus conveniently dismissed as misogyny, is that the Tree “mothered” him too much and failed to foster independence in the child. While this may be factually accurate, it’s even more wrong, it’s the kind of insight that gets you out of having to go any further, it ends your connection to the story - you are done with the book. The criticism that the Tree fails to foster independence presumes it is supposed to do this. But that’s not it’s job. It’s his actual mother’s job, it’s his father’s job. Based on how this little rat turns out it’s clear they failed, but that’s a totally different book, and it’s called Oedipus Tyrannos. The critics say the Tree failed as a mother because they want teaching independence to be the metric of motherhood; but as they are misogynists their true target for redefinition is fatherhood. No one criticized the Tree for failing to teach the boy math, or for self-cutting to guilt him into a debt, its one celebrated failure was not teaching him independence, which, you will observe, is way easier than teaching him math. Consequently it is correct to say that the criticisms of the book pose no threat to the underlying psychology which both haters and admirers share, their ends are the same, both pro and con have succeeded in reprioritizing the myriad defining responsibilities of a parent for the modern age, here they are in full, in order of importance: 1. Foster independence. 2. Other stuff.

Sadly, Porn consists of a mid-double-digits-number of short-ish (5-10 pages) interpretations of various texts, vaguely connected by rants and insults. The texts range from classical (especially Thucydides and Oedipus Rex), to Biblical, to modern novels, to movies, to pornos, to dreams. Some of them, on closer inspection, are fictional - not in the sense of being works of fiction, but in the sense where Teach made them up.

Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats1 mentions across 1 issues

Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats 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 "author of Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats". It most often appears alongside 1917, aesthetics, American.

Reference entry: Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 26, 2022
Last seen: August 26, 2022
Book title: Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats

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Issue trail

Your Book Review: Kora In Hell August 26, 2022

1917 1 shared issues
aesthetics 1 shared issues
American 1 shared issues
Apple 1 shared issues
Benedetto Croce 1 shared issues

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Your Book Review: Kora In Hell

August 26, 2022 · Original source

So yet another interpretation of the title is that WCW is not the Spring taken to Hades. WCW is Demeter, Persephone’s mom, who is desperately moving Heaven and Earth to get her daughter, the American poets of the future, back from the greedy claws of the God of the Underworld, personified in this allegory by the author of Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.

On My Own Books1 mentions across 1 issues

On My Own Books is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 09, 2021 and April 09, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "he had to write a book called On My Own Books to try to sort it all out"; "At one point in On My Own Books, he starts off by talking about a piece of writing he did 'as an exercise for myself'". It most often appears alongside 1913 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Alexandria, Aristotelian.

Reference entry: On My Own Books
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 09, 2021
Last seen: April 09, 2021
Book title: On My Own Books

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Your Book Review: On The Natural Faculties April 09, 2021

1913 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1 shared issues
Alexandria 1 shared issues
Aristotelian 1 shared issues
Aristotle 1 shared issues
Aristotle’s physics 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: On The Natural Faculties

