Books: T

Your Book Review: The Dawn Of Everything

May 23, 2022 · Original source

1: The full list of Book Review Contest finalists is: Consciousness And The Brain, Making Nature, The Anti-Politics Machine, The Castrato, The Dawn Of Everything (EH’s review), The Future Of Fusion, The Illusion Of Grand Strategy, The Internationalists, The Outlier, The Righteous Mind (BW’s review), The Society Of The Spectacle, and Viral.

June 10, 2022 · Original source

Enter The Dawn of Everything, which tries to change the past by taking a third way orthogonal to the Rousseau/Hobbes spectrum. Published to widespread acclaim just six months ago, it was blurbed by the likes of Noam Chomsky and Nassim Taleb, and given glowing reviews in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and many others. A doorstopping tome of public-facing but dense scholarship, it harkens back to back to an older age—it even has overwrought Victorian section titles calligraphed in ALL CAPS.

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

What is the version of prehistory the Davids offer in The Dawn of Everything? It is an anti-story. The Davids are offering up an alternative to (as well as a criticism of) thinkers like Steven Pinker or Jared Diamond or Yuval Noah Harari, all of whom give a standard model of human prehistory that goes small hunter-gatherer tribes → invention of agriculture → civilization (with its associated hierarchies and private property and wealth inequalities).

August 28, 2022 · Original source

The Dawn Of Everything (ancient hunter-gatherers)

Inline links: The Dawn Of Everything

Against Ice Age Civilizations

September 02, 2022 · Original source

1st: The Dawn Of Everything, reviewed by Erik Hoel. Erik is a neuroscientist and author of the recent novel The Revelations. He writes at his Substack The Intrinsic Perspective.

Inline links: The Dawn Of Everything, The Revelations, The Intrinsic Perspective

March 03, 2023 · Original source

In theory, this could suggest that no ancient civilization reached a tech level where it started mining lead, ie the tech level the Phoenicians had in 1000 BC. This is in theory only, because I can’t find a clear record of anyone checking. I assume ice core scientists would have noticed if it happened, but there’s no publicly available dataset with lead levels 10,000 years before present, nor is there a paper titled “We Checked To See If There Were Anthropogenic Lead Emissions In 10,000 BC And There Definitely Weren’t”. Here is a paper that looks at lead level in human bones. They don’t do a great job explaining how lead makes it into human bones, but it seems like a mix of the kind of lead pollution that makes it to Greenland ice cores, plus personally wearing or consuming things that have touched lead. This study investigates skeletons from 12,000 BC onwards, and finds that lead levels start rising in 5,000 BC, when people developed “cupellation”, a technique for using lead to purify gold and silver (it then goes up much further between 1000 - 500 BC, probably the same spike the Greenland cores found). So this presents some very weak evidence against significantly elevated lead from 12,000 BC onward. But it doesn’t rule out small amounts of lead mining far away from the bones’ previous owners, and doesn’t rule out a civilization lasting from 15,000 - 13,000 BC. A Great Britain-level civilization would be expected to raise lead levels a lot, and this pretty strongly rules it out. I would expect an Egypt-level civilization to at least invent cupellation, but I don’t know if its lead would necessarily make it to wherever these bones came from. A Stonehenge or Gobekli Tepe level civilization isn’t ruled out at all. Conclusion I think there’s pretty strong evidence against lost Egypt- or Great Britain- level Ice Age civilizations. I don’t want to rule out a lost Stonehenge or Gobekli Tepe level civilization, but there’s not much positive evidence, and there’s some negative evidence. Stonehenge was built by Neolithic farmer-pastoralists, who had lots of domesticated crops and animals. Gobekli Tepe was built right next to the area where wheat was domesticated at around the same time. Existing early monuments mostly suggest a story where sedentary city- and temple- building civilizations either require domesticated agriculture, or invent it very quickly. None of this means Ice Age people didn’t have fascinating cultures of their own which were advanced in other ways - interesting laws, taboos, mythologies, customs, oral traditions. Tyler Cowen says that everything started earlier than you think, and this is what we’ve been finding about various forms of human culture too (cf. Against The Grain, The Dawn Of Everything). I just don’t expect lost Ice Age cities or giant monuments. I think Michael Shermer’s attempt to argue the same case is weak, relies on a still-controversial rejection of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, and generally leans too much on the absurdity heuristic without moving the needle one way or the other. All of the following predictions are about structures on Earth built by homo sapiens without time travel: 20% chance we ever find something demonstrating equal or greater architectural advancement to Gobekli Tepe, dating from before 11,000 BC.

Inline links: Here is a paper, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!SS8H!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0b5de41a-38d8-4145-821d-5e2f6d2de228_534x215.png, Against The Grain, The Dawn Of Everything, Michael Shermer’s attempt to argue the same case, Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis

Book Review: The Arctic Hysterias

April 06, 2023 · Original source

(if you haven’t already, consider reading Erik Hoel’s review of The Dawn Of Everything, especially the last few parts on “the gossip trap”)

Inline links: Erik Hoel’s review of

August 11, 2023 · Original source

I’ve been suggesting a critique, or waving my hand in the direction of one, but let me tell you how much there is in this book. There’s the introduction to the basic theory of cultural evolution – the psychology that lets humans have cultures and how ideas can transmit themselves down generations. There’s the definition of WEIRD psychology, including dispositionalism (the tendency to explain people’s actions by their innate character), and the tendency to categorize rabbits with cats not carrots; and the fact that even the famous Big Five traits of personality psychology don’t generalize very well beyond the WEIRD countries. There’s a taxonomy of the institutions that help human groups scale up their cooperation, starting with unilineal clans – the basic unit of intensive kinship, and the blind alley that most human societies got stuck in, on Henrich’s account – and including segmented lineages, age sets and premodern chiefdoms and states. (This is a very scientific, comparative approach to anthropology. I would love to hear a debate between Henrich and David Wengrow, whose book The Dawn of Everything, reviewed in ACX here, takes a much more voluntarist approach, starting from the view that there are many ways to organize a society, and that rational collective institutional design is pretty much a human universal.)

Inline links: here

The Outlier6 mentions across 6 issues

The Outlier is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between May 23, 2022 and October 17, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "The full list of Book Review Contest finalists is: ... The Outlier"; "The Outlier is actually intended to be a positive reappraisal of Carter’s presidency"; "The Outlier (biography of Jimmy Carter)". It most often appears alongside ACX, Jimmy Carter, Making Nature.

Article page: The Outlier
Mention count: 6
Issue count: 6
First seen: May 23, 2022
Last seen: October 17, 2025
Book title: The Outlier
Likely author: Max Nussenbaum

Outbound links

Issue trail

Open Thread 225 May 23, 2022
Your Book Review: The Outlier July 08, 2022
Open Thread 239 August 28, 2022
Book Review Contest 2022 Winners September 02, 2022
Book Review Contest 2023 Winners September 15, 2023
Non-Book Review Contest 2025 Winners October 17, 2025

ACX 4 shared issues
Jimmy Carter 4 shared issues
Making Nature 4 shared issues
Candy for Breakfast 3 shared issues
Consciousness and the Brain 3 shared issues

Source context

May 23, 2022 · Original source

1: The full list of Book Review Contest finalists is: Consciousness And The Brain, Making Nature, The Anti-Politics Machine, The Castrato, The Dawn Of Everything (EH’s review), The Future Of Fusion, The Illusion Of Grand Strategy, The Internationalists, The Outlier, The Righteous Mind (BW’s review), The Society Of The Spectacle, and Viral.

July 08, 2022 · Original source

But I wondered what, if any, hidden depths lay within the peanut farmer. Also, I wanted to enter this contest, and I didn’t want to pick a book that I thought a bunch of other people might also review. So I turned to The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter, by Kai Bird. Like Carter, this book seems to have been largely forgotten. It won a Pulitzer, but I had never heard of it until I googled “best book about Jimmy Carter.” It seems to have gotten a lot less attention than similar recent biographies about Grant, Roosevelt, and Truman, and it’s hard to imagine it ever becoming a TV show or a musical.

Inline links: The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter

Although it may not be clear from this review, The Outlier is actually intended to be a positive reappraisal of Carter’s presidency. The author clearly admires Carter’s iconoclasm and moral backbone, and he interprets many of Carter’s decisions through the most positive lens he can—for example, by blaming failures like the hostage crisis on listening to the wrong advisors. His thesis is that Carter was a man ahead of his time: decades before today’s public debates over race, our use of natural resources, and government hypocrisy, Carter looked the country in the eye and forced us to confront the looming end of American exceptionalism. But we didn’t want to hear the message—so we shot the messenger.

Nonetheless, the slipperiness of its protagonist ultimately left me unsatisfied with this book. In the end, The Outlier is a lot like the Carter presidency itself: easy to like and in certain ways admirable, but ultimately a missed opportunity.

August 28, 2022 · Original source

The Outlier (biography of Jimmy Carter)

Inline links: The Outlier

September 02, 2022 · Original source

The Outlier, reviewed by Max Nussenbaum. Max writes at Candy for Breakfast.

Inline links: The Outlier, Candy for Breakfast

Kora In Hell, reviewed by Lucas Paletta. Lucas is a writer from Buenos Aires, Argentina. He blogs (in Spanish) at www.stackdamage.com.ar. I really enjoyed all of these. A few notes of special praise: The Internationalists was probably most fascinating, in the sense of describing a strange historical episode I didn’t know about before. The Outlier was similar and I give it high marks for making Jimmy Carter interesting. Consciousness And The Brain was a whole new neuroscience theory I knew nothing about and I expect to reread it a bunch of times to try to get it to sink in. Sam Altman sent me an email saying he enjoyed the review of The Future Of Fusion Energy. The Making Nature review did a great job talking about and analyzing a trend I’d never thought about before, far beyond even what was in the book. I think about Exhaustion every time I see a CFS patient - specifically, about the claim that 19th century psychiatrists would prescribe a “West cure” of going off and doing cowboy things on a ranch; I haven’t yet recommended that to anyone, but like I said, I think about it often. God Emperor of Dune and Kora In Hell were the token fiction and poetry reviews; I thought they did a spectacular job overcoming the difficulties of reviewing their respective media. I was reading some of the non-finalists and found 1587 in there and was surprised it hadn’t reached finalist status and decided to promote it; based on your votes it seems like that was the right choice. My process for picking finalists was kind of haphazard; I had you rate all reviews on a scale of 1-10, anyone above 8 got in automatically, and then I picked my favorites from the reviews between 7 and 8. This was sort of unfair, and meant there were some reviews that scored better on the voting than finalists but weren’t finalists themselves, and others that I liked better than some finalists but couldn’t pick. All of these are Honorable Mentions. You’ll notice some of them are politically charged, and yes, I did sort of discriminate against these (though not so much that I wouldn’t have picked them if they’d made it above 8). They are: Unsettled, reviewed by Julius S. Julius is a machine learning engineer from San Diego. He blogs at Curious About Ideas.

Inline links: Kora In Hell, www.stackdamage.com.ar, Unsettled, Curious About Ideas

September 15, 2023 · Original source

Public Citizens, reviewed by Max Nussenbaum. Max writes at Candy for Breakfast. You may remember him from last year's review of The Outlier, about the life of Jimmy Carter.

Inline links: Public Citizens, Candy for Breakfast, last year's review of

October 17, 2025 · Original source

JFK Assassination Conspiracy Theories, reviewed by Max Nussenbaum. Max was a finalist in previous contests with his reviews of The Outlier and Public Citizens. He writes at Candy for Breakfast and begrudgingly acknowledges that Lee Harvey Oswald probably acted alone.

Inline links: JFK Assassination Conspiracy Theories, The Outlier, Public Citizens, Candy for Breakfast

The Castrato5 mentions across 5 issues

The Castrato is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between May 23, 2022 and September 02, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "The full list of Book Review Contest finalists is: ... The Castrato"; "her 2015 book titled simply The Castrato"; "Commenters on the review of The Castrato mentioned Radu Marian". It most often appears alongside Consciousness and the Brain, Making Nature, The Anti-Politics Machine.

Article page: The Castrato
Mention count: 5
Issue count: 5
First seen: May 23, 2022
Last seen: September 02, 2022
Book title: The Castrato
Likely author: Roger’s Bacon

Outbound links

Issue trail

Open Thread 225 May 23, 2022
Your Book Review: The Castrato June 03, 2022
Links For June July 01, 2022
Open Thread 239 August 28, 2022
Book Review Contest 2022 Winners September 02, 2022

Consciousness and the Brain 3 shared issues
Making Nature 3 shared issues
The Anti-Politics Machine 3 shared issues
The Dawn Of Everything 3 shared issues
The Internationalists 3 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: The Castrato

May 23, 2022 · Original source

1: The full list of Book Review Contest finalists is: Consciousness And The Brain, Making Nature, The Anti-Politics Machine, The Castrato, The Dawn Of Everything (EH’s review), The Future Of Fusion, The Illusion Of Grand Strategy, The Internationalists, The Outlier, The Righteous Mind (BW’s review), The Society Of The Spectacle, and Viral.

June 03, 2022 · Original source

In the Weird Studies podcast episode which serves as the namesake of this review, University of Indiana Musicologist Phil Ford traces the origin of the modern day mutant archetype back to the castrati, those eunuch singers produced in Italy from the mid-1500s to the mid-1800s. In support of his analysis, Ford cites the numerous similarities between the castrati and what is perhaps the most well-known fictional example of the mutant archetype: the X-men. While X-men are born as mutants, a number of X-men-adjacent superheros are so-called “mutates”, individuals who received their powers through some externally-mediated transformation (e.g. Juggernaut, Spider-man, the Incredible Hulk, Deadpool); similarly, the castrati were not born as mutants but became “mutates” by undergoing castration before puberty. Like the X-men, the castrati spent their childhood sequestered in special academies where they honed their superhuman (singing) powers with rigorous training. The mutant status of both groups made them objects of both fascination and scorn, awe and fear. In a plot twist reminiscent of X-men lore, some castrati managed to rise above their outcast status and obtain great influence as diplomats or more clandestine political operatives (i.e. spies). The X-men comparison (whatever its validity) speaks to the stranger-than-fiction quality of the castrati’s story, a story told by University of Chicago musicologist Martha Feldman in her 2015 book titled simply The Castrato. Feldman jumps around between the different aspects of the history (the biology, the music, the fame, the fortune, etc.) and I will do the same here, but we will begin, as tales of mutants and “mutates” often do, with an origin story.

Inline links: Weird Studies podcast episode, Phil Ford, Martha Feldman, https://www.amazon.com/Castrato-Reflections-Natures-Ernest-Lectures/dp/0520292448

That Catholic doctrine also happened to forbid bodily mutilation was only a minor inconvenience; there was, fortunately, a loophole—it was allowed in cases of medical necessity. This led to all kinds of fabricated stories in which an accident damaged the genitalia and castration was deemed necessary in order to save the boy’s life. The stories usually centered around animals—falls from horses, attacks by wild boar, or, hilariously, bites on the junk by wild swans (“Swans, we should remember, where renowned in mythic and lyric traditions for singing while dying”)—and also frequently involved perilous male activities such as horseback riding or hunting in order to allow the castrato to save face and maintain something of a masculine reputation.

— Casanova, writing of the castrato Salimbeni

Links For June

July 01, 2022 · Original source

12: Commenters on the review of The Castrato mentioned Radu Marian, a singer with an intersex condition who probably sounds the way historical castrati did. Here’s a sample:

Inline links: The Castrato

August 28, 2022 · Original source

The Castrato

Inline links: The Castrato

September 02, 2022 · Original source

=3rd: The Castrato, reviewed by Roger’s Bacon. RB is a teacher based in NYC. He writes at Secretorum and serves as head editor at Seeds of Science (ACX grant winner), a journal publishing speculative and non-traditional scientific articles.

Inline links: The Castrato, Secretorum, Seeds of Science

Two Arms and a Head5 mentions across 5 issues

Two Arms and a Head is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between May 17, 2024 and October 11, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Two Arms and a Head"; "Book review contest finalists are: ... Two Arms and a Head"; "In the year and a half in between, he writes Two Arms and a Head, his combination memoir and suicide note". It most often appears alongside Dominion, Don Juan, How Language Began.

Article page: Two Arms and a Head
Mention count: 5
Issue count: 5
First seen: May 17, 2024
Last seen: October 11, 2024
Book title: Two Arms and a Head
Likely author: Stephen Hawking

Outbound links

Issue trail

Choose Book Review Finalists 2024 May 17, 2024
Open Thread 334 June 17, 2024
Your Book Review: Two Arms and a Head August 02, 2024
Vote In The 2024 Book Review Contest September 27, 2024
Book Review Contest 2024 Winners October 11, 2024

Dominion 4 shared issues
Don Juan 4 shared issues
How Language Began 4 shared issues
How the War Was Won 4 shared issues
Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa 3 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: Two Arms and a Head

May 17, 2024 · Original source

...Trial The Unconsoled The Untethered Soul The Vegetarian The Wages of Destruction The Wheel of Time The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy Three Days in Dwarfland Time Loops Two Arms and a Head War and Peace Warrior's Woman What Even Is Gender? When We Cease To Understand The World Who We Are And How We Got Here Why Fish Don't Exist Winnie-the-Pooh / The House...

Open Thread 334

June 17, 2024 · Original source

2: Book review contest finalists are: Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa, Dominion, Don Juan, Family That Couldn't Sleep, How Language Began, How The War Was Won, Nine Lives, Real Raw News, Silver Age Marvel Comics, Sixth Day, Spirit of Rationalism, Complete Rhyming Dictionary, The Pale King, Two Arms and a Head, and Ballad of the White Horse. Honorable mention to at least Catkin, Road of the King, World Empire Lost, Piranesi, Meme Machine, and Determined. I might promote some honorable mentions to finalists depending on how tolerant you all are of book reviews, and some others to honorable mention after I read more reviews. First review goes up this Friday! Thanks to everyone who entered.

August 02, 2024 · Original source

In the year and a half in between, he writes Two Arms and a Head, his combination memoir and suicide note.

Two Arms and a Head comes from one of those rare moments in history when an individual’s circumstances so perfectly intersect with their skills that they leave a mark on the world. What better cosmic tragedy than to have a strong, fit, arrogant philosophy buff suddenly find himself paralyzed? His memoir is an exploration of what it means to exist in a body that is no longer entirely his own.

Everything below my nipples is no longer me. Hence the title of this work, “Two Arms and a Head”. [...] I am two arms and a head, attached to two-thirds of a corpse. The only difference is that it’s a living, shitting, pissing, jerking, twitching corpse. [...] What was once my beloved body is now a thing. [...]

September 27, 2024 · Original source

1: Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa 2: Dominion 3: Don Juan 4: The Family That Couldn’t Sleep 5: How Language Began 6: Real Raw News 7: Two Arms And A Head 8: How The War Was Won 9: Silver Age Marvel Comics 10: The Complete Rhyming Dictionary And Poet’s Craft Book 11: The History Of The Rise And Influence Of The Spirit Of Rationalism In Europe 12: The Pale King 13: Nine Lives 14: The Ballad Of The White Horse

Inline links: Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa, Dominion, Don Juan, The Family That Couldn’t Sleep, How Language Began, Real Raw News, Two Arms And A Head, How The War Was Won, Silver Age Marvel Comics, The Complete Rhyming Dictionary And Poet’s Craft Book, The History Of The Rise And Influence Of The Spirit Of Rationalism In Europe, The Pale King, Nine Lives, The Ballad Of The White Horse

October 11, 2024 · Original source

1st: Two Arms And A Head, reviewed by AmandaFromBethlehem. Amanda is active in the Philadelphia ACX community. She writes Letters From Bethlehem and is working on a novel. When she’s not writing existential horror, she is busy with home improvement projects.

Inline links: Two Arms And A Head, Letters From Bethlehem

The Anti-Politics Machine4 mentions across 4 issues

The Anti-Politics Machine is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between May 23, 2022 and September 02, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "The full list of Book Review Contest finalists is: ... The Anti-Politics Machine"; "I first picked up James Ferguson’s The Anti-Politics Machine a year ago"; "After writing The Anti-Politics Machine, Ferguson largely gave up on the idea of charitable or state-based aid". It most often appears alongside Consciousness and the Brain, Making Nature, The Castrato.

Article page: The Anti-Politics Machine
Mention count: 4
Issue count: 4
First seen: May 23, 2022
Last seen: September 02, 2022
Book title: The Anti-Politics Machine
Likely author: Colin Aitken

Outbound links

Issue trail

Open Thread 225 May 23, 2022
Your Book Review: The Anti-Politics Machine May 27, 2022
Open Thread 239 August 28, 2022
Book Review Contest 2022 Winners September 02, 2022

Consciousness and the Brain 3 shared issues
Making Nature 3 shared issues
The Castrato 3 shared issues
The Dawn Of Everything 3 shared issues
The Internationalists 3 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: The Anti-Politics Machine

May 23, 2022 · Original source

1: The full list of Book Review Contest finalists is: Consciousness And The Brain, Making Nature, The Anti-Politics Machine, The Castrato, The Dawn Of Everything (EH’s review), The Future Of Fusion, The Illusion Of Grand Strategy, The Internationalists, The Outlier, The Righteous Mind (BW’s review), The Society Of The Spectacle, and Viral.

May 27, 2022 · Original source

I first picked up James Ferguson’s The Anti-Politics Machine a year ago, expecting to read about a failed development project that could have benefited from an evidence-based approach. But instead I found an intervention that could have been backed by every experiment in the world and still would have fallen apart, a program so profoundly shaped by the lens of “development economics” that its practitioners misinterpreted almost every facet of what they were doing.

A story that plausibly explains these numbers (either a potential mechanism for an effect, or an explanation of why the effect turned out to be null) If these stories are challenged, it is not because there is no actual evidence for them, but because an economist in the audience has thought of their own preferred theory. If the speaker can find some data point that contradicts the questioner’s idea, this is thought to “confirm” the original story. Since audience members (who often have little specific knowledge of the region) are unlikely to ask questions like “what if this village just has an incredibly complicated set of social conventions around cattle that prevents their sale even without market barriers in place?” or “do the region’s economic challenges have more to do with this very specific regulation in South African immigration law?”, plausible-sounding stories that explain one or two numerical data points tend to gain traction in the literature whether or not they have anything to do with reality. Mark McGovern famously noted this trend in a review of two of Paul Collier’s books, writing: “Much of the intellectual heavy lifting in these books is in fact done at the level of implication or commonsense guessing. And the common sense is surely not that of the inhabitants of the countries being dissected, but that of the highly educated elite located primarily in Western Europe and North America. In those passages where Collier does lay out the thinking behind his explanations, they are always coherent and plausible, but the chain of causal relations makes it evident how fragile these models typically are.” The World Bank report’s fundamental misdiagnosis of the challenges Lesotho faced formed the basis for a series of failed “development initiatives”, most notably the Thaba-Tseka Development Project, a joint venture funded by the Canadian International Development Agency, the World Bank, the Government of Lesotho, and the UK Overseas Development Ministry. The project focused on providing technical solutions to the “problems” the World Bank report had identified: better agricultural techniques, easier access to markets, and increased government capacity to provide public goods. Each piece faced serious problems in execution, largely because interventions shown to have the sorts of “positive effects” randomized experiments might demonstrate elsewhere in Africa were not necessarily well suited to Lesotho’s unforgiving, mountainous terrain. But even more seriously, the project was so enveloped in “development discourse” that nobody thought to question whether they were working on problems their “recipients” cared about, or merely the ones the “tools of development” were capable of solving. As Ferguson writes, “The promise that crop farming could be revolutionized through the application of a well-known package of technical inputs was so firmly written into the project’s design that it was difficult for those on the scene to challenge it, or even to confront it.” Perhaps the only thing that has changed since Ferguson wrote is that we have tools to better identify these failures: the development literature continues to be littered with failed trials and interventions based on unchecked assumptions. One of the most famous is the British Department for International Development’s 90 million pound Tuungane project, whose Congolese incarnation sought to rebuild village governing institutions that the country’s civil war had destroyed. One of the most convincing explanations of its failure is that it may not have been necessary to begin with: the implementers do not seem to have checked whether the institutions had actually been weakened by violence, and baseline reports indicated that residents were relatively satisfied with village governance before the project even started! More research is needed to clarify the situation -- research which might have been useful to carry out before spending a £90 million on a “fix”. Part of this, perhaps, comes from the usual overconfidence that other social scientists like to accuse economists of. But there are much bigger systemic problems at play. Development work tends to run on short timelines: grad students and postdocs need to publish quickly for their careers to advance, NGO funding runs on 5-ish year cycles, and charities (particularly in “high-risk” areas) face extremely high employee turnover rates. This simultaneously limits the accumulation of institutional knowledge, while incentivizing practitioners away from the time-intensive process of understanding a particular context in favor of “getting results quick.” Similarly, the recent introduction of experimental evidence to the development field is a wondrous thing, but the revolution has to continue: randomized experiments can tell us about the effect an intervention had somewhere, but even the best methods of applying this kind of evidence to a specific context remain somewhat arbitrary and subjective. As EA begins to fund more complex (but potentially more effective) interventions, a key step will be to get a more systematic handle on how to gather evidence about specific places-- countries, states, even villages -- and how to match the tools we have to people who might benefit from them. II. The Trouble with Technocrats “But even if the project was in some sense a ‘failure’ as an agricultural development project, it is indisputable that many of its ‘side effects’ had a powerful and far-reaching impact on the Thaba-Tseka region. [...] Indeed, it may be that in a place like Mashai, the most visible of all the project’s effects was the indirect one of increased Government military presence in the region” As the program continued to unfold, the development officials became more and more disillusioned -- not with their own choices, but with the people of Thaba-Tseka, who they perceived as petty, apathetic, and outright self-destructive. A project meant to provide firewood failed because locals kept breaking into the woodlots and uprooting the saplings. An experiment in pony-breeding fell apart when “unknown parties” drove the entire herd of ponies off of cliffs to their deaths. Why, Ferguson’s official contacts bemoaned, weren’t the people of Thaba-Tseka committed to their own “development”? Who could possibly be opposed to trees and horses? Perhaps, the practitioners theorized, the people of Thaba-Tseka were just lazy. Perhaps they “didn’t want to be better.” Perhaps they weren’t in their right mind or had made a mistake. Perhaps poverty makes a person do strange things. Or, as Ferguson points out, perhaps their anger had something to do with the fact that the best plots of land in the village had been forcibly confiscated to make room for wood and pony lots, without any sort of compensation. The central government was all too happy to help find land for the projects, which they took from political enemies and put in the control of party elites, especially when it could use a legitimate anti-poverty program as cover. In Ferguson’s words, the development project was functioning as an “anti-politics machine” the government could use to pretend political power moves were just “objective” solutions to technical problems. A local student’s term paper captured the general discontent: “In spite of the superb aim of helping the people to become self-reliant, the first thing the project did was to take their very good arable land. When the people protested about their fields being taken, the project promised them employment. [...] It employed them for two months, found them unfit for the work, and dismissed them. Without their fields and without employment they may turn up to be very self-reliant. It is rather hard to know.” Two things stand out to me from this story. First, the “development discourse” lens served to focus the practitioners’ attention on a handful of technical variables (quantity of wood, quality of pony), and kept them from thinking about any repercussions they hadn’t thought to measure. This is a serious problem, because “negative effects on things that aren’t your primary outcome” are pretty common in the development literature. High-paying medical NGOs can pull talent away from government jobs. Foreign aid can worsen ongoing conflicts. Unconditional cash transfers can hurt neighbors who didn’t receive the cash. And the literature we have is implicitly conditioned on “only examining the variables academics have thought to look at” -- surely our tools have rendered other effects completely invisible! Second, the project organizers somewhat naively ignored the political goals of the government they’d partnered with, and therefore the extent to which these goals were shaping the project. Lesotho’s recent political history had been tumultuous. The Basotho Nationalist Party (BNP), having gained power upon independence in 1965, refused to give up power after losing the 1970 elections to the Basotho Congress Party (BCP). Blaming the election results on “communists”, BNP Prime Minister Leabua Jonathan declared a state of emergency and began a campaign of terror, raiding the homes of opposition figures and funding paramilitary groups to intimidate, arrest, and potentially kill anyone who spoke up against BNP rule. This had significant effects in Thaba-Tseka, where “villages [...] were sharply divided over politics, but it was not a thing which was discussed openly” due to a fully justified fear of violence. The BNP, correctly sensing the presence of a substantial underground opposition, placed “development committees” in each village, which served primarily as local wings of the national party. These committees spied on potential supporters of the now-outlawed BCP and had deep connections to paramilitary “police” units. When the Thaba-Tseka Development Project started, its international backers partnered directly with the BNP leadership, reasoning that sustainable development and public goods provision could only happen through a government whose role they primarily viewed as bureaucratic. As a result, nearly every decision had to make its way through the village development committees, who used the project to pursue their own goals: jobs and project funds found their way primarily to BNP supporters, while the “necessary costs of development” always seemed to be paid by opposition figures. The funding coalition ended up paying for a number of projects that reinforced BNP power, from establishing a new “district capital” (which conveniently also served as a military base) to constructing new and better roads linking Thaba-Tseka to the district and national capitals (primarily helping the central government tax and police an opposition stronghold). Anything that could be remotely linked to “economic development” became part of the project as funders and practitioners failed to ask whether government power might have alternate, more concerning effects. As we saw earlier, the population being “served” saw this much more clearly than the “servants”, and started to rebel against a project whose “help” seemed to be aimed more at consolidating BNP control than meeting their own needs. When they ultimately resorted to killing ponies and uprooting trees, project officials infatuated with “development” were left with “no idea why people would do such a thing,” completely oblivious to the real and lasting harm their “purely technical decisions” had inflicted. Have any EA projects had this sort of unexpected political side effect? I think it’s genuinely hard to tell without further research, but the possibility is frightening. (There’s been a little bit of research on the quantitative side --Recent research has found, for instance, that GiveDirectly’s 2014 unconditional cash transfer trial increased community participation but did not change voting patterns, so at least in 2014 the Kenyan government wasn’t using the program to stay in power. Was this the right question to test? I am not sure, especially without a more qualitative survey to see if there are other avenues we should be worried about.) III. Takeaways for Effective Altruism So what do we do as effective altruists (hereafter “EAs”)? I see three key takeaways. The first is a clear need for more qualitative research. GiveWell makes some qualitative judgments about charities, but Ferguson’s work illustrates the need for qualitative evaluation of the interventions themselves to see if the underlying studies have captured all of the “right” variables. Randomized experiments are really good at testing hypotheses, but by their very nature they can’t tell you about variables you didn’t decide ahead of time to measure. Are there significant side effects (positive or negative) we’ve missed from massive malaria net distributions? I don’t know, but if so they are not likely to be discovered by a bunch of Americans and Europeans sitting in a room and trying to guess the best things to measure. Rather, they’re probably already known (or suspected) by the people experiencing them, and a first step to finding out is going and asking them. (A second step is finding the right people to ask them -- real expertise in qualitative research is a rare and valuable skill.) Of course, qualitative research is messy and sometimes the people you interview are wrong or have other agendas. So once we have an “on-the-ground” hypothesis or concern, there will often be good reason to use a randomized trial or quasi-experimental method to test it or try to understand how much of a concern it might be! This sort of interdisciplinary approach is starting to gain traction in academia, but it has yet to be seriously applied in the EA sphere. There’s another angle to this: Ferguson’s most incisive insights arise not from studying the people being “served”, but by studying the development practitioners themselves. Other social scientists have continued this trend, from McGovern’s An Anthropologist Among the Mandarins and Robinson’s How Different Social Scientists Think to Marchais, Bazuzi, and Lameke’s The Data is Gold, and We Are The Gold-Diggers and Omar Bah’s webcomic Mzungus in Development and Governments. Each new paper illuminates the research process in new ways, and provides tools both to do better research and to identify potential weaknesses in the pre-existing literature. I think one of the highest impact investments an Effective Altruist fund could make right now would be to hire a handful of trained anthropologists (or other outside experts in qualitative research / ethnography) to hang out in places like GiveWell or the Machine Intelligence Research Institute for a few years and really study how effective altruism works as a system. How are decisions being made, and how is evidence being used to make them? What does “EA discourse” help make visible and which problems and concerns does it hide from our view? How do the positionalities of typical EA researchers affect their views of what’s important or what’s plausible? I have my guesses, and I’m sure you have yours. But I had my guesses about development economics, too, and I missed nearly everything Ferguson (and the authors mentioned two paragraphs up) uncovered. What more are we missing? The second is an emphasis on local context. As funding gaps for “low hanging fruit” like malaria disappear, EA is going to have to focus on more complicated interventions, which are likely to be fairly context-specific -- after all, why should an agriculture program that works in the flattest parts of the Sahel be expected to work the same way in the Maloti Mountains? Ferguson notes about several of the Thaba-Tseka project’s failed arms: “Tanzania may be very different from Lesotho on the ground, but, from the point of view of a development agency’s head office, both may be simply ‘the Africa desk’. In the Thaba-Tseka case, at least, the original project planners knew little about Lesotho’s specific history, politics, and sociology; they were experts on ‘livestock development in Africa,’ and drew largely on experience in East Africa.” For any sort of context-specific intervention to work, an intimate knowledge of the specific history, needs, and geography of individual villages and regions is necessary. The development world has slowly made steps in this direction, but it’s not clear to me that the EA community has a clear way of acquiring, accessing, or working with this information. I don’t think there’s a magic bullet to solve this problem, but in the long run any solution will probably need to involve a) on-the-ground, qualitative research and b) real representation in the EA network from areas EA organizations are interested in working. The development industry has a shameful history of infantilizing and ignoring the opinions of “locals”, and I think the conversations I’m starting to see in EA about diversity and representation of different parts of the Global South need to continue if we’re going to get enough serious knowledge of local contexts to effectively direct funding. The third is a continued need to take politics seriously. This is one of the most challenging issues in charitable giving: when is it okay to work with a government doing terrible things to deliver humanitarian aid? To what extent does an NGO feeding the hungry lend its legitimacy to or cover for an authoritarian regime’s misdeeds? I don’t have anything close to a full answer (and I don’t think anyone does), but Ferguson’s work exposes a possibility I hadn’t thought of before, in which “technical” and “apolitical” projects can expand the power of the state in unforeseen and potentially dangerous ways. After writing The Anti-Politics Machine, Ferguson largely gave up on the idea of charitable or state-based aid. (Understandably, I think, given that he spent most of a decade watching its most horrific side effects first-hand). It’s ironic, then, that I think his book’s practical value is greatest to those of us who still hold onto hope in its possibilities. May we have ears to hear the voices telling us where our work has fallen short, and eyes to see what it could become. Footnotes Ferguson pg. 55

Inline links: pull talent, worsen, hurt, some, An Anthropologist Among the Mandarins, How Different Social Scientists Think, The Data is Gold, and We Are The Gold-Diggers, Mzungus in Development and Governments

August 28, 2022 · Original source

The Anti-Politics Machine (how development aid goes wrong)

Inline links: The Anti-Politics Machine

September 02, 2022 · Original source

The Anti-Politics Machine, reviewed by Colin Aitken. Colin is a PhD student in Chicago. He blogs at All of it Again about religion, mental health, and effective altruism

Inline links: The Anti-Politics Machine, All of it Again

The Case Against Education4 mentions across 4 issues

The Case Against Education is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between February 18, 2021 and June 27, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Bryan Caplan's The Case Against Education"; "I’m not going throw out my copy of The Case Against Education just yet"; "There’s been renewed debate around Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education recently". It most often appears alongside Bryan Caplan, 1984, Bay Area.