April 09, 2021 · Original source

It’s hard not to notice just how famous Galen was in his own time. Marcus Aurelius described him as “primum sane medicorum esse, philosophorum autem solum” — first among doctors and unique among philosophers (one wonders if Galen might have influenced the Emperor’s own philosophy). Forgeries and unscrupulous editions of his work were such a problem during his lifetime, he had to write a book called On My Own Books to try to sort it all out. Among other things, he complains that his servants were stealing private letters he had written to friends and circulating bootleg copies of them as medical advice. Galen was an incredibly prolific writer. Wikipedia claims that he produced more works than any other author in antiquity, maybe up to 600 treatises, and possibly employed 20 scribes at one point. While these particular claims are hard to substantiate, he did leave behind a whole lot of books. Fires and the various other mishaps that are guaranteed to happen to classical texts destroyed many of his works. Some of this even happened during his own lifetime, and in On My Own Books he seems surprisingly relaxed about so many of his works being lost: The books of many others perished at that time, as did all those of mine which were located in that storehouse; and none of my friends in Rome admitted to having copies of the first two books. Since, then, my followers prevailed upon me to write the same treatise again, I thought that I should give this explanation regarding the previously distributed books, in case anyone in the future finds them and wonders why I should have written a treatise twice on the same subject. Even with these losses, huge amounts of his work has survived. It’s hard to get an exact count, but Claudii Galeni Opera Omnia by Karl Gottlob Kühn, compiled around 1833 and for a long time the definitive edition, contains 122 different works in 22 volumes. That’s a lot. Despite this, I was surprised how hard it was to get my hands on primary source copies of his works (in English). Because of our own plague, I was limited to finding sources online — but for most classical works, this is pretty easy. Marcus Aurelius was a contemporary of Galen, and it’s not too hard to find multiple different translations of Meditations (though admittedly Marcus may have a slightly wider appeal). Part of this might be that Galen’s works are very badly organized. Every secondary source I read on the Galenic corpus is full of griping about how confusing the whole thing is. Galen wrote in Greek, but many of the original versions of his books are lost, leaving us only with Arabic or Latin translations, or Latin translations of earlier Arabic translations. Some of the books appear under different titles in different places, and sometimes the works are only indexed under abbreviations of those titles. Some of them probably were never intended for publication (those bootleg letters I mentioned above), and so may not have official titles or versions at all. Forgeries of his works in various languages continued well on into the Renaissance. Galen himself was very unclear on how to think about the documents he produced. At one point in On My Own Books, he starts off by talking about a piece of writing he did “as an exercise for myself”, and then immediately turns around and mentions that he gave it to friends, who in turn gave it to their friends. Needless to say, the whole thing is a mess, the scholars seem very agitated. I chose to review the longest piece I could find, which is On the Natural Faculties, specifically the translation by Arthur John Brock, which was the only translation I was able to track down. This also seemed like a good choice because, instead of being a treatise on a more limited topic like diet, the pulse, or bones, this book serves as more of an introductory textbook to what today we would call biology. III. On the Natural Faculties is divided into three books, though if the three books have any structure to them, I wasn’t able to figure it out. Galen is pretty straightforward in naming his pieces, and this book is about him trying to describe all of the “natural faculties”. This doesn’t really correspond to any modern concept, but essentially he means the fundamental or basic biological functions common to all living things. He begins by contrasting the functions of the soul, like feeling and voluntary motion (we might say “mental functions”), which occur only in animals, with the natural functions common to both animals and plants. You could maybe translate “natural faculties” as something like “basic biological functions”. I had always heard that Galen was a Hippocrates stan, but right from the get-go he’s mentioning Aristotle in the very same breath (though he reminds us that Hippocrates “lived much earlier than Aristotle”). When describing the natural faculties, he seems to base them off of Aristotle’s physics more than Hippocrates’ humors. Aristotle’s physics is a system I mostly know secondhand from the descriptions offered by Thomas Kuhn (for an example, take a look at this piece). Kuhn stresses that this system is hard for a modern mind to understand and even harder to explain, so I was surprised at how intelligible Galen’s account is. Maybe reading Kuhn’s description prepared me to understand what Galen has to say, but either way, it’s great. I think Galen does a better job than Kuhn. Basically he says, look, there are different kinds of motion: If that which is white becomes black, or what is black becomes white, it undergoes motion in respect to colour; or if what was previously sweet now becomes bitter, or, conversely, from being bitter now becomes sweet, it will be said to undergo motion in respect to flavour … when a warm thing becomes cold, and a cold warm, here too we speak of motion; similarly also when anything moist becomes dry, or dry moist. He goes on to suggest that the natural faculties are more advanced forms of motion, possibly built up out of the combination of simpler forms of motion. (Kuhn treats the Aristotelian perspective as if it was the common sense of the ancient world, but the fact that Galen has to describe it in such detail makes me wonder if that was really the case.) That’s the framework. What the exact set of natural faculties are, however, is less clear. In book one he focuses on three faculties in particular — genesis, growth, and nutrition — and provides lots of arguments that (for example) the body’s ability to grow is different from its ability to sustain itself. In book three he gives a different list of four — the attractive, retentive, expulsive, and alterative faculties — but he also suggests that these are “handmaids of Nutrition”. Elsewhere he says that genesis is not “a simple activity of Nature” but instead is “compounded of alteration and of shaping.” He also mentions faculties like “adhesion” and “presentation”. The particulars are pretty confusing, but the general gist is clear. Galen wants to lay out all the different faculties and their sub-faculties (and sub-sub-faculties?) so that the reader can understand the workings of the body. Galen makes it pretty plain that he thinks that diseases are caused by failures or overactivity of the different principles. For example, he says that in leprosy “there is adhesion of the nutriment but no real assimilation”. One faculty is working but the other is disordered. If you want to be a good physician, he says, you need to understand all these faculties so you can identify diseases (tell what faculties are misfunctioning) and treat them — “how are you going to be successful in treatment, if you do not understand the real essence of each disease?” he says. The four humors do make their way into this mix eventually, especially in the second and third books. (Though the translator often insists on translating “humor” as “juice”, which makes me very uncomfortable.) The relationship seems to be that the humors are the building material of the body, but that all the activity is carried out through the natural faculties. The student needs to know the humors to understand what is being moved around, but the humors are primitive. To Galen, biology is all about these faculties shuffling, transforming, and combining different humors. VI. Anyways, that’s what Galen wants to be talking about. But about halfway through book one, he goes entirely off the rails and never really gets back on track. The thing that sets him off is other schools of medicine. It’s clear that Galen cannot stop thinking about them. They invade his every thought; he is beleaguered by them. I would seriously believe that he loses sleep over them. Some of the commentators I’ve read suggested that Galen was an arrogant man — one said he saw in Galen “the blind assumption that he alone was graced with the ability to bring Hippocrates’ work to completion”. My sense of Galen was that he is a man who is constantly exasperated. He is just trying to write basic pieces about how to be a good physician and philosopher, and people keep descending on him with the most unbelievably pedantic arguments. Book One of On the Natural Faculties is divided into 17 sections, and he spends half of the first section hedging around ways people could potentially take his words in the wrong ways. These sound more than a little like intrusive thoughts, and it’s tempting to think that he’s blowing this all out of proportion. But from what I know about Galen’s life, it seems likely that he really was getting into disagreements all the time, and probably really did need to worry about people quoting his work out of context. One article in The Lancet describes him as “a public figure, known and recognised by many, accosted in the streets, challenged to debate.” It’s easy to imagine how being accosted in the streets might work its way into your head. Either way, these concerns absolutely consume him. He keeps getting drawn off on different tangents, before trying to return to the main thread with statements like: I said, however, that I was not going to enter into an argument with these people, and it was only because the example was drawn from the subject-matter of medicine, and because I need it for the present treatise, that I have mentioned it. Let us pass on, then, again to another piece of nonsense; for the sophists do not allow one to engage in enquiries that are of any worth, albeit there are many such; they compel one to spend one’s time in dissipating the fallacious arguments which they bring forward. What, then, is this piece of nonsense? Now, we usually refrain from arguing with people whose principles are wrong from the outset. Still, having been compelled by the natural course of events to enter into some kind of a discussion with them, we must add this further to what was said… Since, then, we have talked sufficient nonsense — not willingly, but because we were forced, as the proverb says, “to behave madly among madmen” — let us return again to the subject of urinary secretion. But, as I have said, one is driven to talk nonsense whenever one gets into discussion with such men. Having, therefore, given a concise and summary statement of the matter, I wish to be done with it. Of course, in the very next paragraph, he is immediately drawn back into a discussion of their shortcomings! In some ways, On the Natural Faculties is less of a medical treatise and more of a fascinating snapshot of the state of the academic medical world in the latter half of the second century CE. The tone sounds really contemporary in a lot of ways, and has a quality of acrimonious quibbling that is more than a little familiar, though I don’t think modern physicians are likely to be poisoned by their colleagues (but what do I know). V. We’ve established that Galen has a problem with other experts and schools of medical thought. That leaves us wondering how justified he is. Is he criticizing them for real problems in their work, or is this just partisan squabbling? What are the things that he takes such issue with from these other schools? I think there are two things he’s mostly complaining about. The first thing that really sets Galen off is sectarian dogmatism. “Everyone becomes like the first teacher that he comes across,” he says, “without waiting to learn anything from anybody else.” He bemoans sectarian partisanship and, in classic doctor fashion, uses a weird hygiene metaphor, calling it “excessively resistant to all cleansing process”. It is “harder to heal than any itch”. The fact is that those who are enslaved to their sects are not merely devoid of all sound knowledge, but they will not even stop to learn! This is kind of tragicomic, because two of the main things Galen is accused of are 1) blindly following whatever Hippocrates said about medicine and 2) leading centuries of physicians to blindly follow whatever he wrote! It’s hard to know how blindly Galen is following the teachings of Hippocrates. On the one hand, he does refer to him as “most divine Hippocrates” at least once. On the other hand, he is open to pointing out the (rare) cases where he thinks Hippocrates has overlooked something, and even talks about how he wishes his opponents would criticize Hippocrates more directly! When someone disagrees with a whole suite of his intellectual heroes, he says, “now, one cannot be blamed for not agreeing with all these great men, nor for imagining that one knows more than they; but not to consider such distinguished teaching worthy either of contradiction or even mention shows an extraordinary arrogance.” Maybe other physicians really did follow Galen’s writing blindly in the centuries following his death. I’m not sure anymore. But Galen certainly can’t be blamed for it. He could not be clearer in stating that this is exactly what the student of medicine should avoid doing. It would be tempting to pass this all off as one-sided; “stop listening blindly to your teachers and listen blindly to me!” I don’t get that sense. First, we know that Galen studied all over the ancient world, so he was exposed to all sorts of ways of doing medicine. He practiced what he preached. It’s hard to know how fair a representation he’s giving of the other schools of thought, but he writes as though he has them all memorized, and he certainly was in a position to frequently get into debates with them. When he tells us that they’re uncritical, I’m tempted to believe him. Second, Galen makes a serious point to try to convince the reader of his positions. He’s not just stating “facts” and expecting you to bow down at his feet. He’s engaging with opposing points of view and trying to make compelling arguments that he thinks will convince his readers. VI. Finally, I don’t buy this because nowhere is Galen asking people to listen blindly to anyone, least of all himself. Because the second thing that REALLY sets Galen off is when people aren’t empirical enough! He constantly ridicules, in pretty harsh language, those who remain unconvinced by observation and experiment. Asclepiades, one particularly hated adversary, is charged with “bidding us distrust our senses where obvious facts plainly overturn his hypotheses.” Asclepiades has rather unusual opinions about the urinary system, and in one particularly strong example, Galen asks rhetorically (and sarcastically!), I do not suppose that Asclepiades ever saw a stone which had been passed by one of these sufferers, or observed that this was preceded by a sharp pain in the region between the kidneys and the bladder as the stone traversed the ureter, or that, when the stone was passed, both the pain and the retention at once ceased. It is worth while, then, learning how his theory account for the presence of urine in the bladder, and one is forced to marvel at the ingenuity of a man who puts aside these broad, clearly visible routes, and postulates others which are narrow, invisible—indeed, entirely imperceptible. Other schools are also attacked for denying “observed facts” or even “obvious facts”. Meanwhile, people who draw incorrect conclusions but respect the facts are praised. Galen cares a lot about physicians basing decisions on empirical observation. We know that he’s serious about this because of the many disturbing vivisection experiments he describes in great detail. In discussing digestion, he says, “I have personally, on countless occasions, divided the peritoneum of a still living animal and have always found all the intestines contracting peristaltically upon their contents.” He describes an experiment where you vivisect an animal, cutting away different coats of the esophagus, “then give the animal food and you will see that it still swallows although the peristaltic function has been abolished”. When describing the action of the stomach, he suggests that you can fill an animal with liquid food — “an experiment I have often carried out in pigs” — and cut them open “after three or four hours.” He really seems to want his readers to try these macabre exercises at home. “You may observe this yourself,” he says, “if you will try to hit upon the time at which the descent of food from the stomach takes place.” Fellow physicians are criticized for their lack of anatomical experience in the same way. “If he had ever practised anatomy, he might have known that the outer coat of the bladder springs from the peritoneum and is essentially the same as it.” The most extreme example comes from a debate with the disciples of Asclepiades about the function of the ureters, trying to convince this rival school that urine flows from the kidneys to the bladder through these channels. After exhausting his rhetorical options, Galen turns to empirical anatomy. First he shows them, in a dead animal, that the ureters connect the two structures. This isn’t enough. Next he shows them “in a still living animal, the urine plainly running out through the ureters into the bladder.” This doesn’t change their minds either. Next he takes a live animal, ligates the ureters, bandages the animal up, and lets it go. When he opens it up again later, he finds the ureters “quite full and distended”, and when he removes the ligature, everyone can see the urine flow into the bladder. You’d think the story would end there, but not so. Instead, says Galen, “tie a ligature round [the animal’s] penis and then … squeeze the bladder all over.” He points out that nothing goes back through the ureters to the kidneys, demonstrating that the conveyance is a special, one-way action. He goes on like this for a while. Let the animal urinate and tie a ligature around one ureter but not the other. Cut open both the ureters and see the urine “spurt out of it”. Bandage the animal up and open him up later to discover his insides full of urine and the bladder empty. “Now, if anyone will but test this for himself on an animal,” Galen concludes, “I think he will strongly condemn the rashness of Asclepiades.” Today we know that Galen was wrong, and that humorism isn’t a great way to think about medicine. But whatever Galen might have been lacking, it certainly was not the empirical bent. He was no armchair philosopher, and was more than happy to cut up lots of animals to make a point about the function of the ureters. This is funny because, again, this is the opposite of the story we’re told about Galen. He’s described as a pre-scientific or even unscientific thinker, believing that experimentation and investigation are a waste of time. Clearly this isn’t the case, and he made full use of all the resources available to him. We know that human dissection was prohibited in the empire, but Galen worked with gladiators, so we know that he had firsthand experience with human anatomy. He certainly was unafraid, even eager, to practice animal dissection and vivisection. Other doctors of the time didn’t seem to do either of these things, or at least didn’t do nearly as much, and so Galen starts looking more and more like a lone light of empiricism in the wilderness. (However extreme and disturbing his methods may be.) VII. In view of this, it’s extremely depressing to see Tetlock write, “yet Galen never conducted anything resembling a modern experiment.” Galen isn’t here to respond, but if he were, I imagine he would say: and yet Tetlock never conducted anything resembling a basic literature review! Galen definitely isn’t as charitable as we might want him to be. He calls some of the ideas he disagrees with “impossible, nay, perfectly nonsensical”, or “stupid—I might say insane”. His intellectual rivals “are like slaves” he says, “caught in the act of stealing … quite bewildered, and while the one says nothing, the other indulges in shameless lying.” But I’m pretty sympathetic to Galen’s position, because his contemporaries really do sound like idiots. Of course, all this is being filtered through Galen’s own account, but if he’s describing them with any accuracy, he is totally fair in saying that they have no idea what they are talking about. Some of the positions he argues against include: Urine passes into the bladder in the form of vapors, rather than being secreted by the kidneys and passed through the ureters to the bladder. Galen argues against this first by pointing out that the kidneys and bladder are connected by the ureters (which must have some purpose), and second by the extensive evidence from vivisection that I mentioned above.

On Protracted War1 mentions across 1 issues

On Protracted War is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 28, 2022 and April 28, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Xi enjoined the study of Mao’s clever but prolix lectures from 1938, On Protracted War". It most often appears alongside American system, Axios, Bo Xilai.

Reference entry: On Protracted War
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 28, 2022
Last seen: April 28, 2022
Book title: On Protracted War

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Highlights From The Comments On Xi Jinping April 28, 2022

American system 1 shared issues
Axios 1 shared issues
Bo Xilai 1 shared issues
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Highlights From The Comments On Xi Jinping

April 28, 2022 · Original source

Xi made his own Faustian bargain not merely with the Communist Party but very emphatically with Mao’s party: he has been assiduous in restoring Mao’s authority, which his predecessors had cumulatively reduced – a few months ago, reacting to the intensified confrontation with the US and its allies, Xi enjoined the study of Mao’s clever but prolix lectures from 1938, On Protracted War. He constantly elevates the man who jailed and publicly humiliated his father, terrorised his mother, caused the death of his half-sister and imposed many years of acute misery on his siblings as well as himself. What does it mean that China's president, party secretary-general, Central Military Commission chairman and 'core leader' is a Faustian character?

On Taste1 mentions across 1 issues

On Taste 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: On Taste". It most often appears alongside Astralcodexten Com, Deathbed Ballads, Discord.