Article page: The Case Against Education
Mention count: 4
Issue count: 4
First seen: February 18, 2021
Last seen: June 27, 2025
Book title: The Case Against Education

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: The Cult Of Smart February 18, 2021
Links For February February 22, 2022
A Theoretical "Case Against Education" May 23, 2024
Your Review: Alpha School June 27, 2025

Bryan Caplan 3 shared issues
1984 2 shared issues
Bay Area 2 shared issues
Montessori 2 shared issues
No Child Left Behind 2 shared issues

Source context

A Theoretical "Case Against Education"

February 18, 2021 · Original source

The Cult Of Smart invites comparisons with Bryan Caplan's The Case Against Education. Both use largely the same studies to argue that education doesn't do as much as we thought. Caplan very reasonably thinks maybe that means we should have less education. DeBoer...definitely doesn't think that:

Links For February

February 22, 2022 · Original source

...ency matters a great deal for AGI timelines and takeoff speeds, as AGI is implicitly/explicitly defined in terms of brain parity.” 23: I’m not going throw out my copy of The Case Against Education just yet - I haven’t checked this study but I bet there are lots of possible confounders. Still, this would be fun for somebody more interested to analyze in depth: 24:...

.... “Why should we care? Brain efficiency matters a great deal for AGI timelines and takeoff speeds, as AGI is implicitly/explicitly defined in terms of brain parity.” 23: I’m not going throw out my copy of The Case Against Education just yet - I haven’t checked this study but I bet there are lots of possible confounders. Still, this would be fun for somebody more interested to analyze in depth: 24: Best of S...

May 23, 2024 · Original source

There’s been renewed debate around Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education recently, so I want to discuss one way I think about this question.

Your Review: Alpha School

June 27, 2025 · Original source

Why this time might be different: Most promising educational initiatives fail to have impact when expanded beyond their initial studies. Bryan Caplan might argue this is because most education education is just signaling anyway (“The Case Against Education”). He also argues that most parental interventions have no impact (“Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids”) – He claims that how kids turn out is a combination of genetics and non-shared environment (randomness; nothing to do with parenting choices). How can we reconcile Caplan’s buttoned-up data with the idea that the “parenting choice” to educate your kids differently (like with Alpha) might result in different outcomes than would be expected from genetics alone? WHY could Alpha work?

Inline links: The Case Against Education, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids

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

The Educated Mind4 mentions across 4 issues

The Educated Mind is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between September 08, 2023 and May 30, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "9 : The Educated Mind"; "1st: The Educated Mind , reviewed by Brandon Hendrickson"; "Brandon wrote about Kieran Egan’s The Educated Mind". It most often appears alongside Brandon Hendrickson, Kieran Egan, Lying For Money.

Article page: The Educated Mind
Mention count: 4
Issue count: 4
First seen: September 08, 2023
Last seen: May 30, 2025
Book title: The Educated Mind
Likely author: Brandon Hendrickson

Outbound links

Issue trail

Vote In The 2023 Book Review Contest September 08, 2023
Book Review Contest 2023 Winners September 15, 2023
Your Book Review: Silver Age Marvel Comics August 16, 2024
Bayes For Everyone May 30, 2025

Brandon Hendrickson 3 shared issues
Kieran Egan 2 shared issues
Lying For Money 2 shared issues
Njal’s Saga 2 shared issues
On the Marble Cliffs 2 shared issues

Source context

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

Your Book Review: Silver Age Marvel Comics

September 15, 2023 · Original source

1st: The Educated Mind, reviewed by Brandon Hendrickson. Brandon is the founder of Science is WEIRD, a sprawling online science course that helps kids fall in love with the world. He’s also re-imagining what education can be at his Substack, The Lost Tools of Learning (losttools.substack.com).

Inline links: The Educated Mind, Science is WEIRD, losttools.substack.com

August 16, 2024 · Original source

Given Marvel Comics, why Silver Age (1961-1965)? I.a. Why Superhero Comic Books? The winner of last year’s Astral Codex Ten book review contest was Brandon Hendrickson. Brandon wrote about Kieran Egan’s The Educated Mind. One of the foundations of Egan’s educational philosophy is that people learn through stories. He believes early education should focus on teaching lessons through myths and legends. This matches my experience. My kids’ favorite podcast is Greeking Out – a very well produced, very entertaining, National Geographic podcast about Greek Legends. Aside #1: When my oldest daughter was three years old she would ask everyone she met “Do you know any myths? Can you tell me a myth?” She especially liked asking people from different places to get myths from their local cultures. Once, she asked the question to a friend of mine who grew up in South Africa, “Can you tell me any South African myths?” He struggled for a minute and then said, “Okay! I have one! Bread never falls butter side down!”. That was not the type of myth she was looking for; nor the type of myth we will be discussing in this review. Every culture has foundational myths. These stories are entertaining and engaging, but they also teach valuable lessons about both what is important in that culture, and how people in that culture are expected to behave (or at least the Platonic Ideal of how they should behave). In the modern, Western world, we have assimilated many of these foundational stories, particularly the Greek myths. My kids definitely know the Greek myths, but they also know elements of Norse mythology, Egyptian myths, stories about Anasi from West Africa and more. More fundamentally my wife and I, while not religious ourselves, have made a point of exposing the kids to the stories from the Bible. It is not politically correct to call Biblical stories “myths”, but they serve the same purpose – shared cultural understanding of the way the world works. My wife grew up without any religion, and when she was in high school, she struggled with the metaphors and religious allegories that were omnipresent in most of the Western canon. In our culture, familiarity with the Bible is important for an educated person – whether they are religious or not – because it is the foundation of so much of the rest of our culture. I believe the other set of mythological stories that are foundational to our culture are – and by this point I am sure you see where I am going here – comic book superheroes. If true, then having more than a surface-level understanding of the most important superhero stories is important in a similar way to that knowing the Bible stories is important. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is an important idea to understand. So is, “With great power comes great responsibility”. I.b. Why Marvel? While there are many independent superheroes that are not owned by major conglomerates, the superheroes who have built our modern foundational myths are currently owned by two corporations. Warner Bros. Discover owns the DC library of superheroes including Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. In 2009 Disney purchased Marvel Comics and took ownership of their characters, including Spiderman, X-men and the Avengers. Aside #2: Marvel has sold temporary film rights to many of their characters over the years. The most relevant sales started in 1994 when Marvel sold the film rights of X-men and mutants to 20th century Fox, then in 1996, when Marvel went bankrupt, Fox picked up the rights to the Fantastic Four (and New Line picked up Blade). In 1999 Marvel sold the film rights (and live action TV, and animated TV longer than 44 minutes) of Spider-man and related characters to Columbia Pictures (part of Sony) for $7MM. Marvel actually attempted to sell ALL of their remaining Marvel IP film rights to Sony for $25MM, but the top management at Sony was not interested. Sony’s management allegedly told their chief negotiator “Nobody gives a shi*t about any of the other Marvel characters. Go back and do a deal for only Spider-Man). Disney acquired Marvel in 2009, and then Fox in 2019, bringing the two separated packages of characters all back together under one roof (Blade reverted back to Marvel in 2012). Sony still owns the rights to Spider-man but has made a deal with Disney to include some of his films within the Marvel-Disney universe. Marvel sold the film rights of The Hulk to Universal in 1990 and the current status of that agreement is complicated (the consensus is that Marvel now controls the film rights to the character, but Universal owns distribution rights to any stand-alone Hulk film, which could be why Disney let's Hulk co-star in Thor movies, but not vice versa). In the early aughts Marvel wanted to build their own film franchise, but were limited to only using their remaining “B-list” characters – Spider-man, X-men, and the Fantastic Four were all off limits. Fortunately, Kevin Feige, president of production for Marvel at the time, saw a way forward. He convinced Ike Perlmutter, Marvel CEO, to allow for the production of a series of films with the remaining characters begining with Iron Man (2008). Jon Favreau directed and cast Robert Downey Jr as Tony Stark. The film blew away expectations. Kevin’s plan of a series of movies where the characters would interconnect was suddenly feasible. Iron Man was followed by The Incredible Hulk, Thor, and Captain America: The First Avenger. None managed the box office magic of Iron Man, but all were successful enough that the plan stayed on track. In 2012 the characters were all brought together in the first Avengers film, which opened to over $200MM domestically and went on to gross more than $1.5B (which made it the 3rd highest grossing film of all time). Marvel became the first studio to take the interconnected world of their comic books and make the model work on the big screen (for a much larger audience). Once the model was proven to work, other studios tried to duplicate it. Aside #3: Warner Bros’ stumbles with the DC shared universe of Batman, Superman and the Justice League are well known, but that was actually their SECOND attempt at a shared universe. Their first attempt tried to copy the Marvel method more closely. They chose their own B-list hero and set up his first film to allow for a wider mythology. Alas Green Lantern (2011) failed at the box office and we never got stand-alone films about Sinestro (Yellow Lantern), Carol Ferris (Star Sapphire, the Violet Lantern), John Stewart (African American Green Lantern), Kyle Rayner (1990s Green Lantern), Alan Scott (original Green Lantern), or the Blue, Red, and Orange Lantern Corps. At least so far, no studio has successfully created anything with close to the traction obtained by the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Warner’s DC Extended universe (DCEU) had trifling success, but is being shelved and rebooted for a fresh attempt next year. Universal’s attempt at a “Dark Universe” kicked off with Tom Cruise in The Mummy (2017), but was dead on arrival. Paramount’s attempt to link the Transformers Universe to GI Joe at the end of Transformers: Rise of the Beasts has been appropriately mocked. Sony’s Spider-man films linked to the MCU have been very successful, but their attempt at a stand-alone non-MCU Spider-man universe using Spider-man’s villains as anti-heroes has floundered (mostly succeeding only as a source of memes). Next Mattel will be attempting to build a universe off the success of last year’s Barbie and may include Polly Pocket, American Girl, Hot Wheels, and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (no word yet on Thomas the Tank Engine, View Master and the Magic-8 Ball, but all are apparently in development). To date, only Marvel has successfully built a “Cinematic Universe”. One potential reason for the MCU’s success is that Kevin Feige built his cinematic universe on the back of the existing interconnected universe of the comics. But those comics were not the first interconnected universe of stories. For that we would need to go back to our foundational myths. The Bible stories mostly interconnect. Adam and Eve flows into Cain and Abel. David and Goliath leads to the Wisdom of Solomon. Greek Myths DEFINITELY interconnect. Supporting characters in one Greek myth have starring roles in their own stories. The Greek pantheon of tales even have their own version of the Avengers. In the Quest for the Golden Fleece, Jason brings together the Argonauts, who included in their number Theseus (who defeated the Minotaur), Orpheus (who braved the underworld) and Hercules himself – all A-list stars in their own “franchises”. Stand alone stories that exist within an interconnected universe are rare in modern media but were common in the ancient myths that have stood the test of time. Only Marvel has successfully created a shared universe that follows the pattern of ancient myths. Only Marvel films have stand-alone stories and protagonists who exist together in an interconnected world. Something about that method of storytelling is deeply pleasing for humans across many cultures. Marvel films are the first and most successful modern version of the mythological universe, and that it is worth spending more time exploring Marvel’s underlying mythology and where it came from. I.c. Why 1961? The origins of Christianity and Judaism (and Buddhism and Hinduism) are very murky. Even Islam is far enough in the past that we only have a very rough understanding of how it came to exist. When scholars want to understand in detail how a new religion is born they are far better to look at Mormonism or, if you accept it as a religion, Dianetics. Similarly, we have versions of Greek myths that have been passed down to us, but we can never know how those myths changed from their first telling to their “final” versions. Were the stories once unrelated, and only later became crafted into a single “universe”? Or were the stories built off each other one by one (“Dad that Golden Fleece story was amazing! Do you know any other stories about the Hercules guy?”)? Or was it something in between? Perhaps the stories all existed independently, but were later crafted together (“Remember that 12-labors story I told you? Actually that was the same guy who was on the Argo!”) Unlike Greek legends, we can know the origin of the Marvel Universe. We can see how it was constructed step-by-step. The people who did it (most importantly Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko) are dead now, but they have not been dead for long. We can read the original work, see how it changed over the last 60 years, and we can ask the creators “what were you thinking at the time” (or at least read their answers from old interviews). We can’t always trust what Stan Lee says, but at least we can hear his point of view. No one has a transcript of an interview with Homer, or knows exactly what he was thinking when he called it the “wine-dark sea”. Tl;dr: Why read about Marvel Comic superheroes 1961-1965? Because interconnected mythological stories are very important to cultures, Marvel is the leading contender of the most recent modern mythology, and it originated in the first half-decade of the 1960s. II. How did Marvel Superhero Comics happen? Timely Comics published their first comic book in 1939 and called it “Marvel Comics”. Their most popular World War II comics included Captain America, the Human Torch (an android unrelated to the modern Human Torch except in powers, appearance and name), and Namor, the Submariner. In the early 1950s superheroes became less popular, so Timely changed its name to Atlas Comics and focused on humor, western, horror, war and science fiction stories. But in 1956 DC Comics began re-introducing their Golden Age superheroes and, in the second half of the 1950s, the genre took off again – particularly Superman, whose title, Action Comics, became the number one selling comic in America. Stan Lee, editor and chief at Atlas at the time, wanted to get in on the superhero action. Unfortunately in 1957 Atlas lost its distributor and the company had to rely on “Independent News” to get its comics on newsstands. The complication was that Independent News was owned by “National Periodical Publications”, who also owned DC-comics and did not want Atlas to introduce superheroes to compete with Superman, Green Lantern and the Flash. Independent News agreed to distribute Atlas comics but limited the publisher to eight titles per month, and only in non-super hero genres (like horror, romance and science fiction). Blocked from creating and launching new superhero titles, Stan Lee got creative, and in August 1961 Atlas Comics published Fantastic Four #1. Aside #4: Fantastic Four #1 was on newsstands in August 8th, 1961, but the date on the cover was November 1961. The convention at the time was that the cover date was not the “publication date” but rather the “pull date”. The pull date was the time when the retailer could send back unsold copies back to the publisher for a refund. In fact the retailer did not need to send the entire issue back, just the cover, as it was assumed that comic books could not be sold without the cover, and it saved on postage. This was only relevant because it was great for my dad who was a child at the time. My dad was friends with the kid whose father owed the local pharmacy which meant he had access to every comic book published in the late 1950s as long as he was willing to wait a few months and read it without a cover. Going forward in this essay I will always use the pull dates rather than the publication dates for individual comic book issues as they are far easier to source. If you want to convert pull dates back into publication dates you can subtract roughly two months, but it is inconsistent and sometimes longer, as was the case with Fantastic Four #1. Check out the cover of Fantastic Four #1: To the modern eye this certainly looks like a superhero comic. Four heroes with super powers fighting a giant monster. But in the eyes of publishers in 1961 this looked more like a science fiction adventure comic than something that would go head to head with Superman. Here are the covers of Action Comics (the best selling superhero comic at the time) from the three months leading up to Fantastic Four #1: Notice what they have in common? “Super Rivals”, “Super revenge”, “Super Substitutes”. And all include Superman in his blue and red tights. Fantastic Four’s cover featured super powers, but never used the word “super” and no one was wearing superhero costumes. Fantastic Four, as a superhero story, slipped under the radar because it wasn’t really a superhero story at all. It was a story about four close friends who attempted to fly into space, but then something goes wrong and they crash back to Earth. The experience changes them and they decide they now need to use their new abilities to help the rest of humanity – specifically against monsters who are invading from under the Earth. It is a fantastical science fiction story – not a superhero story. Later in his career Jack Kirby, the illustrator of the issue and co-creator of the Fantastic Four, was asked about his inspiration for the Fantastic Four heroes. He did NOT say Superman – or any superhero. He said Challengers of the Unknown. Challengers of the Unknown was an adventure story co-created by Kirby in Showcase #6 in February 1957. Here is how Wikipedia describes the Challengers origin: When acquaintances miraculously survive a plane crash unscathed, they conclude that since they are "living on borrowed time" they should band together for hazardous adventures. The four—pilot Kyle "Ace" Morgan, daredevil Matthew "Red" Ryan, strong and slow-witted Leslie "Rocky" Davis, and scientist Walter Mark "Prof" Haley—became the Challengers of the Unknown. Showcase #6, and the first appearance of the Challengers of the Unknown, by Jack Kirby Visually the Challengers and the Fantastic Four were similar. Both wore skin tight uniforms with belts and minimal decoration. The Fantastic Four’s relatively simple characterizations were practically pulled from Challengers. Reed takes on the traits of both Kyle, the leader, and Walter, the scientist. Johnny, the Human Torch is the daredevil. The Thing is “strong and slow-witted”. Sue, the only woman on the team, seems like a new addition, but is likely based on June Robbins who joined the Challengers team in Showcase #7, as an “honorary” or “girl-Challenger”. After surviving their respective “miraculous” crashes, both the Challengers and the Fantastic Four band together to help the world. They both travel through space and other dimensions, fighting mad scientists and monsters. The Fantastic Four’s early antagonists were not traditional super villains. In the first few issues they fight monsters from under the Earth (Issue #1), shape changing aliens (#2), and a charlatan who uses hypnotism to steal from his audience (#3). In issue #4 Kirby and Lee re-introduce Namor, the Submariner, one of Marvel’s top IP from the 1940s, and have him kidnap Sue. Only in Issue #5 and #6 (June and August 1962) and do we get a more standard-supervillain when Dr Doom attempts to steal the Fantastic Four headquarters and throw it into space. The next superhero Lee created was even less heroic than the Fantastic Four. In April 1962 (pull date), Marvel published The Incredible Hulk. If it was even a superhero story in disguise it was a very good disguise. The story was a scientific-filtered version of Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde. It was a pure monster-story with nothing very super about it. Nothing on the cover suggests this has anything to do with superheroes: It is not clear if even Lee at the time thought the Hulk would be a superhero. In Fantastic Four #5 Johnny is reading a “great new comic mag” and mocks the Thing by comparing him to the Hulk. It seems pretty clear at this point that in the Fantastic Four’s world, the Hulk is just a fictional comic book, like in ours (more on that later): The other two superheroes the Marvel introduces in this period have even more subtle introductions. At the time Marvel had a number of generic-sounding titles and told science fiction and fantasy stand-alone stories: Tales to Astonish