Reference entry: On Taste
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 09, 2025
Last seen: June 09, 2025
Book title: On Taste

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Open Thread 385 June 09, 2025

Astralcodexten Com 1 shared issues
Deathbed Ballads 1 shared issues
Discord 1 shared issues
Drei Klavierstucke 1 shared issues
Worldbuild The Future 1 shared issues

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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)

On The Contemplation Of Bright Objects1 mentions across 1 issues

On The Contemplation Of Bright Objects is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 01, 2025 and October 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "He lists twenty-six scientists who tried staring at the sun for a really long time. Most describe typical retinal afterimages, and Plateau spends most of his time talking about how long these last and what colors they pass through. The only one of Plateau’s sources who reports anything even slightly interesting to us is Robert Darwin ... in his aptly-named On The Contemplation Of Bright Objects". It most often appears alongside 1910s Portugal, 1999 British eclipse, 2017 US eclipse.

Reference entry: On The Contemplation Of Bright Objects
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: October 01, 2025
Last seen: October 01, 2025
Book title: On The Contemplation Of Bright Objects

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The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know October 01, 2025

1910s Portugal 1 shared issues
1999 British eclipse 1 shared issues
2017 US eclipse 1 shared issues
A Ordem 1 shared issues
Abraham Lincoln 1 shared issues

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The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

October 01, 2025 · Original source

Squares A and B are the same color. Source: Checker shadow illusion. There’s no way around it: we need to hear from someone who has stared directly into the sun. August Meessen was a physics professor at a Catholic university, which sounds like exactly the job profile we want for this sort of thing. He found himself sufficiently interested in the Fatima miracle to stare straight into the sun for a few minutes and record what happened. From his paper: In November 2002, I looked directly into the sun, at about 4 p.m. The sun was relatively low above the horizon and its light intensity was attenuated, although the sky was clear. I was able to look right into the sun and was amazed to see that the sun was immediately converted into a grey disc, surrounded by a brilliant ring. The grey disc was practically uniform, while the surrounding ring was somewhat irregular and flamboyant, but did not extend beyond the solar disk. It coincided with its rim. I stopped the experiment, since I wanted to be prudent, but I had experienced myself the initial phase of a typical “miracle of the sun” and I could explain it. The sun became grey, since my eyes immediately responded to its great luminosity by an automatic reduction of their sensitivity. This adaptation is not simply due to the bleaching of pigments in the colour-sensitive cones of the fovea, where the image of the sun is projected, but to secondary processes. By “initial phase”, he means the part where the sun looks pale and well-defined, like a full moon. This isn’t something I think needs explanation (see above), but he sure has explained it. Moving on: In a second experiment, realized at 3 p.m. in December 2002, I looked straight at the sun during a much longer time. After some minutes, I saw impressive colours, up to 2 or 3 times the diameter of the sun. They changed, but were mainly pink, deep blue, red and green. Further away, the sky became progressively more luminous. I stopped there, since I understood that these colours resulted from the fact that the red, green and blue sensitive pigments are bleached and regenerated at different rates. This is frustratingly vague. Are the “impressive colors up to 2-3 times the diameter of the sun” just the normal aftereffects of staring at a bright object? Or something surprising even to physics professors? And the spinning? What about the motions of the sun? I didn’t see them, because I didn’t look at the sun for a sufficiently long time or my brain knew already too much. Once, after I had been looking at a very long passing train, I had (for about 30 seconds) the illusion of an opposite motion. Joseph Plateau discovered that when we look at the centre of a spiral that is rotating at some given velocity about this point, and when we stop this rotation, we see a reversed rotation. It lasts for several minutes, although in reality, there is no motion at all. This is a good example of motional after-effects. The “dance of the sun” is initiated, however, by a spontaneous generation of apparent motion. This feels suspiciously like a just-so story. His explanation for the sun falling to earth to crush everyone - which he also did not see - is equally ad hoc: A very interesting study was recently devoted to this “zoom and loom effect”. It tends to appear when the brain is confronted with the two-dimensional retinal image of an object that is situated at some unknown distance. The brain will then consider the possibility that it could come closer, by performing an illusory mental zoom, where the apparent size of the object is progressively increased. This results from the fact that evolution preserved the tendency to take into account the possibility of a dangerous approach: a rapid evasive action could be beneficial for survival. If true, it sounds like you should be able to generate this effect not just by staring at the sun (ill-advised, causes blindness), but by staring at the moon. I would like to test this, but unfortunately I am writing this on the night of a new moon; I’ll check back in two weeks. Still, I am skeptical that no human being living before 1917 AD ever figured out that staring at a celestial body long enough would make it appear to fall to earth and crush you. Compare to much gentler illusions - like how the moon looks bigger right when it starts to rise - which everybody knows about. I was able to find a thirdhand report (Fr. Stanley Jaki → G. J. Strangfeld → consultation with bishop) of another sun miracle investigator, one “Professor Dr. Stöckl” in Germany, who made a similar experiment: After almost a minute (the time varies according to the condition of the atmopshere and the momentary condition of the eyes) one thinks to see a dark blue disk in front of the sun (this is already a sign of the highly excited state of the retina). According to my experience … this dark blue disk is somewhat smaller than the solar disk, so that the edge of that disk stands out as a ring beyond that dark blue disk. Then one has right away the impression that the solar disk rotates with great speed in one or the other direction. This I have experienced often enough. All this is a subjective appearance that has nothing to do with the external world. These reports are suggestive, but weaker than all but the barest Fatima testimonials. Dr. Messeen admits as much, saying that “I didn’t look at the sun for a sufficiently long time”. Can we find people even more committed - or reckless, or masochistic - than Professors Messeen and Stöckl? Absolutely yes: there was a whole subfield of late 18th / early 19th century psychophysicists who experimented with staring at the sun for long periods, many of whom went blind. Joseph Plateau (1801 - 1883, went blind in 18432) summarizes their work in his aptly-named On The Contemplation Of Bright Objects. He lists twenty-six scientists who tried staring at the sun for a really long time. Most describe what we now recognize as typical retinal afterimages, and Plateau spends most of his time talking about how long these last and what colors they pass through. The only one of Plateau’s sources who reports anything even slightly interesting to us is Robert Darwin (father of Charles; cf. Secrets of the Great Families). After stating that: The author has frequently observed that when he gazed at the midday sun for a long time, until its disk appeared pale blue, he saw a bright blue specter on other objects for more than two days. …he mentions how When looking at the meridian sun as long as the eyes can well bear its brightness, the disc first becomes pale, with a luminous crescent, which seems to librate from one edge of it to the other owing to the unsteadiness of the eye. Here is pallor, and at least a hint of motion. But it’s pretty different from spinning, and not really clear how it relates to the sun miracle. Gustav Fechner (1801 - 1887, went blind in 1839) may have stared for even longer; you can read more of his story - including his ensuing insanity and subsequent attempts to found a new religion - on Adam Mastroianni’s blog. But all that he records about his ill-fated experiment is that: …after looking at the sun through homogeneously colored lenses, if you close your eyes, the primary impression remains for a long time and the entire afterimage usually disappears without a complementary coloration having clearly emerged. These people are great, and they all sound like minor Sam Kriss characters. But after whole careers dedicated to staring at the sun much longer than any normal person would ever try, they report only the barest hints of odd phenomena. Indeed, if anything they saw less of interest to the Fatimologist than Profs. Messeen and Stöckl. Worse, all of these authorities saw their phenomena after seconds to minutes of deliberate staring. Surely if it had taken a minute of staring at the sun before anything happened, some of our eyewitnesses would have mentioned this; after all, several mention that they were starting to doubt after the child-seers’ deadline had passed a few minutes earlier. But by all accounts, the miracle was near-instantaneous. Although Messeen and Stöckl’s reports of miracle-like phenomena are intriguing, it doesn’t seem like they can be the whole picture. Let’s move on. 2.2: Aurora Borealis? At This Time Of Year? In This Part Of The Country? Localized Entirely Within Your Kitchen? Could the miracle at Fatima have been some kind of weird weather phenomenon? The main argument against is that if it were a common weather phenomenon, it would not have awed and terrified tens of thousands of people. But if it were a rare weather phenomenon, then the seers’ successful prophecy that the rare weather phenomenon would happen at solar noon on October 13 1917 becomes almost as impressive as an outright miracle. The argument in favor is that dozens of people have written books and papers about this possibility, we would feel remiss if we didn’t mention them, and anyway it gives us the opportunity to look at pretty pictures of interesting weather phenomena. This is a sun dog. It’s caused by ice crystals in the upper atmosphere that refract sunlight in a very specific way. It’s very cool, but aside from a resemblance to a wheel, it looks nothing like the miracle of Fatima. A sun dog doesn’t have any unusual colors, it doesn’t change size, and it doesn’t spin (I’ve embedded a YouTube video not because a still image would be misleading - it wouldn’t be - but just in case you want to see for yourself how completely motionless it is). It’s just a halo shape with two smaller illusory suns on either side of the real one - something which no one at Fatima reported. (source) This is a solar corona3; cloud iridescence is a related phenomenon. I don’t know how much work the exposure length is doing in this particular photo, but I’m guessing more than zero. Coronae are also very pretty, and might explain the description of wheels and colors. They seem surprisingly common for something that I can’t ever remember seeing, supposedly happening several times a year in most locations. But they don’t spin, the colors don’t change or stain the surrounding landscape, and they don’t fall to earth and crush people. Let’s keep this one as a backup option and move on. This is a dust storm. Steuart Campbell wrote a paper arguing that the miracle was caused by one of these, and I admit if I saw this I would start praying pretty hard. Dust storms can change the color of the sun (including unusual colors like green or blue). And very, very charitably, whirling dust could look like the sun itself spinning around, and the thickening and thinning of dust could look like the sun approaching or receding. But this would require a dust storm localized to a 20 mile region of Portugal which does not, technically, have any dust (and where it was, technically, raining at the time). Campbell proposes that perhaps a storm blew a 20 miles x 20 mile dust cloud from the Sahara out to the Atlantic, then onto Fatima for ten minutes during a break in the rain, then back to the Atlantic again. But I don’t think any dust storm has ever behaved in quite this way. If it did, it probably wouldn’t be at the exact moment predicted by child-seers months in advance. At this point, we might as well talk about literal meteors. The way I’m imagining it is this: as a meteor approaches Earth, it breaks up into three big parts and a host of smaller particles. They strike the atmosphere head-on, from the approximate direction of the sun. The small particles hit first and make a firework show. Then the three big pieces hit, producing multicolored fireballs (meteors can absolutely stain the sky bright colors - see the video). Finally, they burn out a few miles above the ground, , convincingly producing the appearance of the sun falling to earth and nearly striking the spectators. This could even explain the warmth and dry clothes - a local meteor strike produces a lot of heat! I like this because it’s the only one that takes seriously the facet of the event which most impressed the witnesses - the part where it looked like the sun was plummeting to earth and about to kill them. But against it: would a rain of micrometeorites really look like the sun was “dancing”, “spinning”, or “zig-zagging”? Aren’t most nearby meteor strikes very loud? (the Fatima event was, according to witnesses, silent) Don’t they usually break windows? Aren’t most meteor strikes of this size visible for hundreds of miles, not just the twenty miles from which we have witness testimonies? Wouldn’t the strike have to be remarkably head-on, and remarkable close to the position of the sun, in order to look like a solar phenomenon rather than a long streak? Aren’t most meteor fireballs visible for between a few seconds and a minute, not the ten minutes of the Fatima event4? And if there were some extremely unusual meteor strike that was the exception to everything, wouldn’t it still be pretty surprising for it to happen at the exact time and place predicted by child-seers months in advance? We come to the unpromisingly-titled Derivation of equations of the model of the dynamic behavior of the three-dimensional atmospheric cloud of electrically charged ice crystals under the influence of electrostatic forces, in which Artur Wiroski argues that Fatima was a three-dimensional atmospheric cloud of electrically charged ice crystals under the influence of electrostatic forces. Actually, he offhandedly mentions Fatima in three sentences, with the majority of the paper looking more like the image above - but he eventually makes it into a Guardian article where he emphasizes that yes, he is trying to explain the miracle of the sun. However, if I’m understanding him correctly, he says that his theoretical ice crystal phenomenon can only happen when the sun is at an altitude below 22 degrees. But during the Fatima miracle, the sun was at 42 degrees (and Dalleur’s mysterious light source was at 30 degrees), so none of this applies. I’ve tried to include pictures of all the phenomena I mention in this section. I failed for this one, because it’s never been spotted or photographed. It’s just some incredibly weird thing that one scientist says ice crystals might do if parameters were ever exactly right, with such a precise definition of “exactly right” that it’s never happened in real life. If it ever did happen, it probably wouldn’t be at exactly the moment predicted by child-seers several months in advance. 2.3: Everyone’s Mad Here Except You And Me Another common response calls the Sun Miracle a “mass hallucination”. Can 70,000 people really hallucinate the same thing? “Mass hallucination” on Wikipedia redirects to List Of Mass Panic Cases. The Miracle of the Sun is on there, but listed as “(disputed)” - the only item to earn such a parenthetical. The other fifty items mostly belong to three categories: A disease with unusual symptoms spreads through a population; doctors eventually pronounce it psychosomatic.

Inline links: Checker shadow illusion, his paper, 2, Secrets of the Great Families, Adam Mastroianni’s blog, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kvPF!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F30bf02a3-f57b-4a9f-a849-e7e318c65b6f_900x600.jpeg, source, 3, cloud iridescence, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Y1Qt!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9bbd9216-eb7d-4012-b114-bae56dbb0d4c_1024x681.webp, wrote a paper, 4, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Id7a!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3c37c56e-bdf1-46e2-8d29-d395987be105_851x310.png, Derivation of equations of the model of the dynamic behavior of the three-dimensional atmospheric cloud of electrically charged ice crystals under the influence of electrostatic forces, a Guardian article, List Of Mass Panic Cases

On The Edge1 mentions across 1 issues

On The Edge is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 12, 2024 and September 12, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Nate Silver has a new book, On The Edge". It most often appears alongside @halomancer1, ACX, Amazon.

Reference entry: On The Edge
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 12, 2024
Last seen: September 12, 2024
Book title: On The Edge

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Links For September 2024 September 12, 2024

@halomancer1 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
Amazon 1 shared issues
America 1 shared issues
Amish 1 shared issues

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Links For September 2024

September 12, 2024 · Original source

41: Nate Silver has a new book, On The Edge, about risky fields, the people who thrive in them, and the skills those people need. Here’s a mostly positive review, here’s another, and here’s a mostly negative one. Many of the negative reviews are dumb (“how dare he talk about gambling and capitalism without putting I HATE THEM in bold letters on every single page!”), but one of the better criticisms was that a lot of success in risky fields comes not from good risk intelligence, but from setting up heads-I-win-tails-you-lose style scams while pretending that your success comes from good risk intelligence. So one danger of knowing about the (very real!) importance of good risk intelligence is that it makes you more vulnerable to believing these people (although I understand that one part of Nate’s book describes how he was always suspicious of SBF, even before his misdeeds were public).

Inline links: On The Edge, mostly positive review, another, a mostly negative one

On the Origin of Species1 mentions across 1 issues

On the Origin of Species is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 20, 2022 and May 20, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Darwin took many years to write and publish On the Origin of Species". It most often appears alongside Aldous Huxley, Alexander Macmillan, Alfred Russel Wallace.

Reference entry: On the Origin of Species
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 20, 2022
Last seen: May 20, 2022
Book title: On the Origin of Species

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Your Book Review: Making Nature May 20, 2022

Aldous Huxley 1 shared issues
Alexander Macmillan 1 shared issues
Alfred Russel Wallace 1 shared issues
arXiv 1 shared issues
arXiv 1 shared issues

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Your Book Review: Making Nature

May 20, 2022 · Original source

Lockyer had a cushy job as a civil servant in the British government, but dabbled in astronomy in his spare time. In the 19th century, dabbling in astronomy in your spare time could be an intellectually productive hobby: the line between professional and amateur science was blurrier then, and it wasn’t hard to contribute original research even without formal training. During the 1860s, Lockyer published several papers on astronomical observations, the most consequential of which might be the co-discovery and naming of the element helium, from his studies of the sun. His reputation grew among the “men of science” (as scientists called themselves then) of Victorian Britain, and he was soon elected to the Royal Society. But astronomy was an expense, not a source of income. Lockyer routinely supplemented his government job by writing nonspecialist scientific articles and books for a lay audience. Then, one day, he had an idea for a new kind of publication. It would be a weekly periodical to disseminate scientific knowledge to the broader public — but unlike the other periodicals that existed at the time, it would be written by the prominent men of science themselves. It would have a simple, evocative name: Nature. Lockyer summarized the two aims of Nature like this: FIRST, to place before the general public the grand results of Scientific Work and Scientific Discovery, and to urge the claims of Science to a more general recognition in Education and in Daily Life; And, SECONDLY, to aid Scientific men themselves, by giving early information of all advances made in any branch of Natural knowledge throughout the world, and by affording them an opportunity of discussing the various Scientific questions which arise from time to time. In other words (and getting rid of the old-fashioned capitalization of random adjectives and nouns), Nature was meant to do two things: communication from scientists to the public, and communication among scientists. It was an interesting idea. It was also a new one; until then the two aims had been separate. Recall that scientific journals have existed since 1665. During their first two hundred years, they primarily served to record the meetings of learned societies. The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society were originally just that: summaries of whatever “philosophical” questions were discussed at the Royal Society. Aside from journals, specialized books were common and were in fact the higher-status way to communicate science in Victorian Britain. Charles Darwin’s On the Origins of Species, published in 1859, is the most famous example. Informal correspondence between scientists was also a major, but private, channel: Darwin wrote more than 15,000 letters in his lifetime, enough to fill 30 volumes. With the exception of some books, none of the above were intended for laypeople. Educated non-scientists (professionals, clergymen, statesmen, etc.) instead got their science news from generalist or literary periodicals such as the Athenaeum magazine. The articles in those publications were not written by specialists, but by journalists and dilettantes. Lockyer’s view, shared with his close supporter Thomas Huxley — a biologist known for defending Darwinian evolution — was that they were riddled with errors and theological overtones. It would be better, they thought, if scientists did the work of communicating their research themselves. It was bold of Lockyer and Huxley to assume that scientists would be interested in doing this communication work. They weren’t. Almost immediately after Nature was founded, its contributors ignored the popularization part (“not a high-status undertaking,” Baldwin’s book says) and focused on the intra-science communication part. They did write summaries and abstracts of their own research, as Lockyer had intended, but they expected that their readers would be other men of science. Within three years, the educated laypeople who were Lockyer’s target audience were complaining that they could no longer understand the contents. Thus the first of Nature’s two aims was met mostly with failure. Fortunately, this was balanced out by unexpected success at the second aim. Scientists did actually enjoy writing for Lockyer’s magazine, in large part because it was published weekly. They found that writing a summary of their own research in Nature was an excellent way to share their results quickly and gain attention from other scientists. Books were slow; Darwin took many years to write and publish On the Origin of Species, for instance. The journals of scientific societies were slow; you had to wait for a meeting to take place and then for the meeting’s “transactions” to be published. Private correspondence was fast, but it wasn’t public. Through publication speed, as well as other factors as we’ll see below, Nature filled a niche in the ecosystem. It was the Twitter of 19th-century British science. Soon enough, this model would be copied, most notably by the journal Science in 1880. According to its first editor, Science was explicitly meant to, “in the United States, take the position which ‘Nature’ so ably occupies in England.” In just a few years, Nature had disrupted scientific publishing and established itself as a useful and unique institution of science, recognized by specialists both in the UK and abroad. First page of the first edition of Nature, 4 November 1869 II. One Hundred Years of Building a Reputation Despite its popularity, Nature didn’t become prestigious overnight. Far from it, in fact. Making Nature often reminds us that the journal spent most of its history as a low-grade publication where anything could be printed quickly, as long as it was factually correct. (This was ensured by basic checks from the editorial team; Nature articles were not consistently peer-reviewed until the 1970s.) As late as the 1960s, a researcher publishing a preliminary report in Nature was expected to follow up with a longer paper “in a more serious journal.” In other words, Nature delivered quick and cheap distribution, not luxury brand approval. This changed about fifty years ago, as we’ll see in Part III. But to understand what happened then, we first need to examine the characteristics of the journal in the roughly 100-year period from its early days until prestige took over, starting with a deeper look into publication speed. Publication Speed John Maddox, editor of Nature in the late 20th century, said that “one of Nature’s greatest early assets was the speed of the Royal Mail.” You could write to Nature, be published within a week, and read the replies to your communication within two weeks. This was state-of-the-art communication tech! Consider how many times publication speed is mentioned throughout the first half of the book (emphasis mine): What made Nature unique was, in large part, its ability to act as a venue for . . . discussions via its correspondence columns and its weekly publication schedule. (p. 8) Many British men of science found that one of the fastest ways to bring a scientific issue or idea to their fellow researchers’ attention was to send a communication to Nature. (p. 39) Unlike the literary periodicals, there was almost no delay between the submission of a piece and its appearance in the journal. (p. 63) A second reason Nature’s speed of publication would have been compelling to men of science is that getting one’s work into print quickly had become an increasingly essential part of establishing priority for a scientific finding or theory. (p. 65) Scientific weeklies [such as Nature] played a unique role in researchers’ publishing strategies at the end of the nineteenth century by offering researchers a forum where short articles could be printed quickly. (p. 105) Both the Proceedings [of the Royal Society of London] and the Philosophical Magazine had significant lag times between submission and publication . . ., which made Nature and its weekly turnaround uniquely valuable for the priority-conscious Rutherford. (p. 109) [Rutherford] sent his most interesting experimental results [to Nature] immediately, both as a way of keeping his colleagues updated on his work and as insurance against being scooped as he had in 1899. (p. 112) These quotes highlight two distinct reasons why speed was important. The first, as I hinted at earlier, was Nature’s role as the аcademic social media of its time. It was simply the best way to have discussions about scientific topics — or science itself — that could, unlike private correspondence, reach a large audience. More on this in the next section. The second reason, as shown by the mentions of physicist Ernest Rutherford, was establishing priority. Today we take for granted that being the first to publish new ideas or results is important, but in the 19th century this was less clear. To bring up Darwin as an example again, he kept his thoughts on evolution private for many years, because he wanted to make sure his argument was sound before he submitted it to the public (although he did eventually sense the urgency of publishing the theory before Alfred Russel Wallace did). But as science became professionalized, “not being scooped” became more and more crucial, and the weekly Nature was a good tool to avoid that. All this talk of speed may surprise anyone who has recently submitted a paper to Nature. In 2016, an analysis revealed that the median time for Nature to review a paper was 150 days, i.e. 5 months, up from 85 days a decade earlier. Nature itself reports, for the year 2020, a median time of 226 days between submission and acceptance. We’re a long way from “less than a week.” Why was there a decrease in publication speed? As we might expect, the reason was Nature’s growing popularity, especially among the international scientific community. At least, that’s what happened the first time there was a slowdown, in the mid-20th century. Early on, Nature was a journal for and by British scientists. But in the first half of the 20th century, science in general and Nature in particular began to involve much more collaboration between researchers across borders. It was a big deal, for instance, when a foreign government banned Nature, as Nazi Germany did in 1938; German researchers had been using it as an important source of scientific news. The ban was furthermore covered in non-British media, such as The New York Times, indicating that the journal was internationally newsworthy. Such an increase in international readership meant more letters and articles sent to the editors, and by the 1950s, there was such a backlog that submissions needed to be held for six months or more. In the 1960s, the new editor John Maddox recognized this as a problem. He began his editorship by clearing the backlog, and even printed the date of submission along with each scientific paper to show everyone how quick Nature was at reviewing articles (“often within a month,” Baldwin’s book says). Clearly, Maddox thought that restoring the speedy reputation of the journal was important. He seems to have succeeded, for a time. As late as 1989, during a controversy around cold fusion, a Wall Street Journal article said that Nature was still fast: it was able to print papers “in as little as three weeks instead of the more usual lead time of six to twelve months for other scientific publications.” Thus, despite a dip in the middle of the century due to its popularity and international reach, speedy publication was still an important characteristic of Nature in the 1970s. A second — and so far permanent — decrease occurred more recently, perhaps as a result of prestige and the competition of near-instantaneous online platforms, but that’s another story. Network Effects As of 2022, scientists argue in public on Twitter, blogs, and other online platforms, like ResearchHub. In the 19th century, Twitter and ResearchHub hadn’t been invented [citation needed]. Fortunately, Nature was there. A network effect occurs when the value of a product comes primarily from the people who use it. If there are two competing telephone systems, the most valuable one is whichever has the most users (or at least the users you want to talk to). If you create an improved Twitter clone, then all its amazing features won’t do much if you don’t somehow manage to capture Twitter’s network of several million people. Likewise, Nature became an interesting journal to read and contribute to because it gained the attention of Britain’s scientific elite as the place to discuss big science questions. This role as a forum was a constant in Nature’s history, as Making Nature shows with several detailed accounts of debates that took place within the journal’s pages. Some examples: Controversies over the age of the Earth in the 1880s.