Inline links: The Educated Mind, Greeking Out, Nobody gives a shi*t about any of the other Marvel characters. Go back and do a deal for only Spider-Man, Dark Universe, appropriately mocked, memes, attempting to build a universe, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!MbHP!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F63b4711e-2248-4120-897e-bba8a595a28b_405x616.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!OCj5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9afeb585-b58b-4932-8702-153b4fdf135d_619x305.png, Wikipedia, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!OzTl!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F49fd3582-b5bd-4567-b5e9-cca46c1f1c49_425x615.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!lfiM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc23c3ad1-5fed-4063-8ac2-d9d89e69bee6_252x398.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!oV4t!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F346f85d9-580b-4eb2-b91c-3422003613d5_591x572.png

Bayes For Everyone

May 30, 2025 · Original source

[Editor’s note: I accept guest posts from certain people, especially past Book Review Contest winners. Brandon Hendrickson, whose review of The Educated Mind won the 2023 contest, has taken me up on this and submitted this essay. He writes at The Lost Tools of Learning and will be at LessOnline this weekend, where he and Jack Despain Zhou aka TracingWoodgrains will be doing a live conversation about education.]

Inline links: review of The Educated Mind, The Lost Tools of Learning, LessOnline

The Future of Fusion Energy4 mentions across 4 issues

The Future of Fusion Energy is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between June 17, 2022 and September 02, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Future of Fusion Energy is the best introduction to fusion that I know"; "If you want to learn more about fusion, I highly recommend The Future of Fusion Energy"; "Sam Altman writes in to say he enjoyed the recent book review of The Future Of Fusion Energy". It most often appears alongside Consciousness and the Brain, God Emperor of Dune, Helion.

Article page: The Future of Fusion Energy
Mention count: 4
Issue count: 4
First seen: June 17, 2022
Last seen: September 02, 2022
Book title: The Future of Fusion Energy
Likely author: TheChaostician

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: The Future Of Fusion Energy June 17, 2022
Open Thread 232 July 10, 2022
Open Thread 239 August 28, 2022
Book Review Contest 2022 Winners September 02, 2022

Consciousness and the Brain 2 shared issues
God Emperor of Dune 2 shared issues
Helion 2 shared issues
Jimmy Carter 2 shared issues
Kora In Hell 2 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: The Future Of Fusion Energy

June 17, 2022 · Original source

The Future of Fusion Energy is the best introduction to fusion that I know. I can confirm that the information it contains is common knowledge among plasma physicists. My parents, who are not physicists [2], can confirm that it is accessible and interesting to read.

Things are changing fast in fusion right now, and The Future of Fusion Energy is already out of date in some important ways. I will summarize our quest for fusion as it is portrayed in the book, describe what has happened in the field since 2018, and make some predictions about where we go from here. The predictions are my own and do not reflect the opinions of Parisi or Ball.

Figure 9: There are three people in this diagram. Can you find them? ITER is designed to get Q=10. Despite getting 10 times as much energy from fusion as we put into the plasma, ITER is not designed to get engineering breakeven. ITER is designed as an experiment, not as a power plant. There will be tons of measuring devices pointed inwards. There are four different ways to heat the plasma and drive the current. This all allows you to learn more, but it requires extra power and lowers the overall plant efficiency. ITER will be followed by a demonstration power plant, named DEMO [15]. A fully optimized power plant should be able to reach engineering breakeven as long as Q>5. This is why I chose Q=5 as my criterion for ‘getting fusion’. ITER is also testing multiple designs for the tritium breeding blanket. Tritium is expensive and radioactive, so you want to produce it on site. The D-T fusion reaction produces a neutron, which we want to absorb, so we can use it to produce tritium. ‘Breeding' is when we use a neutron to produce a more useful isotope. It is a ‘blanket' because it surrounds the entire plasma, keeping the neutrons from going anywhere else. The best reaction to produce tritium involves lithium-6: 36Li +01n 24He +13T . This reaction also releases energy, which increases the power produced by about 25%. The tritium breeding blanket needs to make this reaction occur as much as possible, to efficiently carry the heat away so it can be used to generate electricity, and to provide a way to extract the tritium produced. ITER is scheduled to begin their first experiments in 2025. Part of why I think that we are about to make rapid progress again is because we are finally getting a large experiment. There have been problems with ITER staying on schedule and under budget. This isn't surprising for a collaboration between governments representing over half the world's population. In 2014, ITER got a new director, recalculated its expected cost, and underwent a major restructuring. Since then, ITER has largely stuck to this schedule and budget. Recently, there has been a 6 month delay because the French nuclear agency did what nuclear regulatory agencies do best, but this has been the longest delay since 2014. It is still possible for ITER to fail. The biggest risk involves disruptions. Sometimes, the plasma in a tokamak becomes unstable and all of the plasma hits the wall at once. This could melt some extremely expensive equipment and take years to repair. If ITER cannot get disruptions under control, then it would be a failed experiment. This is especially challenging because pushing for higher Q makes disruptions more likely. ITER is planning on being extremely cautious: Experiments begin in 2025, but it won't operate at full capacity until 2035. ITER has been the focus of the fusion community now for decades. The Future of Fusion Energy similarly makes ITER the centerpiece of the book. Things. Have. Changed. ITER by itself is not enough to justify the high level of confidence I express at the start. When Parisi & Ball finished writing this book in April 2018, ITER was basically the only game in town. Since then, Things. Have. Changed. Historically, private fusion companies were almost entirely jokes or frauds. They make outlandish claims, use completely different designs so they can't build on the progress of Figure 3, and they can be safely ignored. For example, Lockheed Martin [16] claims that it will take them five years to build a prototype of a fusion power plant that will fit in a truck. They have yet to publish evidence that they have produced a fully ionized plasma. Maybe they're just being secretive, but their design has solid components in the plasma. That won't work. A new generation of private companies have surged into fusion. Leading the charge is Commonwealth Fusion Systems and their tokamak SPARC [17]. Recent advances in high temperature superconductors have been a game changer. They can produce a much stronger magnetic field which allows for better confinement in a smaller experiment. We should now be able to get Q=10 in a medium experiment, which costs ten times less than ITER [18] and is within the reach of private venture capital. Figure 10: Finding the person here is much easier. When the Department of Energy decided to close the third largest plasma experiment in the US, the MIT group which ran it found itself adrift. They founded Commonwealth Fusion Systems in 2018 with a goal of getting fusion within 10 years [19]. Since then, they have built the first ever high temperature superconducting coil in 2019, released their engineering plans for SPARC in 2020, began construction in 2021, and plan on finishing construction in 2025. Commonwealth Fusion had just been founded when Parisi & Ball wrote in 2018. Now they're leading the race to fusion. Several other startups are following SPARC's strategy of using stronger magnetic fields to get fusion in a smaller experiment. They use a variety of designs. Alternative Designs To understand how the alternative designs are different, we need to make sure we understand the basic strategy for getting fusion in a tokamak. Let's run through it again: (A) We want to get lots of fusion reactions … … so we want a large triple product (density * temperature * confinement time). (B) The fusion plasma is too hot to touch solid objects … … so we put it in a magnetic bottle shaped like a doughnut. (C) The particles drift outwards, leaving the bottle … … so we twist the magnetic field with a current in the plasma. I will start with the alternatives that are most similar to a tokamak. For each one, I will list the best experiments that currently exist, where they're located, and the year they began operation. Tokamaks have been better researched than any other strategy. There are currently 10 medium tokamaks: T-10 (Russia, 1975)

Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!n_7L!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F80bdc472-0b30-4841-8b08-9527c70f16f4_820x369.jpeg

Open Thread 232

July 10, 2022 · Original source

2: Speaking of turning money into big positive impacts on the future, Sam Altman writes in to say he enjoyed the recent book review of The Future Of Fusion Energy, and that he predicts Helion (the fusion startup he’s a leading investor in) has a 85% chance of Q > 1 D-T fusion by 2024, and a 65% chance of Q > 1 D-He3 fusion by 2026.

Inline links: book review of, Helion

August 28, 2022 · Original source

The Future Of Fusion Energy

Inline links: The Future Of Fusion Energy

Book Review: Malleus Maleficarum

September 02, 2022 · Original source

=3rd: The Future Of Fusion Energy, reviewed by TheChaostician.

Inline links: The Future Of Fusion Energy, TheChaostician

Kora In Hell, reviewed by Lucas Paletta. Lucas is a writer from Buenos Aires, Argentina. He blogs (in Spanish) at www.stackdamage.com.ar. I really enjoyed all of these. A few notes of special praise: The Internationalists was probably most fascinating, in the sense of describing a strange historical episode I didn’t know about before. The Outlier was similar and I give it high marks for making Jimmy Carter interesting. Consciousness And The Brain was a whole new neuroscience theory I knew nothing about and I expect to reread it a bunch of times to try to get it to sink in. Sam Altman sent me an email saying he enjoyed the review of The Future Of Fusion Energy. The Making Nature review did a great job talking about and analyzing a trend I’d never thought about before, far beyond even what was in the book. I think about Exhaustion every time I see a CFS patient - specifically, about the claim that 19th century psychiatrists would prescribe a “West cure” of going off and doing cowboy things on a ranch; I haven’t yet recommended that to anyone, but like I said, I think about it often. God Emperor of Dune and Kora In Hell were the token fiction and poetry reviews; I thought they did a spectacular job overcoming the difficulties of reviewing their respective media. I was reading some of the non-finalists and found 1587 in there and was surprised it hadn’t reached finalist status and decided to promote it; based on your votes it seems like that was the right choice. My process for picking finalists was kind of haphazard; I had you rate all reviews on a scale of 1-10, anyone above 8 got in automatically, and then I picked my favorites from the reviews between 7 and 8. This was sort of unfair, and meant there were some reviews that scored better on the voting than finalists but weren’t finalists themselves, and others that I liked better than some finalists but couldn’t pick. All of these are Honorable Mentions. You’ll notice some of them are politically charged, and yes, I did sort of discriminate against these (though not so much that I wouldn’t have picked them if they’d made it above 8). They are: Unsettled, reviewed by Julius S. Julius is a machine learning engineer from San Diego. He blogs at Curious About Ideas.

Inline links: Kora In Hell, www.stackdamage.com.ar, Unsettled, Curious About Ideas

The Geography Of Madness4 mentions across 4 issues

The Geography Of Madness is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between October 28, 2022 and May 21, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Frank Bures’ The Geography Of Madness is a great book about recent penis-stealing-witch-related panics"; "The Asian half of The Geography Of Madness has the feel of a nature documentary on penis-stealing witches"; "subtler than The Geography of Madness (or my previous views) suggested". It most often appears alongside China, bouffée délirante, Crazy Like Us.

Article page: The Geography Of Madness
Mention count: 4
Issue count: 4
First seen: October 28, 2022
Last seen: May 21, 2024
Book title: The Geography Of Madness

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: Malleus Maleficarum October 28, 2022
Book Review: The Geography Of Madness February 22, 2023
Highlights From The Comments On Geography Of Madness February 27, 2023
Book Review: The Others Within Us May 21, 2024

China 3 shared issues
bouffée délirante 2 shared issues
Crazy Like Us 2 shared issues
DSM 2 shared issues
Ethan Watters 2 shared issues

Source context

October 28, 2022 · Original source

Did you know: the German name for Malleus Maleficarum is “Der Hexenhammer” His arguments ring hollow to modern ears, and honestly neither God nor the Devil comes out looking very good. God isn’t trying to maximize a 21st century utilitarian view of the Good, He’s trying to maximize His own glory. Allowing some evil helps with this, because then He can justly punish it (and being just is glorious) or mercifully forgive it (and being merciful is also glorious). But, if God let the Devil kill everyone in the world, then there would be no one left to praise God’s glory, plus people might falsely think God couldn’t have stopped the Devil if He’d wanted to. So the glory-maximizing option is to give the Devil some power, but not too much. Meanwhile, the Devil isn’t trying to maximize 21st century utilitarian evil. He’s trying to turn souls away from God. So although he could curse people directly, what he actually wants is for humans to sell their soul to him in exchange for curse powers. So whenever possible he prefers to act through witches. The rest of this part is just corollaries of these basic points. But there sure are a lot of corollaries, like: Question III: Whether Children Can Be Generated By Incubi And Succubi So, we all know that sometimes demons who look like hot men come and have sex with women in the middle of the night. But can these demons make a woman pregnant? It would seem that the answer should be no, because the Bible says God created Man in His own image, which suggests the conception of new humans is pretty holy, which makes it sound kind of blasphemous to suggest demons could do it. On the contrary side, we know that demons can have kids with humans. The Bible says so: Genesis 6 talks about nephilim, children of “the sons of God” by “the daughters of men”. And St. Augustine seems to think all those stories about Greek gods impregnating women were incubus demons. So “it is just as Catholic a view to hold that men may at times be begotten by means of incubi and succubi, as it is contrary to the words of the Saints and even to the tradition of Holy Scripture to maintain the opposite opinion.” Since the incubi cannot produce semen themselves, probably they steal it from some other human, then bring it to the womb of the person they are having sex with. Question VI: Concerning Witches Who Copulate With Devils - Why Is It That Women Are Chiefly Addicted To Evil Superstitions? Why are most witches women? Probably because women are awful: John Chrystotom says . . . what else is woman but a foe to friendship, an unescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil of nature, painted with fair colors! Therefore if it be a sin to divorce her when she ought to be kept, it is indeed a necessary torture, for either we commit adultery by divorcing her, or we must endure daily strife. In fact, the word for woman in Latin is femina, which can also have the form feminus, which is literally just fe minus (lesser in faith)! Because women are less faithful, more carnal, and mentally weaker, they are more easily tempted by the Devil, and make up the majority of witches. Question IX: Whether Witches May Work Some Prestidigitory Illusion So That The Male Organ Appears To Be Entirely Removed And Separate From The Body. IE: can witches steal your penis? It would seem that witches can steal your penis. After all, many people claim to have had their penis stolen by witches. The fifteenth-century peasants among whom Kramer went witch-hunting claimed this. And modern people claim it even today. Frank Bures’ The Geography Of Madness is a great book about recent penis-stealing-witch-related panics, which happened until the mid-20th century in Asia and still happen in Africa. For some reason, this is a classic concern across cultures and centuries. But on the contrary side, God created the human body, and charged Man to be fruitful and multiply. So if the Devil could steal people’s penises it would seem that he must be more powerful than God, which is blasphemous. Kramer answers that witches cannot steal men’s penises, but they can cast an illusion that causes it to look and feel like the penis has been stolen. Classic namby-pamby liberal centrist compromise! Question XIV: The Enormity Of Witches Is Considered, And It Is Shown That The Whole Matter Should Be Rightly Set Forth And Declared This is is one of those “more a comment than a question” questions. Kramer suggests that not only is witchcraft a sin, but it is the worst sin. This section (plus the next few) is a list of all the different things witches are worse than, and why. Witches are worse than pagans, because pagans never knew about Christianity. But witches know about it and deliberately reject it. Witches are worse than Jews, because Jews never claimed to be Christian. But witches were once Christian and then renounced the faith. Witches are worse than ordinary heretics, because ordinary heretics only reject some parts of the faith. But witches implicitly reject all of it by supporting the Devil himself. Witches are worse than Adam, because although Adam’s sin had terrible consequences for the human race, this wasn’t really his direct decision. If we limit our consideration to the specific act, Adam just disobeyed God once, but witches are disobeying God all the time. In fact witches are more sinful than the Devil himself (!), and the Devil’s sin “is in many respects small in comparison with the crimes of witches”. For “both sin against God; but [the Devil] against a commanding God, and [witches] against One who dies for us, Whom, as we have said, wicked witches offend above all.” Witches are literally the worst thing in the entire universe. Whatever else you are concerned about, there is no way it is anywhere close to as bad as witches. If you had the faintest idea how bad witches really were, you would be freaking out all the time. You need to stop whatever you were doing before and become some kind of witch-minimizer instead. This ends Part 1, but if you’re interested you might want to look at further questions from this section, including What Is The Source Of The Increase Of Works Of Witchcraft? Whence Comes It That The Practice Of Witchcraft Hath So Notably Increased?

Inline links: The Geography Of Madness, need to, What Is The Source Of The Increase Of Works Of Witchcraft? Whence Comes It That The Practice Of Witchcraft Hath So Notably Increased?

Book Review: The Geography Of Madness

February 22, 2023 · Original source

This image (source) of a witch stealing a man’s penis, with a box of previously-stolen penises to her right accompanies the 1411 poem “Flowers Of Virtue” in its 1486 edition. Malleus Maleficarum was published in 1486, so if the original text of Flowers Of Virtue contained the incident this picture refers to, it would predate Malleus. But the original text is written in poetic medieval German and I can’t find a good translation. When I wrote my review of the Malleus, people were surprised at the penis-stealing witch chapters. Yet nothing could possibly be less surprising; the penis-stealing witches are timeless and omnipresent. When commenters continued to doubt, I promised them this review of Frank Bures’ Geography Of Madness. II. Frank Bures is a journalist. In 2001, he came across an unusual BBC article: a mob had killed twelve people in Nigeria, believing them to be penis-stealing witches. A few months later, a similar article: five people, Benin. He tried to pitch a story about the phenomenon to his editor, who “said he couldn’t pay me to fly to Nigeria and find essentially . . . nothing”. For some reason - and this is the point at which I start to worry about narrator reliability - Bures became obsessed with this. He couldn’t get it out of his mind. He started scraping together money to visit Africa on his own, story be damned: Nigeria gnawed at me. I knew that it was a terrible time to leave. I knew that [my wife] Bridgit, newly pregnant, wouldn’t want me to go. But I also knew that I had to, and that if I didn’t it would be a lifelong regret. . . three months later, I was the lone tourist on a plane full of Nigerians descending to Lagos. Africa is a relative newcomer to penis-stealing witches: The first recorded incident of penis theft in Africa I could find took place in Sudan in the 1960s. But in the mid- to late seventies in Nigeria, there were waves of well-documented cases. One of these happened in the northern city of Kaduna, where a psychiatrist named Dr. Sunday Ilechukwu was working in his office when a policeman arrived, escorting two men. One of them said he needed a medical assessment: He had accused the other of making his penis disappear. As with [a previously discussed incident], this had caused a disturbance in the street. During Ilechukwu’s examination, he later recounted, the victim stared straight ahead while the doctor examined his penis and pronounced him normal. “Exclaiming,” Ilechukwu wrote in the Transcultural Psychiatric Review, “the patient looked down at his groin for the first time, suggesting that the genitals had just reappeared.” According to Ilechukwu, this was part of an epidemic of magical penis theft that swept through Nigeria between 1975 and 1977. “Men could be seen in the streets of Lagos holding on to their genitalia either openly or discreetly with their hand in their pockets,” Ilechukwu wrote. “Women were also seen holding on to their breasts directly or discreetly, by crossing the hands across the chest . . . Vigilance and anticipatory aggression were thought to be good prophylaxes. This led to further breakdown of law and order.” During an incident, the victim would yell: “Thief! My genitals are gone!” Immediately, a culprit would be identified, apprehended by a crowd, and often killed. …but it’s been making up for lost time. Bures was able to find and interview one previous penis theft victim, plus the friend of another. Both described similar stories: someone had bumped up against them under weird circumstances, they immediately noticed their penis was much smaller than usual, they called out the culprit, and - apparently because the witch involved didn’t want to get in trouble - their penis was restored. Whatever weird itch this topic had given Bures, this didn’t satisfy him. He writes, very lucidly, about a desire to get closer to “the story”. He started bumping up against random Nigerians in suspicious ways, hoping one of them would accuse him of stealing their penis. Bures was an obvious foreigner, and a these panics often resulted in the suspected penis-stealer getting lynched, so this was a crazy thing to do. He could easily have died. Instead, everyone politely ignored him, nothing happened, and a slightly-disappointed Bures flew back to his poor family and abandoned his weird obsession. III. …for four years. After that the bug bit him again and he flew to Asia, long a center of penis-stealing witch activity. There are nature documentaries on lions, dolphins, even dinosaurs. They all share a common pattern: you talk about your subject’s habitat, their diet, their behaviors. The Asian half of The Geography Of Madness has the feel of a nature documentary on penis-stealing witches. And the last beat of every nature documentary has to be: this majestic creature, which once roamed from one end of the region to the other, is now endangered, threatened by increasing globalization and industrial activity. This is true for the witches also. Bures’ time in Hong Kong was a bust. There was a penis theft panic there forty years earlier, and he was able to interview some of the doctors who treated it. But they all said that was long ago. Now everybody is Westernized and has Western fears like vaccine injury or structural racism. They get Western mental disorders like depression and anorexia. The idea of witches stealing their penises seems as risible to them as it probably does to you. Singapore was also a bust. Bures had hoped it wouldn’t be, because it’s full of Malaysians, and Malaysia holds a special place in history as the spot where penis-stealing witches first made contact with Western science. The Malaysian word for the condition is koro (it means “head of a turtle”, based on an analogy to the penis retracting into the body the same way a turtle’s head retracts into its shell), and it is by this name that the condition gets listed in the DSM and the rest of the medical literature. Neither I nor Bures was able to find many ethnic Malays worrying about koro; most of the activity seems to be from Malaysian-Chinese. The Chinese definitely worry about it, attributing it to a wide variety of causes including poisoning, yin-yang imbalance, and - yes - witches. But Bures found nothing among any ethnicity. Once again, all the doctors said it used to be common, but disappeared as the city industrialized and adopted Western ways. Guangzhou was also a bust. The doctors said the same thing - in the old days, there would be huge epidemics of koro, social contagions that would impact hundreds of people at once. Now only a few superstitious rural people still believed. One traditional healer said he saw “three or four” cases a year. All the educated people had moved on. I once saw a nature documentary on Tasmanian tigers. Most people believe these have been extinct since 1930. Still, there are occasional unconfirmed sightings, especially in a remote area called Cape York, and every so often some scientists trudge off to Cape York with traps and cameras in the hopes of getting lucky. Bures decides end his own nature documentary with an expedition to the Cape York of the penis-stealing witches. This is a remote island village in China called Lin’gao, where in 1984: . . . rumors spread of a fox ghost - sometimes disguised an old woman roaming the land—collecting penises in covered baskets she carried on a shoulder pole. When two young men approached her and told her to uncover the baskets, they looked inside, saw that the baskets were filled with penises and died instantly of fright. Panic about koro would hit a village and last three to four days. When residents heard about a case in a neighboring village, the panic would subside, since that meant the ghost had moved on. The attacks slowly made their way around the island. The ghost struck at night, when villagers were sleeping. A chill would creep into the room, and suddenly the victim would feel his penis shrinking inward. He would grab it and run outside for help. A twenty-eight-year-old office worker was at home one night when: > “ . . . he heard a gong being beaten and the terrifying noises made by people who were panicking in a nearby neighborhood. He suddenly became anxious and experienced the sensation that his penis was shrinking. He was seized with panic and shouted loudly for help. Several men in the neighborhood rushed in and tried to rescue him by forcefully pulling his penis and making loud sounds to chase away the evil ghost that was thought to be affecting him.” Neighbors and family members were enlisted in rescue operations. Victims were beaten with sandals and slippers while the middle finger of their left had was squeezed, so that the ghost could exit the body there. The epidemic engulfed the island, with the exception of the Li and Miao minorities, who seemed to be immune to such fears. Researchers estimated that between 2,000 and 5,000 people were affected, but that “no one died from genital retraction.” One baby, however, did die when his mother tried to feed him pepper juice, and a girl was beaten to death during a two-hour exorcism. “Numerous men suffered injuries to their penises as a result of ‘rescuing’ actions.” Iron pins were sometimes inserted through the nipples of women to prevent retraction, which caused infections as well. This was, as far as anyone knows, the last great koro epidemic in Asia. Bures had a terrible time getting to Lin’gao. He had equal trouble getting an interpreter; the natives spoke a language called Be, very distantly related to Thai but not at all to regular Chinese. Finally he found someone who was able to contact a local shaman. Like any good doctor, the shaman referred him to a specialist - in this case, the designated anti-ghost shaman, who lived in a different village. He spent most of his time off on various ghost-fighting missions, but eventually Bures and his team were able to track him down. I want you to picture the scene. An American journalist has been traveling the world in search of a dying variety of witchcraft. Now he’s reached the end of the line, the wildest and most primitive region of China. With great difficulty, he has procured an interpreter. Together, they consult a shaman, who sends them on a quest to find a second, wiser shaman who specializes in ghosts. After many trials and tribulations, he reaches the second, wiser, ghost-specialist shaman, who invites him into his home, filled with strange charms and magical images. “Tell me your question,” says the shaman. And Bures asks: “What do you know about penis-stealing witches?” . . . and the shaman answers: “Haha, no one believes in that stuff anymore.” IV. So as a nature documentary, The Geography of Madness is kind of a bust. Still, Bures rescues it with some great analysis of culture-bound mental illness. A culture-bound mental illness is one that only affects people who know about it, and especially people who believe in it. Often it doesn’t make sense from a scientific point of view (there’s no such thing as witches, and the penis can’t retract into the body). It sometimes spreads contagiously: someone gets a first case, the rest of the village panics, and now everyone knows about it / believes in it / is thinking about it, and so many other people get it too. Different cultures have their own set of culture-bound illnesses. Sometimes there are commonalities - many cultures have something something penis something witches - but the details vary, and a victim almost always gets a case that matches the way their own culture understands it. THESE PEOPLE ARE NOT MAKING IT UP. I cannot stress this enough. There are plenty of examples of people driving metal objects through their penis in order to pull it out of their body or prevent the witches from getting it or something like that. There is no amount of commitment to the bit which will make people drive metal objects through their penis. People have died from these conditions - not the illness itself, which is fake, but from wasting away worrying about it, or taking dangerous sham treatments, or getting into fights with people they think caused it. If you think of it as “their unconscious mind must be doing something like making it up, but their conscious mind believes it 100%”, you will be closer to the truth, though there are various reasons I don’t like that framing. In Rajasthan, India, people come to the hospital with gilahari (lizard) syndrome. Patients say a lizard-like mass, sometimes visible as a skin swelling, is crawling around the body. They express terror that it will reach their airway and suffocate them. Japanese people may contract jikoshu-kyofu, a debilitating fear that they have terrible body odor. No amount of reassurances by friends and psychiatrists can convince these people that they smell normal, nor will any number of deodorants or perfumes make them comfortable. The French suffer from bouffée délirante, where a perfectly healthy person suddenly becomes completely psychotic, with well-formed hallucinations and delusions - then recovers just as suddenly, sometimes over hours or days. This is not how psychosis works anywhere except France and a few former French colonies. Traditional Chinese medicine monitors the balance between yin and yang. The male orgasm can deplete yang, and sure enough in China (but nowhere else) some men suffer traditional symptoms of yang depletion after they orgasm. “The symptoms can last weeks to months after a single orgasm, [and include] chills, dizziness, [and] backache”. The phrase “run amok” comes from Malaysia, where it referred to a specific phenomenon: some person who had been unhappy for a long time would suddenly snap, kill a bunch of people, then say they had no memory of doing it. Malaysian culture totally rolls with this and doesn’t hold it against them; the unhappiness is a risk factor for possession by a tiger spirit, which commits the killings. Although Malays have been doing this since at least the 1700s, there are some fascinating parallels with modern US mass shootings that suggest the damn tiger spirits have finally made it to the US common psychological origins. I have seen exactly one demonic possession case in my ten years as a psychiatrist. The man fell to the ground, mouth foaming, chanting strange syllables and the names of Biblical demons. My attending doctor at the time - one of those people who somehow manages to be an expert in everything - was an expert in demonic possession, and told us that he was in no way psychotic, antipsychotics wouldn’t help him (except insofar as they help everyone by decreasing all behaviors), and he needed to “work through his issues”. The patient was uncooperative - he was only visiting MDs because the local bishop wouldn’t call in an exorcist until he got a psych exam - and eventually left against medical advice. After going down the list, Bures asks the correct next question: how do we know whether or not our own mental illnesses are just as culture-bound as the Japanese or Malaysians’? Cultures that believe in witches have witch-related culture-bound illnesses; cultures that believe in demons have demon-related ones. We believe in science, so we should expect sciencey-sounding culture-bound illnesses, and these might be hard to tell apart from other, more physical conditions. So how suspicious should we be, and of what? Certainly we have some culture-bound mental illnesses. Electromagnetic hypersensitivity is a condition where some people supposedly become very sick when exposed to electromagnetic fields (like from cell phones). This sounds very scientific and makes perfect sense according to our culture, but researchers have found that placebo electrical devices make them exactly as sick as real ones, and that devices they don’t know about don’t make them sick at all. These people’s pain is real, and their lives are very difficult (although a few have found refuge in the National Radio Quiet Zone, an area in Virginia where the government enforces a ban on electromagnetic transmissions for secret military reasons). But their condition only afflicts them because they believe in it, much like with koro. Fine, everyone knows that one’s not real. What about DSM-style mental disorders, the stuff everyone’s supposed to believe in? Are those culture-bound? Unfortunately, I think Bures kind of flubs this section. He decides to focus on PMS (premenstrual syndrome), which is officially included in the DSM as PMDD (premenstrual dysphoric disorder). After discussing the history of hysteria, he writes that: Today, hysteria is never diagnosed, except by unwise husbands. In 1931, however, an American gynecologist named Robert Frank revived the idea in a new guise. He published an article titled, “The hormonal causes of premenstrual tension.” Frank described symptoms that occurred in the week before menstruation: irritability, bloating, fatigue, depression, attacks of pain, nervousness, restlessness, and the impulse for “foolish and ill considered actions,” due to ovarian activity. Again, the cause was the uterus. Then in 1953, British physician Katharina Dalton elaborated on this, arguing the condition came from fluctuation of estrogen and progesterone. She called it Premenstrual Syndrome, and soon symptoms grew to include: anxiety, sadness, moodiness, constipation or diarrhea, feeling out of control, insomnia, food cravings, increased sex drive, anger, arguments with family or friends, poor judgment, lack of physical coordination, decreased efficiency, increased personal strength or power, feelings of connection to nature or to other women, seizures, convulsions, asthma attacks, not to mention flare ups in asthma, allergies, sinusitis, anxiety disorders, irritable bowel syndrome, migraines, and multiple sclerosis. If any of these symptoms occurred in the second half of the menstrual cycle, one had PMS. Estimates of the number of women afflicted ranged from 5 percent to 95 percent. In the 1980s, three women in the UK were tried for arson, assault and manslaughter. The three all claimed they had diminished responsibility due to PMS, and got reduced sentences on the condition that they underwent hormone treatment. After that, according to one study, American women flooded doctors with requests for help with their PMS. “Popular groups like PMS Action were founded to promote recognition and treatment of PMS by medical professionals. Private PMS clinics began to appear in the USA, modeled after those in the UK, and progesterone therapy was enthusiastically adopted, much to the chagrin of many gynaecologists who viewed its use as ‘unscientific’ and ‘commercial’, not to mention unlicensed." Based on all this, the 1987 version of the DSM-III included a new category: Late Luteal Phase Disorder (luteal refers to progesterone). It was proposed as a topic for further research, but despite the absence of such research, it was included in the 1994 edition of the DSM-IV under the name Premenstrual Dysmorphic Disorder, or PMDD.96 In 2013, in the DSM-5, it was given its own category as a full-fledged mental illness. Yet neither PMS nor PMDD occur in most cultures. There are no biomarkers to measure them by. No conclusive correlation has ever been found between estrogen or progesterone levels and PMS. As one study noted, “the more time that women of ethnic minorities spend living in the United States, the more likely they are to report PMDD. Thus, if we are to accept PMDD as a reified medical disorder, then we must also accept exposure to U.S. culture as a risk factor for contracting PMDD.” If it is a syndrome at all, it’s a cultural one. I asked my wife what she thought of this, and she told me: The day before her first-ever period, as a teenager, when she had never really thought about PMS, she felt exceptionally weird, emotional, and generally off, to the point where it seemed to demand an explanation. Then she had her first-ever period, and retroactively explains it as PMS.

Inline links: source, my review of the, Geography Of Madness, Be, gilahari (lizard) syndrome, jikoshu-kyofu, bouffée délirante, suffer traditional symptoms of yang depletion, run amok, Electromagnetic hypersensitivity, National Radio Quiet Zone

Highlights From The Comments On Geography Of Madness

February 27, 2023 · Original source

[Original post: The Geography Of Madness]

Inline links: The Geography Of Madness

Book Review: The Others Within Us

May 21, 2024 · Original source

So I want to take on the task Falconer avoids, and try to provide a boring materialistic explanation of all of this. This won’t be surprising to people who have read other essays of mine, especially my reviews of Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind, Crazy Like Us, and The Geography Of Madness.