Inline links: more than 15,000 letters, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Athenaeum_(British_magazine), took many years, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!GYj8!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa4f03221-7d79-42f6-bf6c-35d90fe3f7e5_1142x1600.jpeg, revealed, reports, ResearchHub

On the Origins of Species1 mentions across 1 issues

On the Origins of Species is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 20, 2022 and May 20, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Charles Darwin’s On the Origins of Species, published in 1859, is the most famous example". It most often appears alongside Aldous Huxley, Alexander Macmillan, Alfred Russel Wallace.

Reference entry: On the Origins of Species
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 20, 2022
Last seen: May 20, 2022
Book title: On the Origins of Species

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: Making Nature May 20, 2022

Aldous Huxley 1 shared issues
Alexander Macmillan 1 shared issues
Alfred Russel Wallace 1 shared issues
arXiv 1 shared issues
arXiv 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: Making Nature

May 20, 2022 · Original source

Lockyer had a cushy job as a civil servant in the British government, but dabbled in astronomy in his spare time. In the 19th century, dabbling in astronomy in your spare time could be an intellectually productive hobby: the line between professional and amateur science was blurrier then, and it wasn’t hard to contribute original research even without formal training. During the 1860s, Lockyer published several papers on astronomical observations, the most consequential of which might be the co-discovery and naming of the element helium, from his studies of the sun. His reputation grew among the “men of science” (as scientists called themselves then) of Victorian Britain, and he was soon elected to the Royal Society. But astronomy was an expense, not a source of income. Lockyer routinely supplemented his government job by writing nonspecialist scientific articles and books for a lay audience. Then, one day, he had an idea for a new kind of publication. It would be a weekly periodical to disseminate scientific knowledge to the broader public — but unlike the other periodicals that existed at the time, it would be written by the prominent men of science themselves. It would have a simple, evocative name: Nature. Lockyer summarized the two aims of Nature like this: FIRST, to place before the general public the grand results of Scientific Work and Scientific Discovery, and to urge the claims of Science to a more general recognition in Education and in Daily Life; And, SECONDLY, to aid Scientific men themselves, by giving early information of all advances made in any branch of Natural knowledge throughout the world, and by affording them an opportunity of discussing the various Scientific questions which arise from time to time. In other words (and getting rid of the old-fashioned capitalization of random adjectives and nouns), Nature was meant to do two things: communication from scientists to the public, and communication among scientists. It was an interesting idea. It was also a new one; until then the two aims had been separate. Recall that scientific journals have existed since 1665. During their first two hundred years, they primarily served to record the meetings of learned societies. The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society were originally just that: summaries of whatever “philosophical” questions were discussed at the Royal Society. Aside from journals, specialized books were common and were in fact the higher-status way to communicate science in Victorian Britain. Charles Darwin’s On the Origins of Species, published in 1859, is the most famous example. Informal correspondence between scientists was also a major, but private, channel: Darwin wrote more than 15,000 letters in his lifetime, enough to fill 30 volumes. With the exception of some books, none of the above were intended for laypeople. Educated non-scientists (professionals, clergymen, statesmen, etc.) instead got their science news from generalist or literary periodicals such as the Athenaeum magazine. The articles in those publications were not written by specialists, but by journalists and dilettantes. Lockyer’s view, shared with his close supporter Thomas Huxley — a biologist known for defending Darwinian evolution — was that they were riddled with errors and theological overtones. It would be better, they thought, if scientists did the work of communicating their research themselves. It was bold of Lockyer and Huxley to assume that scientists would be interested in doing this communication work. They weren’t. Almost immediately after Nature was founded, its contributors ignored the popularization part (“not a high-status undertaking,” Baldwin’s book says) and focused on the intra-science communication part. They did write summaries and abstracts of their own research, as Lockyer had intended, but they expected that their readers would be other men of science. Within three years, the educated laypeople who were Lockyer’s target audience were complaining that they could no longer understand the contents. Thus the first of Nature’s two aims was met mostly with failure. Fortunately, this was balanced out by unexpected success at the second aim. Scientists did actually enjoy writing for Lockyer’s magazine, in large part because it was published weekly. They found that writing a summary of their own research in Nature was an excellent way to share their results quickly and gain attention from other scientists. Books were slow; Darwin took many years to write and publish On the Origin of Species, for instance. The journals of scientific societies were slow; you had to wait for a meeting to take place and then for the meeting’s “transactions” to be published. Private correspondence was fast, but it wasn’t public. Through publication speed, as well as other factors as we’ll see below, Nature filled a niche in the ecosystem. It was the Twitter of 19th-century British science. Soon enough, this model would be copied, most notably by the journal Science in 1880. According to its first editor, Science was explicitly meant to, “in the United States, take the position which ‘Nature’ so ably occupies in England.” In just a few years, Nature had disrupted scientific publishing and established itself as a useful and unique institution of science, recognized by specialists both in the UK and abroad. First page of the first edition of Nature, 4 November 1869 II. One Hundred Years of Building a Reputation Despite its popularity, Nature didn’t become prestigious overnight. Far from it, in fact. Making Nature often reminds us that the journal spent most of its history as a low-grade publication where anything could be printed quickly, as long as it was factually correct. (This was ensured by basic checks from the editorial team; Nature articles were not consistently peer-reviewed until the 1970s.) As late as the 1960s, a researcher publishing a preliminary report in Nature was expected to follow up with a longer paper “in a more serious journal.” In other words, Nature delivered quick and cheap distribution, not luxury brand approval. This changed about fifty years ago, as we’ll see in Part III. But to understand what happened then, we first need to examine the characteristics of the journal in the roughly 100-year period from its early days until prestige took over, starting with a deeper look into publication speed. Publication Speed John Maddox, editor of Nature in the late 20th century, said that “one of Nature’s greatest early assets was the speed of the Royal Mail.” You could write to Nature, be published within a week, and read the replies to your communication within two weeks. This was state-of-the-art communication tech! Consider how many times publication speed is mentioned throughout the first half of the book (emphasis mine): What made Nature unique was, in large part, its ability to act as a venue for . . . discussions via its correspondence columns and its weekly publication schedule. (p. 8) Many British men of science found that one of the fastest ways to bring a scientific issue or idea to their fellow researchers’ attention was to send a communication to Nature. (p. 39) Unlike the literary periodicals, there was almost no delay between the submission of a piece and its appearance in the journal. (p. 63) A second reason Nature’s speed of publication would have been compelling to men of science is that getting one’s work into print quickly had become an increasingly essential part of establishing priority for a scientific finding or theory. (p. 65) Scientific weeklies [such as Nature] played a unique role in researchers’ publishing strategies at the end of the nineteenth century by offering researchers a forum where short articles could be printed quickly. (p. 105) Both the Proceedings [of the Royal Society of London] and the Philosophical Magazine had significant lag times between submission and publication . . ., which made Nature and its weekly turnaround uniquely valuable for the priority-conscious Rutherford. (p. 109) [Rutherford] sent his most interesting experimental results [to Nature] immediately, both as a way of keeping his colleagues updated on his work and as insurance against being scooped as he had in 1899. (p. 112) These quotes highlight two distinct reasons why speed was important. The first, as I hinted at earlier, was Nature’s role as the аcademic social media of its time. It was simply the best way to have discussions about scientific topics — or science itself — that could, unlike private correspondence, reach a large audience. More on this in the next section. The second reason, as shown by the mentions of physicist Ernest Rutherford, was establishing priority. Today we take for granted that being the first to publish new ideas or results is important, but in the 19th century this was less clear. To bring up Darwin as an example again, he kept his thoughts on evolution private for many years, because he wanted to make sure his argument was sound before he submitted it to the public (although he did eventually sense the urgency of publishing the theory before Alfred Russel Wallace did). But as science became professionalized, “not being scooped” became more and more crucial, and the weekly Nature was a good tool to avoid that. All this talk of speed may surprise anyone who has recently submitted a paper to Nature. In 2016, an analysis revealed that the median time for Nature to review a paper was 150 days, i.e. 5 months, up from 85 days a decade earlier. Nature itself reports, for the year 2020, a median time of 226 days between submission and acceptance. We’re a long way from “less than a week.” Why was there a decrease in publication speed? As we might expect, the reason was Nature’s growing popularity, especially among the international scientific community. At least, that’s what happened the first time there was a slowdown, in the mid-20th century. Early on, Nature was a journal for and by British scientists. But in the first half of the 20th century, science in general and Nature in particular began to involve much more collaboration between researchers across borders. It was a big deal, for instance, when a foreign government banned Nature, as Nazi Germany did in 1938; German researchers had been using it as an important source of scientific news. The ban was furthermore covered in non-British media, such as The New York Times, indicating that the journal was internationally newsworthy. Such an increase in international readership meant more letters and articles sent to the editors, and by the 1950s, there was such a backlog that submissions needed to be held for six months or more. In the 1960s, the new editor John Maddox recognized this as a problem. He began his editorship by clearing the backlog, and even printed the date of submission along with each scientific paper to show everyone how quick Nature was at reviewing articles (“often within a month,” Baldwin’s book says). Clearly, Maddox thought that restoring the speedy reputation of the journal was important. He seems to have succeeded, for a time. As late as 1989, during a controversy around cold fusion, a Wall Street Journal article said that Nature was still fast: it was able to print papers “in as little as three weeks instead of the more usual lead time of six to twelve months for other scientific publications.” Thus, despite a dip in the middle of the century due to its popularity and international reach, speedy publication was still an important characteristic of Nature in the 1970s. A second — and so far permanent — decrease occurred more recently, perhaps as a result of prestige and the competition of near-instantaneous online platforms, but that’s another story. Network Effects As of 2022, scientists argue in public on Twitter, blogs, and other online platforms, like ResearchHub. In the 19th century, Twitter and ResearchHub hadn’t been invented [citation needed]. Fortunately, Nature was there. A network effect occurs when the value of a product comes primarily from the people who use it. If there are two competing telephone systems, the most valuable one is whichever has the most users (or at least the users you want to talk to). If you create an improved Twitter clone, then all its amazing features won’t do much if you don’t somehow manage to capture Twitter’s network of several million people. Likewise, Nature became an interesting journal to read and contribute to because it gained the attention of Britain’s scientific elite as the place to discuss big science questions. This role as a forum was a constant in Nature’s history, as Making Nature shows with several detailed accounts of debates that took place within the journal’s pages. Some examples: Controversies over the age of the Earth in the 1880s.

On the Plurality of Worlds1 mentions across 1 issues

On the Plurality of Worlds is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 21, 2025 and February 21, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "from his 1984 book On the Plurality of Worlds". It most often appears alongside /r/slatestarcodex, ACX, Adrian.

Reference entry: On the Plurality of Worlds
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: February 21, 2025
Last seen: February 21, 2025
Book title: On the Plurality of Worlds

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Highlights From The Comments On Tegmark's Mathematical Universe February 21, 2025

slatestarcodex 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
Adrian 1 shared issues
Anthropic principle 1 shared issues
Aristotle 1 shared issues

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Highlights From The Comments On Tegmark's Mathematical Universe

February 21, 2025 · Original source

It’s a lot like David Lewis’s modal realism (from his 1984 book On the Plurality of Worlds) and has something in common with Mark Balaguer’s plenitudinlus platonism (from his 1998 book Platonism and Anti Platonism in Mathematics) but it’s a bit different from either. I suspect some of the medievals and ancients had some related idea. But until the development of 20th century logic there wasn’t a clear conception of what “every consistent mathematical theory” means, and it would likely take an analytic philosopher to endorse such a blunt view that this is everything that exists.

On the Road1 mentions across 1 issues

On the Road 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 "unless you count stuff like On the Road, which I think obscures more than illuminates what a life in poverty is actually like". It most often appears alongside 1984, American, American ‘hobo’ culture.

Reference entry: On the Road
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 10, 2021
Last seen: June 10, 2021
Book title: On the Road

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Your Book Review: Down And Out In Paris And London June 10, 2021

1984 1 shared issues
American 1 shared issues
American ‘hobo’ culture 1 shared issues
anarcho-syndicalists 1 shared issues
Animal Farm 1 shared issues

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Your Book Review: Down And Out In Paris And London

June 10, 2021 · Original source

Uncomfortably we took off our caps and sat down. The lady handed out the tea, and while we ate and drank she moved to and fro, talking benignly. She talked upon religious subjects—about Jesus Christ always having a soft spot for poor rough men like us, and about how quickly the time passed when you were in church, and what a difference it made to a man on the road if he said his prayers regularly. We hated it. We sat against the wall fingering our caps (a tramp feels indecently exposed with his cap off), and turning pink and trying to mumble something when the lady addressed us. There was no doubt that she meant it all kindly. As she came up to one of the north country lads with the plate of buns, she said to him:

It appeared from what they said that all spikes are different, each with its peculiar merits and demerits, and it is important to know these when you are on the road. An old hand will tell you the peculiarities of every spike in England, as: at A you are allowed to smoke but there are bugs in the cells; at B the beds are comfortable but the porter is a bully; at C they let you out early in the morning but the tea is undrinkable; at D the officials steal your money if you have any—and so on interminably. There are regular beaten tracks where the spikes are within a day's march of one another. I was told that the Barnet-St Albans route is the best, and they warned me to steer clear of Billericay and Chelmsford, also Ide Hill in Kent. Chelsea was said to be the most luxurious spike in England; someone, praising it, said that the blankets there were more like prison than the spike. Tramps go far afield in summer, and in winter they circle as much as possible round the large towns, where it is warmer and there is more charity. But they have to keep moving, for you may not enter any one spike, or any two London spikes, more than once in a month, on pain of being confined for a week.

It was interesting to see the subtle way in which he disassociated himself from 'these here tramps'. He had been on the road six months, but in the sight of God, he seemed to imply, he was not a tramp. I imagine there are quite a lot of tramps who thank God they are not tramps.

One Billion Americans1 mentions across 1 issues

One Billion Americans is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 13, 2021 and October 13, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Matt Yglesias touches on this in One Billion Americans"; "Matt Yglesias touches on this in One Billion Americans". It most often appears alongside Anatoly Karlin, atomic bomb, C.S. Lewis.

Reference entry: One Billion Americans
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: October 13, 2021
Last seen: October 13, 2021
Book title: One Billion Americans

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Highlights From The Comments On Kids And Climate Change October 13, 2021

Anatoly Karlin 1 shared issues
atomic bomb 1 shared issues
C.S. Lewis 1 shared issues
California 1 shared issues
Chris Landsea 1 shared issues

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Highlights From The Comments On Kids And Climate Change

October 13, 2021 · Original source

Matt Yglesias touches on this in One Billion Americans. He argues that climate change can only be solved by technological progress. Even if America cut its population by 50%, there are billions of people in south Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa whose lives are rapidly improving, and therefore will see their emissions per capita increase. It's unethical to try and thwart this improvement in their lives, and so the only way to fix climate change is through technological innovation. And the best way to achieve innovation is with more people not less. Yglesias therefore encourages policies to make it easier for Americans to have children, but also to increase immigration to the largest technologically innovative economy.

One Fish Two Fish, Red Fish Blue Fish1 mentions across 1 issues

One Fish Two Fish, Red Fish Blue Fish is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 28, 2022 and December 28, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "is “One Fish Two Fish, Red Fish Blue Fish" a cause or a consequence?". It most often appears alongside 2C-B, 48: Bean, @AliceFromQueens.

Reference entry: One Fish Two Fish, Red Fish Blue Fish
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: December 28, 2022
Last seen: December 28, 2022
Book title: One Fish Two Fish, Red Fish Blue Fish

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Links For December 2022 December 28, 2022

2C-B 1 shared issues
48: Bean 1 shared issues
@AliceFromQueens 1 shared issues
@Cryptovexillologist 1 shared issues
@cube_flipper 1 shared issues

Source context

Links For December 2022

December 28, 2022 · Original source

People tend to associate 1 with red and 2 with blue (is “One Fish Two Fish, Red Fish Blue Fish" a cause or a consequence?). See the post for other numbers, days of the week, months of the year, etc. Some make total sense (eg winter months are white, spring months are green), others are seemingly inexplicable (wide agreement on the pinkness of 8).

One Thousand And One Nights1 mentions across 1 issues

One Thousand And One Nights is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 24, 2021 and May 24, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "One Thousand And One Nights is a book about love, wonder, magic, and morality". It most often appears alongside Abbasid Caliphate, Allah, Arabian Nights.

Reference entry: One Thousand And One Nights
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 24, 2021
Last seen: May 24, 2021
Book title: One Thousand And One Nights

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Book Review: Arabian Nights May 24, 2021

Abbasid Caliphate 1 shared issues
Allah 1 shared issues
Arabian Nights 1 shared issues
Arabian Nights 1 shared issues
Arabs 1 shared issues

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Book Review: Arabian Nights

May 24, 2021 · Original source

One Thousand And One Nights is a book about love, wonder, magic, and morality. About genies, ape-people, and rhinoceroses who run around with elephants impaled on their horns. About how to use indexical uncertainty to hack the simulation running the universe to return the outcome you want. But most of all, it's a book about how your wife is cheating on you with a black man.