Inline links: Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind, Crazy Like Us, The Geography Of Madness

The Internationalists4 mentions across 4 issues

The Internationalists is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between May 23, 2022 and September 02, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "The full list of Book Review Contest finalists is: ... The Internationalists"; "Unlike many works of history, The Internationalists isn’t about a leader"; "Reading The Internationalists led me to want to read a broader intellectual history of war". It most often appears alongside Consciousness and the Brain, Making Nature, The Anti-Politics Machine.

Article page: The Internationalists
Mention count: 4
Issue count: 4
First seen: May 23, 2022
Last seen: September 02, 2022
Book title: The Internationalists
Likely author: Belos

Outbound links

Issue trail

Open Thread 225 May 23, 2022
Your Book Review: The Internationalists July 01, 2022
Open Thread 239 August 28, 2022
Book Review Contest 2022 Winners September 02, 2022

Consciousness and the Brain 3 shared issues
Making Nature 3 shared issues
The Anti-Politics Machine 3 shared issues
The Castrato 3 shared issues
The Dawn Of Everything 3 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: The Internationalists

May 23, 2022 · Original source

1: The full list of Book Review Contest finalists is: Consciousness And The Brain, Making Nature, The Anti-Politics Machine, The Castrato, The Dawn Of Everything (EH’s review), The Future Of Fusion, The Illusion Of Grand Strategy, The Internationalists, The Outlier, The Righteous Mind (BW’s review), The Society Of The Spectacle, and Viral.

July 01, 2022 · Original source

In The Internationalists, Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro (H&S from now on) work to raise the profile of the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact, at the time the most-ratified treaty in history, in which 63 nations (unlike today, this was most of the world - 51 became founding members of the United Nations) came together to declare war illegal. Here is the Pact, in full.

Inline links: The Internationalists

Unlike many works of history, The Internationalists isn’t about a leader, a country, or a time period. Instead, it is an intellectual history - the history of a set of ideas and how they changed our cultures. As such, it ties together threads across historical periods and places to show how the ideas, rules, and culture changed. This is my favorite kind of history, both because it’s the history of the most interesting aspect of human behavior - ideas, and how they affect us - as well as because it often brings out surprising connections across times and places.

The US keeps starting or engaging in wars, like in Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq. I will briefly summarize the 3 major sections of the book and how they tackle the first five claims. Section 1: The Old World Order This section refutes the claim that outlawry of war wasn't actually a significant change for anyone at the time. To do so, it covers the history of the international laws of war as described by Hugo Grotius in a set of books titled The Law of War and Peace, including how he came to write it, what the laws were, and how they were used and understood. In this section, H&S work to fully immerse us in the laws of war before the Peace Pact, and the ways that people understood war as a result. I’ve already included a number of things about this up above, so I’ll just put in a few interesting notes here, and if you want more persuasion that people viewed war differently, I’d suggest you pick up the book. There is lots of historical evidence that attitudes toward war before the Peace Pact were not like attitudes toward war today, that people - lawyers, diplomats, sovereigns, and citizens - believed it to be normal and legal, and frequently justified. Conquest in response to debts or offenses was one of the primary motivators of war in the period ruled by the Old World Order (generally, from some time before 1625 when Grotius wrote the rules down to 1928, when the Peace Pact was signed), though H&S also document some of the weirder ones, like a King who declared that they had the right to wage war against another because the other King stole his wife. But because Grotius had declared that no one outside the belligerents could determine whose side was just without violating neutrality, the reasons for war were largely whatever Monarchs could get away, which ran the gamut. Perhaps because it was fashionable, perhaps to convince their citizenry of their rightness, Monarchs paid handsomely for famous thinkers to write manifestos explaining why they were going to war, and other Monarchs and the citizenry generally accepted these reasons. It would be like if Putin had called up Google co-founder Sergey Brin and asked him to write out why Russia had the right to conquer Ukraine, and then everyone else shrugged and decided, sure, that sounds reasonable. Heads of state enlisted esteemed writers and scholars as well as experienced lawyers to draft [war manifestos]. The English military and political leader Oliver Cromwell commissioned John Milton, the great epic poet, to write A Manifesto of the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth in 1655 when he ordered the invasion of the Spanish possessions in the Caribbean. In 1703, the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I employed Gottfried Leibniz, the rationalist philosopher, co-inventor of calculus, and a trained lawyer, to compose the Manifesto for the Defense of the Rights of Charles III, which defended the empire’s involvement in the War of the Spanish Succession. Commodore Perry arrived in Japan in 1853 and returned for real the next year. Because they were so confused about how the laws of war were supposed to work, Japan proceeded to send Nishi Amane to the Netherlands to study the Law of War and Peace, and twenty years later, in 1875, Japan conquered Korea. Their logic for doing so was that they were afraid Europe or China would get there first. The world recognized their conquest at the time, though after WWII they were made to give it up. Korea was alluring prey for aggressive Western nations. As Nishi Amane [the scholar who brought the Grotian rules to Japan] would later explain, defending one’s borders “is like riding in a third-class train; at first there is adequate space but as more passengers enter there is no place for them to sit. The logic of necessity requires the people to plant both feet firmly and expand their elbows into any opening that may occur for, unless this is done, others will close the opening. (Chapter 6) Section 2: The Transformation Period Recall our list of counterclaims, #s 2 and 3. 2. Outlawry wasn't taken seriously at the time by the signatories - that it was just feel-good propaganda. 3. World War II proves that it failed, so it wasn't important. This section tells the story of how the Peace Pact came into existence, including how influential it was on the thinkers of the time. Throughout the 1930s and 40s, thinkers and diplomats attempted to turn the Peace Pact into practice, and then, when World War II demonstrated that they needed significantly more teeth to make the Peace Pact real, created the United Nations and other international institutions dedicated to supporting the Pact’s goals. At the time, they viewed World War II as a sign that they hadn’t gotten the right combination of institutions to make the Peace Pact succeed, not that it wasn’t important. This was a classic situation of needing More Dakka and they did, indeed, keep adding more until it worked. In an account composed more than a decade later, Jackson recounted that this view of the Pact was shared by the president and his inner circle. The Peace Pact, he reported, “left no vestige of legal right for [a state] to resort to a war of aggression. From the beginning, Roosevelt, Hull, Welles, Stimson and I had been in agreement that Hitler’s war . . . was an illegal one, and that other powers were under no obligation to remain indifferent. (Chapter 11) There is some counter-evidence in support of #2, from the side of the Japanese at least. Japan, for example, did not think that it had renounced the rules of the Old World Order on August 27, 1928. Its signing of the “No-War Pact,” as the Paris Peace Pact was known in Japan, was regarded as a diplomatic gesture, a noble proclamation affirming the aspiration of all civilized nations to seek peace. Indeed, Japanese officials considered it a sign of how far their nation had come that it was included among the fifteen countries at the grand ceremony in Paris. (Chapter 7) But at least on the Allies side, they had intended it seriously, and as World War II went on, that intention redoubled. Sumner Welles, Undersecretary of State during World War II, was assigned by Roosevelt to create a plan for peace after the war. What he and James Shotwell authored was effectively an outline of the United Nations, and they put the Peace Pact at the very center of it. Shotwell was far from subtle about his effort to treat the Pact as a starting point. He placed the Pact at the start of his preliminary draft. Article 1 repeated the Pact verbatim. Article 2 provided that “[t]he United Nations, in order to strengthen and safeguard the peace of nations as set forth in the General Pact for the Renunciation of war, agree to cooperate in the establishment of the necessary instrumentalities for its effective maintenance.” What followed was an outline of nearly every essential institutional component of the modern-day United Nations. Ten days later he circulated a more detailed draft, now entitled “Provisional Outline of International Organization.” (Chapter 8) It wasn't just the United Nations. NATO was built off of the Atlantic Charter, and it was also designed to reinforce the Peace Pact. This is why it's reasonably accurate to describe it as a defensive alliance. The [first draft of the Atlantic Charter] was a remarkable document. It began by restating the principles of the Stimson Doctrine—there would be no conquest; the two countries would “seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other.” Moreover, there would be “no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned.” The Charter looked ahead to a time “after the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny”—a remarkable statement for a neutral in the war—and declared the two states’ “hope to see established a peace which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries. (Chapter 8) This section brings to bear quotes from leaders at the time showing how important they considered the outlawry of war, how they viewed it as changing the world, but also how unprepared they were for how to react to countries choosing to ignore the Pact. Most importantly, they show how the Allies were strongly motivated to fight World War II specifically to preserve and expand the Pact, to make the world safe for peace. Unfortunately, then, as now, Russia/the Soviet Union did not quite live up to the ideals that the Allies generally advocated for. The Soviet Union took territory after World War II, the only one of the Allies to do so. The only ally to gain any significant territory after the war was the Soviet Union. More than twenty million of the nation’s citizens had died in the course of the war, and Stalin insisted on several territorial gains as the price of peace—many, but not all, of them in areas previously contested. … These concessions to Stalin were seen by the other Allied powers as regrettable deviations from accepted law, not precedents to be followed in the future. (Chapter 13) To be fair, we are talking about Josef Stalin, here. Who’s surprised? Section 3: The New World Order Recall our list of counterclaims, #s 4 and 5. 4. The world isn't more peaceful post outlawry. 5. Any increase in peace since World War II is due to democracies, nuclear weapons, or other reasons, and not the Peace Pact. H&S walk through the best academic evidence we have of whether the world is more peaceful today than it was in the period from 1816 (when our data collection starts being decent) to the Peace Pact. They then spend some time discussing why the evidence better supports the Peace Pact than other causes. In particular, H&S highlight that only since the Peace Pact have countries been denied territorial gains from their conquests. There's a lot of detail in there. Here's just a taste of it. A loose team of political scientists has assembled comprehensive data to help them study war. The resulting project, with the intentionally clinical name “Correlates of War,” hosts datasets on everything from “militarized interstate disputes” to “world religion data” to “bilateral trade.” Most relevant here, it includes extensive data on “territorial change”—a record of every single territorial exchange between states from 1816 to 2014, totaling over eight hundred entries. What do our 254 cases of territorial change tell us? They tell us something that is at once striking and surprising: Conquest, once common, has nearly disappeared. Even more unexpected, the switch point is that now familiar year when the world came together to outlaw war, 1928. From the time the data start in 1816 until the Peace Pact opened for signature in 1928, there was, on average, approximately one conquest every ten months (1.21 conquests per year). Put another way, the average state during this period had a 1.33 percent chance of being the victim of conquest in any given year. Those may seem like pretty good odds. They are not: A state with a 1.33 percent annual chance of conquest can expect to lose territory in a conquest once in an ordinary human lifetime. After 1948, the chance an average state would suffer a conquest fell from once in a lifetime to once or twice a millennium. (Chapter 13) The US wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya One disappointment I have is that H&S do not spend much time discussing the US wars of the last two decades. The book was published in 2017, so there’s really no excuse for this. Even counting them, their claim that wars since the Peace Pact have been fewer and less world-changing than before the Peace Pact still holds up, but since they don’t directly discuss the most notable wars of the last two decades, they leave a significant hole in their argument. I can imagine defenses that they would make, but they should have made them. They mostly refer to these conflicts either as not a conquest (since the US isn’t officially running those places now) or as a side effect of the Peace Pact in allowing failed states (See Addendum 1 for more on that) More recently, the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, toppled Sadaam Hussein, and installed the Coalition Provisional Authority to govern the country. But what’s most notable about these “nonconquests” is how ineffective and unstable they usually are. Exerting influence indirectly is inefficient and expensive. (Chapter 13) And in 2015 alone, high-fatality civil wars continued in Nigeria, South Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Ukraine. Why, if war has been outlawed, is there still so much conflict? The answer is that these conflicts are not prohibited by the Pact. Indeed, they are the predictable consequences of it … the prohibition on the use of force by one state against the territory of another has allowed two sources of conflict to simmer… within [states]. (Chapter 15) The broader intellectual history of war Reading The Internationalists led me to want to read a broader intellectual history of war. H&S include some comments that hint at it, for example describing the Principle of Distinction and other agreements made about how to behave during war. Fortunately for the civilians of Europe, the biblical model of war was finally repudiated. By the middle of the eighteenth century, European armies had come to recognize a “Principle of Distinction,” the doctrine central to modern humanitarian law, which distinguishes between soldiers and civilians and protects the latter from the former. The Principle of Distinction was the first curtailment of Grotius’s blanket immunity for those waging war. In the next century, it was followed by a flood of new legal regulations placing stricter controls on a soldier’s license to kill. International treaties protected the wounded and medical personnel (First Geneva Convention, 1864) prohibited the use of fragmenting, explosive, and incendiary small arms ammunition (St. Petersburg Declaration, 1874) banned explosives from balloons, asphyxiating gas, and dum-dum bullets (First Hague Convention, 1899) and proscribed pillage, the execution of surrendering soldiers and prisoners of war, and forcing civilians to swear an allegiance to a foreign power (Second Hague Convention, 1907). (Chapter 3) But the history of this and other pre-Peace Pact intellectual history of war is thin within the text, as the point H&S are chasing is specific to the Peace Pact's relevance in history, not the broader history of war. Some of my favorite books are books that tie together aspects of history across wide gulfs, which The Internationalists succeeds at. It’s rare and delightful to see how a piratical ship capture by the Dutch in the 16th century ties together with the opening of Japan, the US battles with Mexico, and finally, the creation of the United Nations. H&S’s perspective is that the Peace Pact marks a turning point, and one that should not be forgotten. It’s also clear that it marks a capstone on a long history of small changes that are also, themselves, interesting battles in the long-running war to make the world less intolerable. In the end, they identify four key changes in the intellectual landscape, with Lauterpacht’s fingers in nearly all of them. Neutrality no longer requires impartiality. States can help those they view as victims.

Inline links: More Dakka

August 28, 2022 · Original source

The Internationalists (treaty to make war illegal)

Inline links: The Internationalists

Your Book Review: The Pale King

September 02, 2022 · Original source

=3rd: The Internationalists, reviewed by Belos. Belos is working on a new blook titled best of a great lot about system design for effective governance.

Inline links: The Internationalists, best of a great lot

Kora In Hell, reviewed by Lucas Paletta. Lucas is a writer from Buenos Aires, Argentina. He blogs (in Spanish) at www.stackdamage.com.ar. I really enjoyed all of these. A few notes of special praise: The Internationalists was probably most fascinating, in the sense of describing a strange historical episode I didn’t know about before. The Outlier was similar and I give it high marks for making Jimmy Carter interesting. Consciousness And The Brain was a whole new neuroscience theory I knew nothing about and I expect to reread it a bunch of times to try to get it to sink in. Sam Altman sent me an email saying he enjoyed the review of The Future Of Fusion Energy. The Making Nature review did a great job talking about and analyzing a trend I’d never thought about before, far beyond even what was in the book. I think about Exhaustion every time I see a CFS patient - specifically, about the claim that 19th century psychiatrists would prescribe a “West cure” of going off and doing cowboy things on a ranch; I haven’t yet recommended that to anyone, but like I said, I think about it often. God Emperor of Dune and Kora In Hell were the token fiction and poetry reviews; I thought they did a spectacular job overcoming the difficulties of reviewing their respective media. I was reading some of the non-finalists and found 1587 in there and was surprised it hadn’t reached finalist status and decided to promote it; based on your votes it seems like that was the right choice. My process for picking finalists was kind of haphazard; I had you rate all reviews on a scale of 1-10, anyone above 8 got in automatically, and then I picked my favorites from the reviews between 7 and 8. This was sort of unfair, and meant there were some reviews that scored better on the voting than finalists but weren’t finalists themselves, and others that I liked better than some finalists but couldn’t pick. All of these are Honorable Mentions. You’ll notice some of them are politically charged, and yes, I did sort of discriminate against these (though not so much that I wouldn’t have picked them if they’d made it above 8). They are: Unsettled, reviewed by Julius S. Julius is a machine learning engineer from San Diego. He blogs at Curious About Ideas.

Inline links: Kora In Hell, www.stackdamage.com.ar, Unsettled, Curious About Ideas

The Pale King4 mentions across 4 issues

The Pale King is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between June 17, 2024 and October 11, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Book review contest finalists are: ... The Pale King"; "I avoided reading The Pale King"; "which eventually came to be titled The Pale King". It most often appears alongside Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa, Dominion, Don Juan.

Article page: The Pale King
Mention count: 4
Issue count: 4
First seen: June 17, 2024
Last seen: October 11, 2024
Book title: The Pale King

Outbound links

Issue trail

Open Thread 334 June 17, 2024
Your Book Review: The Pale King September 06, 2024
Vote In The 2024 Book Review Contest September 27, 2024
Book Review Contest 2024 Winners October 11, 2024

Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa 3 shared issues
Dominion 3 shared issues
Don Juan 3 shared issues
How Language Began 3 shared issues
How the War Was Won 3 shared issues

Source context

Open Thread 334

June 17, 2024 · Original source

2: Book review contest finalists are: Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa, Dominion, Don Juan, Family That Couldn't Sleep, How Language Began, How The War Was Won, Nine Lives, Real Raw News, Silver Age Marvel Comics, Sixth Day, Spirit of Rationalism, Complete Rhyming Dictionary, The Pale King, Two Arms and a Head, and Ballad of the White Horse. Honorable mention to at least Catkin, Road of the King, World Empire Lost, Piranesi, Meme Machine, and Determined. I might promote some honorable mentions to finalists depending on how tolerant you all are of book reviews, and some others to honorable mention after I read more reviews. First review goes up this Friday! Thanks to everyone who entered.