Inline links: One Thousand And One Nights

(I'd always heard that she leaves him at a cliff-hanger and makes him spare her to find out how it ends, which I think makes a better story, but this isn't how the real Arabian Nights works).

Allah: The real hero of most of the stories. If a character survives, it's always because "Allah had not fated them to die that day"; if they make an unusually large profit, it's because "Allah is most merciful". The only fault one can possibly find with the Allah of the Arabian Nights is that He seems a little exploitable. If someone is trying to hurt you, you can say something like "If you spare me, Allah will certainly spare you; but if you do not spare me, Allah will not spare you", and then they have to let you go or else be cursed to die in some kind of ironic way. Prayer to Allah is kind of a get out of jail free card, sometimes literally, and everyone who follows Allah's ways prospers proportionally.

Open Borders1 mentions across 1 issues

Open Borders is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 27, 2025 and June 27, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "see his “ Open Borders ” book". It most often appears alongside 10,000 hour rule, 2 Hour Learning, Inc, 2-hour Learning.

Reference entry: Open Borders
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 27, 2025
Last seen: June 27, 2025
Book title: Open Borders

Outbound links

https://www.amazon.com/Open-Borders-Science-Ethics-Immigration/dp/1250316960/

Issue trail

Your Review: Alpha School June 27, 2025

10,000 hour rule 1 shared issues
2 Hour Learning, Inc 1 shared issues
2-hour Learning 1 shared issues
Alex Amplifier 1 shared issues
Alpha 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Review: Alpha School

June 27, 2025 · Original source

They keep the kids motivated so they put in the daily effort and don’t get burned out What Alpha is doing is not rocket science. They are just “following the science” for what has been proven to work, and then designing a school around the best way (or “a way”) to deliver that science - personalized instruction, mastery focus, spaced repetition and incentives. It should not be too surprising that when it all comes together it spits out measurable results. But will it hold? Part Six: A Response to Bryan Caplan "When the data and anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. It’s usually not that the data is being miscollected. It’s usually that you’re not measuring the right thing." — Jeff Bezos (on multiple occasions) Not only does Bryan Caplan convincingly argue that education is mostly signalling in his book “The Case Against Education”, he goes even further to pour cold buckets of water on aspirational parents in his book “Selfish Reasons to have more Kids”. In that latter book he makes a compelling case with unimpeachable data that how kids turn out is almost entirely due to their genes plus “non-shared environment” (i.e., random things not having to do with parenting). According to Caplan helicopter-parenting does not hurt your kids, it is just a waste of everyone’s time (and maybe their enjoyment during their childhood). You might be able to influence some of your kids' behavior in the short term, but once they become an adult and move out of your house they will revert to the biases of their genes. As Caplan says, the most important parenting decision you can make that will affect how your kids turn out is your choice of spouse (or more accurately your choice of the genes you use to build your kids). Caplan does put one caveat on his data: range restriction. He admits that all of his adoption studies focus on middle class Americans (and Europeans). He is the first to admit that if you take a baby out of extreme poverty in the developing world and raise him in a middle class American family, he will have better economic outcomes than if you leave him in rural Mauritania (see his “Open Borders” book). He may even grant that moving from the poorest broken families in America to the middle class also may make a difference – since all the data available comes from families who were approved by administrators as acceptable to raise adopted kids. But is the same thing true when you move from the middle of the bell curve to the right? When the Data Set Gets Bigger Raj Chetty’s neighbourhood-impact study cracked the range challenge open. Chetty had access to all IRS filing data for generations. He was able to focus on families with multiple children that moved to significantly different zip codes, and follow those children over extended periods of time. By having millions of data points he could tease apart the impact of moving to a “better” zip code for older vs younger siblings. The younger sibling had the same family environment (and 50% of the same genes), but some number of more years in the “better” neighborhood. Chetty found that better neighborhoods made a difference to long term outcomes. But isn’t the neighborhood where a family lives in a “shared environment”? Clearly some adopted families lived in better neighborhoods than others? Why didn’t Caplan’s adoption studies pick that up? I think part of the answer is noise. Chetty had millions of data points vs hundreds of thousands for the adoption studies. But mostly I think the reason Chetty found this impact while the adoption studies did not is that he was looking for different things. No one took the adoption studies and grouped the zip codes as the relevant input variable. As Bezos says, the data wasn’t miscollected, they were just looking at the wrong things. So what does a good zip code look like? Chetty summarizes a good zip code as: Short commutes

Inline links: Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education, Selfish Reasons to have more Kids, Open Borders, neighbourhood-impact study

Order Without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes1 mentions across 1 issues

Order Without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes 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 "Order Without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes is a study of, well, its subtitle". It most often appears alongside ACX, amoral familialism, An Introduction to Law and Economics.

Reference entry: Order Without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 08, 2021
Last seen: April 08, 2021
Book title: Order Without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes

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Your Book Review: Order Without Law April 08, 2021

ACX 1 shared issues
amoral familialism 1 shared issues
An Introduction to Law and Economics 1 shared issues
anthropology 1 shared issues
Association of American Publishers 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: Order Without Law

April 08, 2021 · Original source

Order Without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes is a study of, well, its subtitle. The author, Robert Ellickson, is a professor and legal scholar. He comes across as a low-key anarchist, and I’ve seen him quoted at length on some anarchist websites, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he’s just a full-blown anarchist. He doesn’t identify as one explicitly, at least not here, and he does respect what states bring to the table. He just wishes people would remember that they’re not the only game in town. Part of the thesis of the book could be summed up (in my words, not his) as: we credit the government with creating public order, but if you look, it turns out that people create plenty of public order that has basically nothing to do with the legal system. Sometimes there is no relevant law, sometimes the order predates the law, and sometimes the order ignores the law. More on this later.

Organization of Behavior1 mentions across 1 issues

Organization of Behavior is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 12, 2025 and September 12, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "In Hebb’s famous Organization of Behavior, he wrote". It most often appears alongside A Change of Heart, Abraham, Adams.

Reference entry: Organization of Behavior
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 12, 2025
Last seen: September 12, 2025
Book title: Organization of Behavior

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Your Review: The Synaptic Plasticity and Memory Hypothesis September 12, 2025

A Change of Heart 1 shared issues
Abraham 1 shared issues
Adams 1 shared issues
Adams and Garrison 1 shared issues
Alexander Forbes 1 shared issues

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Your Review: The Synaptic Plasticity and Memory Hypothesis

September 12, 2025 · Original source

Later, people like Jerzy Konorski (1948) and Donald Hebb (1949) substantially expanded on the idea. Hebb’s ideas were particularly influential. In Hebb’s famous Organization of Behavior, he wrote:

Inline links: Organization of Behavior

Organizing for Social Change1 mentions across 1 issues

Organizing for Social Change 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 "This book exists. It's called Organizing for Social Change". It most often appears alongside #EEGManyLabs, 23andme, @freeshreeda.

Reference entry: Organizing for Social Change
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: November 10, 2023
Last seen: November 10, 2023
Book title: Organizing for Social Change

Outbound links

Issue trail

Followup: Quests And Requests November 10, 2023

#EEGManyLabs 1 shared issues
23andme 1 shared issues
@freeshreeda 1 shared issues
@surcomplicated 1 shared issues
Alain Daigle 1 shared issues

Source context

Followup: Quests And Requests

November 10, 2023 · Original source

This book exists. It's called Organizing for Social Change and is put out by a lefty organizer training group called MidWest Academy. Of course, the tactics can also be used by conservatives and libertarians. It's very practical!

Origin Of Consciousness1 mentions across 1 issues

Origin Of Consciousness is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 06, 2023 and April 06, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Jaynes’ Origin Of Consciousness". It most often appears alongside Alaska, Alaskan government, Andamanese.

Reference entry: Origin Of Consciousness
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 06, 2023
Last seen: April 06, 2023
Book title: Origin Of Consciousness

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Book Review: The Arctic Hysterias April 06, 2023

Alaska 1 shared issues
Alaskan government 1 shared issues
Andamanese 1 shared issues
Arctic hysteria 1 shared issues
Bureau of Indian Affairs 1 shared issues

Source context

Book Review: The Arctic Hysterias

April 06, 2023 · Original source

(if you haven’t already, consider reading my review of Jaynes’ Origin Of Consciousness or CubeFlipper’s review of Sorenson’s Preconquest Consciousness)

Inline links: Origin Of Consciousness, Preconquest Consciousness

Origin Of The Human Mind1 mentions across 1 issues

Origin Of The Human Mind is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 13, 2021 and June 13, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "reviews of Origin Of The Human Mind". It most often appears alongside Astralcodexten, Bay Area, biostatistician.

Reference entry: Origin Of The Human Mind
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 13, 2021
Last seen: June 13, 2021
Book title: Origin Of The Human Mind

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Open Thread 176 June 13, 2021

Astralcodexten 1 shared issues
Bay Area 1 shared issues
biostatistician 1 shared issues
Bruno Macaes 1 shared issues
California 1 shared issues

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Open Thread 176

June 13, 2021 · Original source

1: I've heard from five people who, despite sending me entries (and in some cases having me get back to them saying I'd gotten them), somehow didn't get entered into the Book Review Contest. The people I know about are the ones who wrote reviews of The Beginning Of Infinity, Gulag+Kapital+Totalitarianism, Plagues And Peoples, Essay On Man, and Origin Of The Human Mind. If you entered but didn't end up either as a finalist or in the Runners-Up Packet, you're also in that category and should send me an email at scott@slatestarcodex.com ASAP so I can fix it. Send it from a different address than you used originally, in case the problem was that your emails end up in my spam filter. My plan is to speed-judge all of them, then pick one extra finalist which I'll present to you next Thursday, then start voting next Friday.

Orlandini's Antigona1 mentions across 1 issues

Orlandini's Antigona is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 03, 2022 and June 03, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as ""In a duet in Orlandini's Antigona..."". It most often appears alongside 18th century, A Eunuch's Dream, Alessandro Moreschi.

Reference entry: Orlandini's Antigona
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 03, 2022
Last seen: June 03, 2022
Book title: Orlandini's Antigona

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Your Book Review: The Castrato June 03, 2022

18th century 1 shared issues
A Eunuch's Dream 1 shared issues
Alessandro Moreschi 1 shared issues
American football 1 shared issues
Anna Mons 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: The Castrato

June 03, 2022 · Original source

...he audience". He wasn’t undefeated however, “Farinelli sang at Bologna in 1727, where he met the famous castrato Antonio Bernacchi, twenty years his senior. In a duet in Orlandini's Antigona , Farinelli showed off all the beauties of his voice and refinements of his style, executing a number of passages of great virtuosity, which were rewarded with tumultuou...