September 06, 2024 · Original source

For the longest time, I avoided reading The Pale King. It wasn’t the style—in places thick with the author’s characteristic footnotes,1 sentences that run for pages, and spasms of dense technical language. Nor was it the subject matter—the book is set at an IRS Center and tussles with postmodernism. Nor the themes, one of which concerns the existential importance of boredom, which the book, at times, takes pains to exemplify.

Inline links: 1

No—I couldn’t read The Pale King because it was the book that killed him.

He believed contemporary fiction was stuck in two modes: cheap entertainment, or grim jeremiad. “Look, man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?” He aimed to inspire a vision of another way of living, both with others and within our own minds. His third novel, the “Long Thing,” which eventually came to be titled The Pale King, was meant to be an articulation of that vision.

September 27, 2024 · Original source

1: Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa 2: Dominion 3: Don Juan 4: The Family That Couldn’t Sleep 5: How Language Began 6: Real Raw News 7: Two Arms And A Head 8: How The War Was Won 9: Silver Age Marvel Comics 10: The Complete Rhyming Dictionary And Poet’s Craft Book 11: The History Of The Rise And Influence Of The Spirit Of Rationalism In Europe 12: The Pale King 13: Nine Lives 14: The Ballad Of The White Horse

October 11, 2024 · Original source

The Pale King, reviewed by Arielle Friedman. Arielle likes fiction, light technopessimism, and the occasional political screed. She writes at analogfutures.substack.com and runs a co-writing group every weekday morning that you can join here.

Inline links: The Pale King, analogfutures.substack.com, here

The Righteous Mind4 mentions across 4 issues

The Righteous Mind is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between May 23, 2022 and September 02, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Righteous Mind (BW’s review)"; "I didn’t read The Righteous Mind for a long time after I knew about it"; "I was completely wrong. I found The Righteous Mind to be a frustrating book". It most often appears alongside Consciousness and the Brain, Making Nature, The Anti-Politics Machine.

Article page: The Righteous Mind
Mention count: 4
Issue count: 4
First seen: May 23, 2022
Last seen: September 02, 2022
Book title: The Righteous Mind
Likely author: Ben

Outbound links

Issue trail

Open Thread 225 May 23, 2022
Your Book Review: The Righteous Mind July 15, 2022
Open Thread 239 August 28, 2022
Book Review Contest 2022 Winners September 02, 2022

Consciousness and the Brain 3 shared issues
Making Nature 3 shared issues
The Anti-Politics Machine 3 shared issues
The Castrato 3 shared issues
The Dawn Of Everything 3 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: The Righteous Mind

May 23, 2022 · Original source

1: The full list of Book Review Contest finalists is: Consciousness And The Brain, Making Nature, The Anti-Politics Machine, The Castrato, The Dawn Of Everything (EH’s review), The Future Of Fusion, The Illusion Of Grand Strategy, The Internationalists, The Outlier, The Righteous Mind (BW’s review), The Society Of The Spectacle, and Viral.

July 15, 2022 · Original source

I didn’t read The Righteous Mind for a long time after I knew about it. This was partly because I don’t get through much in the way of new reading material. A friend of mine told me yesterday that he’d read something like 130 new books this year. That was on February 20th. I’ve read one, and it was The Righteous Mind. Another friend releases Spotify playlists every Friday of the greatest hits from the many new albums he’s listened to that week. I’ve listened to one new album this year. It was Selling England by the Pound, which he recommended. It was my first foray into Genesis and I loved it. I now have to keep telling him that, no, I haven’t listened to any more Genesis or Peter Gabriel since then, but I’m sure I’ll get round to it within the year.

This is to make the point that I’m starting from a low base rate of reading things. I still think I put off reading The Righteous Mind for unusually long, though, given how interesting I find the subject matter. The reason, I think, is that I sort of felt like it wouldn’t be very interesting, because I’d kind of know and agree with all of it already. Given how slowly I absorb new books, I like them to either be challenging, or a new and informative look at things I just don’t know very much about yet. I don’t mean to come across as some sort of sage of intellectual piety and good habits of mind who scorns the comforting embrace of being validated. I read plenty of political bloggers that I mostly agree with! I just don’t tend to use books for that.

I had a general feeling that The Righteous Mind sits in the background of a lot of the political or meta-political content that I know and love. It had the aura of a sort of foundational text for the loose family of political views and affiliations I have. I don’t consider myself a centrist, which I think is how Haidt identifies himself, but I do share his disdain for tribal partisan politics and general sense that so much of what passes for political debate is just people yelling foundational definitional disagreements past each other mostly for the benefit of their own fans. I felt like I’d probably picked up most of its insights further downstream, and wouldn’t get much out of reading it.

August 28, 2022 · Original source

The Righteous Mind

Inline links: The Righteous Mind

Book Review: The Rise Of Christianity

September 02, 2022 · Original source

The Righteous Mind, reviewed by Ben Wōden. Ben is an analyst from Reading, UK.

Inline links: The Righteous Mind

The Rise Of Christianity4 mentions across 4 issues

The Rise Of Christianity is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between September 12, 2024 and December 04, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Rodney Stark’s The Rise Of Christianity"; "wrote The Rise Of Christianity"; "Talk is cheap, but The Rise Of Christianity suggests the early Christians pulled it off". It most often appears alongside America, Christianity, emperor Julian.

Article page: The Rise Of Christianity
Mention count: 4
Issue count: 4
First seen: September 12, 2024
Last seen: December 04, 2024
Book title: The Rise Of Christianity

Outbound links

Issue trail

Links For September 2024 September 12, 2024
Book Review: The Rise Of Christianity November 12, 2024
The Early Christian Strategy November 14, 2024
Book Review: From Bauhaus To Our House December 04, 2024

America 4 shared issues
Christianity 3 shared issues
emperor Julian 3 shared issues
Russia 3 shared issues
Christians 2 shared issues

Source context

Links For September 2024

September 12, 2024 · Original source

...rslan’s X discussion . 3: Ruxandra Teslo has a review of the theory that aristocratic women drove the early adoption of Christianity . I’m waiting to read Rodney Stark’s The Rise Of Christianity before having an opinion, but saving this to come back to later. 4: List Of Groups Who Protested The Democratic Convention (also continued on second tweet). This is real...

...here’s Ruben Arslan’s X discussion . 3: Ruxandra Teslo has a review of the theory that aristocratic women drove the early adoption of Christianity . I’m waiting to read Rodney Stark’s The Rise Of Christianity before having an opinion, but saving this to come back to later. 4: List Of Groups Who Protested The Democratic Convention (also continued on second tweet). This is real...

November 12, 2024 · Original source

The rise of Christianity is a great puzzle. In 40 AD, there were maybe a thousand Christians. Their Messiah had just been executed, and they were on the wrong side of an intercontinental empire that had crushed all previous foes. By 400, there were forty million, and they were set to dominate the next millennium of Western history.

Rodney Stark was a sociologist of religion. He started off studying cults, and got his big break when the first missionaries of the Unification Church (“Moonies”) in the US let him tag along and observe their activities. After a long and successful career in academia, he turned his attention to the greatest cult of all and wrote The Rise Of Christianity. He spends much of it apologizing for not being a classical historian, but it’s fine - he’s obviously done his homework, and he hopes to bring a new, modern-religion-informed perspective to the ancient question.

Inline links: The Rise Of Christianity

The Early Christian Strategy

November 14, 2024 · Original source

Then do whatever your opponent did last round. This was so boring that Axelrod sponsored a second tournament specifically for strategies that could displace TIT-FOR-TAT. When the dust cleared, TIT-FOR-TAT still won - although some strategies could beat it in head-to-head matches, they did worst against each other, and when all the points were added up TIT-FOR-TAT remained on top. In certain situations, this strategy is dominated by a slight variant, TIT-FOR-TAT-WITH-FORGIVENESS. That is, in situations where a bot can “make mistakes” (eg “my finger slipped”), two copies of TIT-FOR-TAT can get stuck in an eternal DEFECT-DEFECT equilibrium against each other; the forgiveness-enabled version will try cooperating again after a while to see if its opponent follows. Otherwise, it’s still state-of-the-art. The tournament became famous because - well, you can see how you can sort of round it off to morality. In a wide world of people trying every sort of con, the winning strategy is to be nice to people who help you out and punish people who hurt you. But in some situations, it’s also worth forgiving someone who harmed you once to see if they’ve become a better person. I find the occasional claims to have successfully grounded morality in self-interest to be facile, but you can at least see where they’re coming from here. And pragmatically, this is good, common-sense advice. For example, compare it to one of the losers in Axelrod’s tournament. COOPERATE-BOT always cooperates. A world full of COOPERATE-BOTS would be near-utopian. But add a single instance of its evil twin, DEFECT-BOT, and it folds immediately. A smart human player, too, will easily defeat COOPERATE-BOT: the human will start by testing its boundaries, find that it has none, and play DEFECT thereafter (whereas a human playing against TIT-FOR-TAT would soon learn not to mess with it). Again, all of this seems natural and common-sensical. Infinitely-trusting people, who will always be nice to everyone no matter what, are easily exploited by the first sociopath to come around. You don’t want to be a sociopath yourself, but prudence dictates being less-than-infinitely nice, and reserving your good nature for people who deserve it. Reality is more complicated than a game theory tournament. In Iterated Prisoners’ Dilemma, everyone can either benefit you or harm you an equal amount. In the real world, we have edge cases like poor people, who haven’t done anything evil but may not be able to reciprocate your generosity. Does TIT-FOR-TAT help the poor? Stand up for the downtrodden? Care for the sick? Domain error; the question never comes up. Still, even if you can’t solve every moral problem, it’s at least suggestive that, in those domains where the question comes up, you should be TIT-FOR-TAT and not COOPERATE-BOT. This is why I’m so fascinated by the early Christians. They played the doomed COOPERATE-BOT strategy and took over the world. II. Matthew 5: You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you . . . If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Talk is cheap, but The Rise Of Christianity suggests the early Christians pulled it off. For example, even though pagan institutions would not help indigent Christians, Christians tried to give charity to Christian and pagan alike, even going so far as to help nurse pagans during the plague (when nursing a victim conferred a high risk of contagion and death). Even Emperor Julian, an enemy of Christianity, admitted it lived up to its own standards: When the poor happened to be neglected and overlooked by the priests, the impious Galileans observed this and devoted themselves to benevolence . . . [they] support not only their poor, but ours as well, [when] everyone can see that our people lack aid from us.” In 1 Corinthians 6, Paul is asked whether it is acceptable for one Christian to pursue a lawsuit against another Christian in a pagan court. He answers: The very fact that you have lawsuits among you means you have been completely defeated already. Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be cheated? We get a similar picture from the stories of the martyrs. Many of them prayed for the Romans while the Romans were in the process of torturing and killing them; Polycarp even cooked them a meal. If the Christians had merely been TIT-FOR-TAT, it would be easy to tell a story of their victory. The Roman Empire was corrupt and decadent to the core. People were looking for a community they could trust. Christianity offered access to a better class of friends who wouldn’t immediately rob or betray you when your guard was down. By providing a superior alternative to the low-trust pagan world, it was irresistible on a purely rational economic basis. But this story sounds more worthy of the mystery cults. Mystery cults are a great structure for mutual aid; we see this today in groups like the Freemasons (cf. Backscratcher Clubs). Everybody knows who’s on the inside (and needs to be mutually aided) and who’s on the outside (and can be ignored). The initiatory structure holds off freeloaders and makes sure the people on the inside are of approximately equal rank (so that you get as many benefits as you give) and can be held accountable if they don’t contribute. Since Christianity did better than the mystery cults, there must have been some reason that COOPERATE-BOT beat TIT-FOR-TAT in the particular environment of Roman religion, defying all normal game theoretic logic. III. Is this a consistent feature of COOPERATE-BOT strategies, or was it just luck? This is hard to say, because in all normal cases it’s impossible to follow a COOPERATE-BOT strategy at scale and for any period of time. Consider the Quakers, who gave it a better try than most. They were persecuted by the British and fled to America (is this kosher? it sort of seems like resisting evil). There they founded the colony of Pennsylvania, intended to be a utopia of pacifism and benevolence. They were very serious about this; history records many Quakers who were arrested or even killed rather than compromise their principles, and the British Crown seized Pennsylvania from the Quakers a few times because they wouldn’t make extremely cheap gestures like pay taxes or swear oaths. But in the end, the Crown frog-boiled the Quakers into compliance. They promised to return self-government if the Quakers would budge an inch - in one compromise, if they agreed to pay taxes that could go to non-combat functions of the military. The Quakers eventually agreed, and the British ratcheted up their demands the next time. Finally, in 1755, some Indians launched a major assault on Pennsylvania, and all the Quakers voluntarily resigned from government to let the non-Quaker Pennsylvanians (who by this time outnumbered them) conduct the war without restraint. The Quakers performed better than most COOPERATE-BOTs. They stuck to their principles most of the time, and in the end their religion survived. But look deeper, and you see a gradual process of surrender to reality. First was the flight to America, an implicit admission that living was better than being martyred for the faith. Then came the various compromises; an implicit admission that getting to keep self-government while being 99% pure was better than being subjects while 100% pure. Finally, they gave up Pennsylvania itself rather than be wiped out, again choosing the practical option over martyrdom. My point isn’t to knock the Quakers, who may come in a close 2nd in “historical groups that stuck to their cooperative principles despite all odds” and were certainly more ethical than I am. My point is that even very committed groups of religious fanatics fail the non-violent COOPERATE-BOT strategy eventually. Or maybe the ones who didn’t fail were wiped out? I hear good things about the Cathars, but we can’t know for sure because they were very thoroughly killed off - unrepentant to the last. Are there any other groups who deserve mention in this section besides early Christians, Quakers, and Cathars? I think some German and Russian sects have tried similar strategies, though they mostly failed and I don’t know much about them. Not exactly the same, but maybe rhyming: what about modern liberalism? To the monarchs and dictators of the past, free speech might seem kind of like COOPERATE-BOT in a limited domain: the idea that elites shouldn’t make any forceful/legal effort to protect their ideological and spiritual position must sound almost as crazy as them not making any forceful/legal effort to protect themselves if attacked, or to prevent themselves from getting cheated. It is, in some sense, a unilateral surrender in the war of ideas; fascists and communists will do their best to crush liberalism, but liberals cannot ban discussion of fascism or communism. The fact that this, too, has worked, makes me think early Christianity wasn’t just a one-off, but suggests some larger point. IV. Still, I don’t really know what it is. Here are some weak theories: Advertisement: Being kind to outsiders is good PR and encourages those outsiders to join you. This effect is stronger than the corresponding disincentive (that they won’t get much better treatment than they’re getting already, and they will have to be nice to other outsiders in their turn).

Inline links: The Rise Of Christianity, cf. Backscratcher Clubs, eventually agreed

Book Review: From Bauhaus To Our House

December 04, 2024 · Original source

Fifth, one of the morals I took from The Rise Of Christianity is that you’re more likely to win if you’re in the game. Paganism was just a set of tools for propitiating deities; Christianity was a missionary religion. Except at the very end (eg Emperor Julian), pagans didn’t think of themselves as proud pagans or try to convince others of paganism - so Christianity, which understood that it was competing with paganism and tried to win the competition, succeeded almost by default. In the same way, older styles of architecture were just sets of tools for making pretty buildings. Its practitioners didn’t originally think of themselves as “old-style architects” or care about converting anyone else. But modern architecture, with its manifestos and compounds and nonbourgeoisity, was absolutely an ideology, and understood perfectly well that it was at war with its predecessors. Some of the most ideological bits were filed off before it came to America. In Germany, Bauhaus architects had tried to adhere to a special Bauhaus diet invented by Walter Gropius - that didn’t last long. But it was still recognizably a warrior faith.

Inline links: The Rise Of Christianity

The Secret of Our Success4 mentions across 4 issues

The Secret of Our Success is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between April 08, 2021 and July 15, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "the thesis of The Secret of Our Success"; "The author or The Secret of Our Success"; "His marvelous book The Secret of Our Success told the human narrative". It most often appears alongside Rousseau, US, Adam Smith.

Article page: The Secret of Our Success
Mention count: 4
Issue count: 4
First seen: April 08, 2021
Last seen: July 15, 2025
Book title: The Secret of Our Success
Likely author: Joseph Henrich

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: Order Without Law April 08, 2021
Your Book Review: The Educated Mind July 14, 2023
Your Book Review: The Weirdest People in the World August 11, 2023
Book Review: Arguments About Aborigines July 15, 2025

Rousseau 3 shared issues
US 3 shared issues
Adam Smith 2 shared issues
Confucius 2 shared issues
Europe 2 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: Order Without Law

April 08, 2021 · Original source

It seems like we need to add a caveat to the hypothesis for this kind of thing, “if people believe that rain dances bring rain, then norms will encourage rain dances”. And I kind of want to say that’s fair enough, you can’t expect norms to be smarter than people. But on the other hand, I think the thesis of The Secret of Our Success and the like is that actually, that’s exactly what you can expect norms to be. And it seems like a significant weakening of the hypothesis – do we now only predict norms to optimize in ways that group members understand? Or to optimize not for welfare but for “what group members predict their future welfare will be”? I dunno, and that’s a bad sign. But if the hypothesis doesn’t lose points for rain dances, it probably shouldn’t gain points for manioc. (Though as Ben Hoffman points out, the cost-benefit of manioc processing isn’t immediately obvious. Maybe the hypothesis should lose points for both manioc and rain dances.)