Orthodoxy1 mentions across 1 issues

Orthodoxy is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 20, 2024 and September 20, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "As Chesterton writes in his book Orthodoxy :"; "To quote again from Orthodoxy :". It most often appears alongside Adam, Alfred, Ballad.

Reference entry: Orthodoxy
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 20, 2024
Last seen: September 20, 2024
Book title: Orthodoxy

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Issue trail

Your Book Review: The Ballad of the White Horse September 20, 2024

Adam 1 shared issues
Alfred 1 shared issues
Ballad 1 shared issues
Buddhism 1 shared issues
Buddhist 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: The Ballad of the White Horse

September 20, 2024 · Original source

So Alfred has hope and his enemies do not. The Vikings display both errors of hope simultaneously. They presume that their victory is certain, merely because they have won over and over and their enemy is outnumbered, scattered, and demoralized. Yet Guthrum also despairs for he has no hope of anything he does lasting beyond his life. All will burn in Surtr’s fire, and all will die with Odin. As Chesterton writes in his book Orthodoxy:

Inline links: Surtr’s fire, Orthodoxy

This is what Chesterton calls the eternal revolution. To quote again from Orthodoxy:

Our Difficulty Swallowing It1 mentions across 1 issues

Our Difficulty Swallowing It is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 09, 2021 and April 09, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Druin Burch’s 2010 book, Taking the Medicine: A Short History of Medicine’s Beautiful Idea, and Our Difficulty Swallowing It". It most often appears alongside 1913 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Alexandria, Aristotelian.

Reference entry: Our Difficulty Swallowing It
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 09, 2021
Last seen: April 09, 2021
Book title: Our Difficulty Swallowing It

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Your Book Review: On The Natural Faculties April 09, 2021

1913 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1 shared issues
Alexandria 1 shared issues
Aristotelian 1 shared issues
Aristotle 1 shared issues
Aristotle’s physics 1 shared issues

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Your Book Review: On The Natural Faculties

April 09, 2021 · Original source

I haven’t been able to confirm its source. Everything attributes it to Galen, but they all point to earlier secondary sources — people who were not Galen but who were supposedly quoting him. Tetlock doesn’t cite one of Galen’s many works — he cites Druin Burch’s 2010 book, Taking the Medicine: A Short History of Medicine’s Beautiful Idea, and Our Difficulty Swallowing It. Now, Taking the Medicine does include that quotation, but as far as I can tell, it doesn’t cite a source.

Our Nation’s Path: Ideology for Social Reconstruction1 mentions across 1 issues

Our Nation’s Path: Ideology for Social Reconstruction is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 28, 2021 and June 28, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Nine months after taking power in Korea, the peasant-born Park published a book of his own, Our Nation’s Path: Ideology for Social Reconstruction". It most often appears alongside Alexander Hamilton, America, ASEAN.

Reference entry: Our Nation’s Path: Ideology for Social Reconstruction
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 28, 2021
Last seen: June 28, 2021
Book title: Our Nation’s Path: Ideology for Social Reconstruction

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Book Review: How Asia Works June 28, 2021

Alexander Hamilton 1 shared issues
America 1 shared issues
ASEAN 1 shared issues
Asia 1 shared issues
Association of South-East Asian Nations 1 shared issues

Source context

Book Review: How Asia Works

June 28, 2021 · Original source

...he was an amateur historian who specialised in the histories of rising powers. He was well read on German development, and followed closely that country’s swift, state-led re-industrialisation after the Second World War. He also knew in detail the stories of Sun Yat-sen, Turkey’s Kemal Pasha and Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and their efforts to nurture modern, large-scale industries. Nine months after taking power in Korea, the peasant-born Park published a book of his own, Our Nation’s Path: Ideology for Social Reconstruction, which contained a road map for what Park described as ‘co-ordination and supervisory guidance, by the state, of mammoth economic strength’. The next year Park published The Country, the Revolution and I, with chapters on ‘The Miracle on the Rhine’ and ‘Various Forms of Revolution’ in which he discussed different historical revolutions from an economic and developmental perspective. (He always referred to his own coup as a revolution.)

Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking1 mentions across 1 issues

Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 23, 2024 and August 23, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Walt Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”". It most often appears alongside A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste, A Hymn to God the Father, Alabama.

Reference entry: Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 23, 2024
Last seen: August 23, 2024
Book title: Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking

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Issue trail

Your Book Review: The Complete Rhyming Dictionary and Poet's Craft Book (1936 Edition) August 23, 2024

A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste 1 shared issues
A Hymn to God the Father 1 shared issues
Alabama 1 shared issues
Bogus 1 shared issues
Bolshevism 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: The Complete Rhyming Dictionary and Poet's Craft Book (1936 Edition)

August 23, 2024 · Original source

But aside from novelties for comedic effect, you’ve started to wonder if strict rhymes are really necessary for good poetry, and perhaps you’ve started to wonder what poetry even is. So when you chance upon Walt Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”, you sit bolt upright. This is something new:

Inline links: Walt Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”

Out of the cradle endlessly rocking, Out of the mocking-bird’s throat, the musical shuttle, Out of the Ninth-month midnight, Over the sterile sands and the fields beyond, where the child leaving his bed wander’d alone, bareheaded, barefoot, Down from the shower’d halo, Up from the mystic play of shadows twining and twisting as if they were alive,

Overtraining Syndrome1 mentions across 1 issues

Overtraining Syndrome is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 01, 2023 and February 01, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "…the only author of the sole book in Overtraining Syndrome". It most often appears alongside 2006 Ioannidis paper, ACTIV-6, Alexandros.

Reference entry: Overtraining Syndrome
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: February 01, 2023
Last seen: February 01, 2023
Book title: Overtraining Syndrome

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Issue trail

Response To Alexandros Contra Me On Ivermectin February 01, 2023

2006 Ioannidis paper 1 shared issues
ACTIV-6 1 shared issues
Alexandros 1 shared issues
Alexandros Marinos 1 shared issues
American 1 shared issues

Source context

Response To Alexandros Contra Me On Ivermectin

February 01, 2023 · Original source

Gideon (correctly) phrased this as a non-sinister albeit potentially weird misstep by the study authors, but in trying to summarize Gideon, I (incorrectly) phrased it as a sinister attempt to inflate results. After looking into it, I think Alexandros is completely right and I was completely wrong. Although I sometimes get details wrong, this one was especially disappointing because I incorrectly tarnished the reputation of Biber et al and implicitly accused them of bad scientific practices, which they were not doing. I believed I was relaying an accusation by Gideon (who I trust), but I was wrong and he was not accusing them of that. I apologize to Biber et al, my readers, and everyone else involved in this. My only reservation is that I don’t want to say too strongly that Gideon’s critique is wrong: I haven’t looked through the study documents enough to say with certainty that Alexandros’ reanalysis of the protocol issues is correct (though the superficial check I’ve done looks that way). But my mistakes are completely separate from anything Gideon did and definitely real and egregious. Cadegiani et al (Alexandros 50% right) Flavio Cadegiani did several studies on ivermectin in Brazil; I edited this section in response to criticism by Marinos and others, but the earliest version I can find on archive.is (I can’t guarantee it was the first I wrote) said: A crazy person decided to put his patients on every weird medication he could think of, and 585 subjects ended up on a combination of ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, and nitazoxanide, with dutasteride and spironolactone "optionally offered" and vitamin D, vitamin C, zinc, apixaban, rivaraxoban, enoxaparin, and glucocorticoids "added according to clinical judgment". There was no control group, but the author helpfully designated some random patients in his area as a sort-of-control, and then synthetically generated a second control group based on “a precise estimative based on a thorough and structured review of articles indexed in PubMed and MEDLINE and statements by official government agencies and specific medical societies”. Patients in the experimental group were twice as likely to recover (p < 0.0001), had negative PCR after 14 vs. 21 days, and had 0 vs. 27 hospitalizations. Speaking of low p-values, some people did fraud-detection tests on another of Cadegiani’s COVID-19 studies and got values like p < 8.24E-11 in favor of it being fraudulent. Also in Cadegiani news: he apparently has the record for completing one of the fastest PhDs in Brazilian history (7 months), he was involved in a weird scandal where the Brazilian government tried to create a COVID recommendation app but it just recommended ivermectin to everybody regardless of what input it got, and he describes himself as: …the only author of the sole book in Overtraining Syndrome, the prevailing sport-related disease among amateur and professional athletes. He is also responsible for approximately 70% of the articles published in the field in the world in the last 05 years, and reviewer for more than 90% of the manuscripts in the field. And, uh, he’s also studied whether ultra-high-dose antiandrogens treated COVID, and found that they did, cutting mortality by 92% . Which sounds great, except that it looks like most of this is that the control group had a shockingly high mortality rate, much higher than makes sense even in the context of severe COVID. I think the charitable explanation here is that he made this data up too. But the Brazilian Parliament seems to be going with an uncharitable explanation, seeing as they have recommended that Cadegiani be charged with crimes against humanity. Anyway, let’s not base anything important on the results of this study. You can find Alexandros’ full critique here, but again I’ll try to summarize it as best I can. Alexandros is unhappy with my portrayal of Cadegiani’s background. I cite details that make him look strange and maybe fake, but there are other details that make him seem more impressive, like that he won gold medals at a Brazilian Scientific Olympiad.

Inline links: the earliest version I can find on archive.is, involved in a weird scandal, describes himself as, recommended that Cadegiani be charged with crimes against humanity, here

Ovid's Metamorphoses1 mentions across 1 issues

Ovid's Metamorphoses 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 "I took the first paragraph of every book in Ovid's Metamorphoses and did the gradual partial translation". It most often appears alongside #EEGManyLabs, 23andme, @freeshreeda.

Reference entry: Ovid's Metamorphoses
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: November 10, 2023
Last seen: November 10, 2023
Book title: Ovid's Metamorphoses

Outbound links

Issue trail

Followup: Quests And Requests November 10, 2023

#EEGManyLabs 1 shared issues
23andme 1 shared issues
@freeshreeda 1 shared issues
@surcomplicated 1 shared issues
Alain Daigle 1 shared issues

Source context

Followup: Quests And Requests

November 10, 2023 · Original source

I started writing an attempt at idea . . . but it became much too long for a Substack comment, so I spun it off into a blog post here. I took the first paragraph of every book in Ovid's Metamorphoses and did the gradual partial translation, along with the Latin version and the literal English version for comparison.

Inline links: blog post here

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