Inline links: The Secret of Our Success, points out

July 14, 2023 · Original source

Alice: The aerospace-engineer-turned-Harvard-professor-of-human-evolution who’s helping reinvent how we understand anthropology, psychology, and economics? The author or The Secret of Our Success and The WEIRDest People in the World? I’m familiar with his work, yes.

Inline links: The Secret of Our Success, The WEIRDest People in the World

Book Review: Arguments About Aborigines

August 11, 2023 · Original source

The difference between Greece and Rome on the one hand, and Babylon and Egypt on the other, was that Greeks and Romans had written down their stories for us. Their stories had become our story. History was a narrative. Each of its chapters had a beginning, middle and end. How else would you tell it? Now, as we go farther back, we have less and less writing to rely on. Even when we have writing, on papyrus or stone, it isn’t self-interpreting – it’s not history the way Herodotus and Livy tell us history, with the explicit goal of recounting the past. Earlier still the texts die out completely, and we are left with stones and bones. Our knowledge of this history has to come from science: from archeology, anthropology (in the hope of using present societies to learn about past societies), and now also the new science of historical population genetics. Joe Henrich has done more than most to teach us our history using these tools. His marvelous book The Secret of Our Success told the human narrative from the point of view of the unique human capacity for cumulative culture1.

Inline links: book, 1

Y is correlated with X today Indeed this does seem to skip all the interesting, contingent bits: On the other hand, if you want to explain an all-important outcome like the take-off into modern economic growth, then you can't just mumble “one damn thing after another” or “irony and contingency”. That a hundred things randomly conspired to make the West Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic is not a satisfying story. Why would the die rolls keep favouring this one place? (And you can't invoke the law of large numbers. There are only five continents in the world, and modern economic growth did not have to happen anywhere at all.) To get from Europe 1 AD to modernity, while paying reasonable attention to the many accidents along the way, there are really only two possible narrative genres. The first is the rock falling down a mountain. It starts with one big, random event. This then triggers other events, and they trigger others, and now you have an unstoppable landslide. But the chance is at the start. The second is the cyclist pushing his bike up a mountain. It takes an actor who deliberately over time overcomes one obstacle and dodges another, until eventually they get to the top, and from there it's a downhill ride. WEIRD belongs firmly in the landslide genre. The big event is the Marriage and Family Program of the Western Church. This sets off a landslide, which the later chapters detail: the decline of kin institutions, the rise of Italian communes and city-states in the middle ages, the idea of individual rights in the European law merchant, the development of Protestantism, and finally the trifecta of science, commerce and democracy. WEIRD psychology is there, as an unobserved helper, for each stage of this journey, but each stage also builds on the previous ones. It's not by chance that WEIRD tells the West's story as a landslide. First, this is part of cultural evolution's baggage of intellectual commitments. Homo culturalis doesn't figure out solutions to his problems by abstract thought; he's not a natural optimizer. Instead he feels his way towards solutions. In a now famous example from The Secret Of Our Success, nobody just sat down and worked out how to detoxify manioc. Cultures which did this job better just had an evolutionary advantage. Second, the “bicycle push uphill” story would threaten the clean causality of the natural experiment. Suppose the Western Church promulgated the MFP with the deliberate plan of creating WEIRD psychology and causing the take-off into modern economic growth. Okay, that's unlikely, but suppose it promulgated the MFP with a plan that was somewhat related to increasing human welfare (in this world, not the next). Then we might suspect two things: Maybe in doing so the Church was reacting to existing conditions: reading the human situation and responding “hey, what we need here is less intensive kinship”.

Inline links: detoxify manioc

It seems important which of these two stories is true. So, after The Secret of Our Success and WEIRD, perhaps there is room to make it a trilogy.

July 15, 2025 · Original source

But my own thoughts on anthropology have been shaped by two letter-S-intensive books. First, The Secret Of Our Success by Joseph Henrich (reviewed by me here). Second, Sick Societies by Robert Edgerton (reviewed by Jane Psmith here).

Inline links: reviewed by me here, reviewed by Jane Psmith here

The WEIRDest People in the World4 mentions across 4 issues

The WEIRDest People in the World is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between July 14, 2023 and September 15, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "and The WEIRDest People in the World"; "Henrich's latest book, The Weirdest People in the World"; "13 : The WEIRDest People In The World". It most often appears alongside Adam Smith, Confucius, Europe.

Article page: The WEIRDest People in the World
Mention count: 4
Issue count: 4
First seen: July 14, 2023
Last seen: September 15, 2023
Book title: The WEIRDest People in the World
Likely author: David Hugh Jones

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: The Educated Mind July 14, 2023
Your Book Review: The Weirdest People in the World August 11, 2023
Vote In The 2023 Book Review Contest September 08, 2023
Book Review Contest 2023 Winners September 15, 2023

Adam Smith 2 shared issues
Confucius 2 shared issues
Europe 2 shared issues
Greece 2 shared issues
Harvard 2 shared issues

Source context

July 14, 2023 · Original source

Alice: The aerospace-engineer-turned-Harvard-professor-of-human-evolution who’s helping reinvent how we understand anthropology, psychology, and economics? The author or The Secret of Our Success and The WEIRDest People in the World? I’m familiar with his work, yes.

Inline links: The Secret of Our Success, The WEIRDest People in the World

Inline links: 3, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!1pe5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F65c52bab-c319-4239-988c-73c141e995a6_935x214.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!FA2x!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F910f2b34-1235-412a-a43d-ed00fa1b1dc9_882x767.png, one of the scientific articles behind

August 11, 2023 · Original source

The question was always going to arise: how do we fit the big story of humanity, told by modern social science, together with the story of Europe told by narrative history? Henrich's latest book, The Weirdest People in the World, goes there2.

Inline links: 2

Trust strangers more and are more honest. This psychology might make societies richer, for fairly well-known and plausible reasons. The Weirdest People in the World (henceforth just WEIRD) sets out a causal chain from cultural change to psychological change to modern economic growth. The start of that chain is surprising: an obscure set of rules pushed by the medieval Catholic church, which banned marriage between cousins. The most important argument of the book is that these rules created WEIRD psychology. How it worked: these marriage regulations served to dismantle intensive kin networks, which are the social cement of society almost everywhere else in the world. For most people in history, family hasn't just been the place where children grow up and couples spend time together. Family has been the basic human group, and there have been extensive and precise rules dictating who counts as family (or clan) and how each person should act with respect to different relatives. The Church's regulations, the Marriage and Family Programme (MFP), aimed to replace intensive kinship, and over many centuries it was more or less successful in doing that. We'll come back shortly to why it wanted to. So, the causal chain looks like this3: WEIRD's key evidence is the link between the places where the Church promulgated the MFP and a set of psychological and social outcomes: the level of cousin marriage, the psychology of people living in those places today, social capital and economic growth. This is the scientific story of European history, and Henrich's answer to the most important question in the world. These maps from one of the scientific articles behind WEIRD show the basic causal claim: the medieval church reduced the intensity of kinship institutions. He tells it with an extraordinary mastery of a very wide range of sources from anthropology, psychology, behavioural economics, economic history, and historical narrative. This book is for everyone, but the connoisseur will enjoy the bibliography: if you think it's important and relevant, it's probably in there, and there was also plenty of work which I did not know, and now feel I should. It takes a very smart person to keep this many balls in the air. Being at Harvard probably doesn't hurt either – that's the “collective brain” of the human network, which makes an appearance later on in the book. So this book really sets down a marker: the anthropologists are returning from the Amazon, the Sudan and Polynesia, and coming for Western history and economics. It will be interesting to see how those target disciplines react. Is it true? Economists and historians think about Western history very differently. Historians love irony and contingency. They enjoy byways. Triumphalist, linear narratives of progress are distrusted as “Whig history”. Growth economists, by contrast, are all about the linear bigness. They have a relentless focus on the one question of how the West got rich, and if you call that triumphalist, they will take out a chart of South Sudanese child mortality and laugh at you. Both historians and historical economists — a more appropriate name than “economic historians” nowadays — are interested in causality. But economists have a crunchier, more “scientific” standard for what counts as proof of causality. You've got to have a treatment and a control group, and by default if you claim there are no confounds, they won't believe you. You need you some plausible exogeneity. A random river where Napoleon's armies stopped. The distance from Wittemberg where Luther nailed up his theses. And then, how does that affect something that matters today (if it doesn't, then who cares?) Of course, the longer ago the exogenous treatment, the more impressive the result. You can see the incentives that these disciplinary demands might set up, and that might worry you. At worst, you might get a kind of “underground river” concept of history, where X happened long ago

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

Highlights From The Comments On Justice Creep

September 15, 2023 · Original source

The Weirdest People in the World, reviewed by David Hugh-Jones. David is a social scientist with interests in genetics and culture. He writes at Wyclif's Dust, which is also the name of his book. He's currently looking for a job which lets him do research; if you have any ideas, get in touch. Failing that, he plans to retire to the hills and rail against modern civilization.

Inline links: The Weirdest People in the World, Wyclif's Dust, book, get in touch

Terra Ignota3 mentions across 3 issues

Terra Ignota is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between March 16, 2022 and July 30, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "If I were in Terra Ignota , my fondest wish would be to excel in some way the same way Sniper, Apollo Mojave, and the other utopian characters excel"; "If I were in Terra Ignota, my fondest wish would be to excel in some way the same way Sniper, Apollo Mojave, and the other utopian characters excel"; "Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota , a sci-fi story". It most often appears alongside Charity, 1984, Apollo Mojave.

Article page: Terra Ignota
Mention count: 3
Issue count: 3
First seen: March 16, 2022
Last seen: July 30, 2024
Book title: Terra Ignota

Outbound links

Issue trail

Justice Creep March 16, 2022
Highlights From The Comments On Justice Creep March 24, 2022
Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman July 30, 2024

Charity 3 shared issues
1984 2 shared issues
Apollo Mojave 2 shared issues
Christianity 2 shared issues
climate justice 2 shared issues

Source context

Justice Creep

March 16, 2022 · Original source

Here’s a crazy theory: the moral transition from other virtues to Justice mirrors the literary transition from utopian fiction to dystopian. In Utopia, people practice virtues like Charity, Industry, and Humanity, excelling at them and making their good world even better. In Dystopia, Justice is all you can hope for. If I were in Terra Ignota, my fondest wish would be to excel in some way the same way Sniper, Apollo Mojave, and the other utopian characters excel, bringing glory to my Hive and giving its already-brilliant shine extra luster. But if I were in 1984, my fondest wish would be to bring O’Brien and the others to justice; to watch them suffer, to undo the wound in the world caused by their scheming.

Inline links: Terra Ignota

March 24, 2022 · Original source

“If I were in Terra Ignota, my fondest wish would be to excel in some way the same way Sniper, Apollo Mojave, and the other utopian characters excel, bringing glory to my Hive and giving its already-brilliant shine extra luster. But if I were in 1984, my fondest wish would be to bring O’Brien and the others to justice; to watch them suffer, to undo the wound in the world caused by their scheming.”

Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman

July 30, 2024 · Original source

This part probably deserves more prominence - sports are a notable holdout of master morality, and an easy way for most people to appreciate it. Some of the most popular criticisms of slave morality come from imagining it being overapplied to sports (eg everyone getting participation trophies). A full treatment of this topic could touch on Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota, a sci-fi story where one of the remaining civilizations is descended from the International Olympic Committee and has managed to preserve humanist values in a sort of Olympics-centric way.

The Accidental Superpower3 mentions across 3 issues

The Accidental Superpower is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between May 21, 2021 and July 10, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Accidental Superpower is filled with country-specific charts that look like this:"; "This has largely been a summary about wealth creation so far, but The Accidental Superpower is a story about a worldwide disorder"; "The second half of The Accidental Superpower is filled with Zeihan’s predictions". It most often appears alongside Addiction By Design, Australia, Double Fold.

Article page: The Accidental Superpower
Mention count: 3
Issue count: 3
First seen: May 21, 2021
Last seen: July 10, 2021
Book title: The Accidental Superpower
Likely author: Jon Boguth

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: The Accidental Superpower May 21, 2021
Vote In The Book Review Contest! June 18, 2021
Book Review Contest: Winners July 10, 2021

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

Source context

May 21, 2021 · Original source

In The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder (2014), Peter Zeihan predicts the future of world politics and economic development in a way that an ACX fan would appreciate. He puts a timeline on it. The book isn’t about “some hazy distant future after we’re all dead and gone, but the future we will all be living in for the next fifteen years of our lives.” Zeihan’s subtitle hints at his big and bold thesis, which predicts “the dissolution of the free trade order, the global demographic inversion, the collapse of Europe and China,” which “is all just a fleeting transition” to a world largely abandoned by America.

Inline links: The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder

People have fun making predictions like this (and mocking those who get things spectacularly wrong). With money and fame available to people whose predictions turn out right, and the ease with which we forget bad predictions, we should expect many such visionaries. However, regardless of whether you agree with Zeihan’s particular vision, The Accidental Superpower presents a set of analytical tools that should be useful for anyone interested in little questions like which countries will obtain power and wealth in the future, and which will collapse in war and poverty. (In case you didn’t catch it from the title, Zeihan says that America is going to be the biggest winner in the world to come.)

We’ve probably all heard that demography is destiny. Zeihan’s model doesn’t quite go that far, but he’s a big believer in the importance of it. “Marry demographics with geopolitics and you have a series of powerful tools for predicting everything from political instability to economic outcomes.” The Accidental Superpower is filled with country-specific charts that look like this:

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

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)

The Beginning Of Infinity3 mentions across 3 issues

The Beginning Of Infinity is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between June 13, 2021 and September 15, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "reviews of The Beginning Of Infinity"; "The Beginning Of Infinity , reviewed by Cam Peters"; "his review of The Beginning Of Infinity". It most often appears alongside @campeters4, a_reader, ACX.

Article page: The Beginning Of Infinity
Mention count: 3
Issue count: 3
First seen: June 13, 2021
Last seen: September 15, 2023
Book title: The Beginning Of Infinity
Likely author: Cam Peters

Outbound links

Issue trail

Open Thread 176 June 13, 2021
Book Review Contest 2022 Winners September 02, 2022
Book Review Contest 2023 Winners September 15, 2023

@campeters4 2 shared issues
a_reader 2 shared issues
ACX 2 shared issues
Atlas of Wonders and Monsters 2 shared issues
Cam Peters 2 shared issues

Source context

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.

September 02, 2022 · Original source

The Beginning Of Infinity, reviewed by Cam Peters. Cam is a data analyst who blogs at Fallible Pieces and tweets at @campeters4..

Inline links: The Beginning Of Infinity, Fallible Pieces, @campeters4

Statement on New York Times Article

September 15, 2023 · Original source

How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, reviewed by Cam Peters. Cam is a data analyst who blogs at Fallible Pieces and tweets at @campeters4. He also won an honorable mention last year for his review of The Beginning Of Infinity.

Inline links: How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, Fallible Pieces, @campeters4, his review of The Beginning Of Infinity

The Bell Curve3 mentions across 3 issues

The Bell Curve is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between February 14, 2021 and July 14, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and IQ in 'The Bell Curve'"; "a journalist dishonestly spliced my words to imply I supported Charles Murray's The Bell Curve"; "those “everyone is equally smart” romantic navel-gazers who find The Bell Curve too scary to open?". It most often appears alongside Bryan Caplan, Charles Murray, Freddie DeBoer.

Article page: The Bell Curve
Mention count: 3
Issue count: 3
First seen: February 14, 2021
Last seen: July 14, 2023
Book title: The Bell Curve

Outbound links

Issue trail

Statement on New York Times Article February 14, 2021
Book Review: The Cult Of Smart February 18, 2021
Your Book Review: The Educated Mind July 14, 2023

Bryan Caplan 2 shared issues
Charles Murray 2 shared issues
Freddie DeBoer 2 shared issues
Harvard 2 shared issues
Reddit 2 shared issues

Source context

February 14, 2021 · Original source

1. The article tries to connect me to Charles Murray and The Bell Curve, saying:

In one post, he aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and IQ in “The Bell Curve.” In another, he pointed out that Murray believes Black people “are genetically less intelligent than white people.”

Inline links: aligned himself with Charles Murray

February 18, 2021 · Original source

Earlier this week, I objected when a journalist dishonestly spliced my words to imply I supported Charles Murray's The Bell Curve. Some people wrote me to complain that I handled this in a cowardly way - I showed that the specific thing the journalist quoted wasn’t a reference to The Bell Curve, but I never answered the broader question of what I thought of the book. They demanded I come out and give my opinion openly. Well, the most direct answer is that I've never read it. But that's kind of cowardly too - I've read papers and articles making what I assume is the same case. So what do I think of them?

The Precision Of Sensory Evidence

July 14, 2023 · Original source

Alice: Speaking of gaps, there’s a huge one in your treatment of this — what about IQ? It’s the most-tested, most-validated measurement in all of schooling! Is Egan one of those “everyone is equally smart” romantic navel-gazers who find The Bell Curve too scary to open?

Reviewer: Look, not everyone has the cognitive capacity to put their shirt on by themselves; I have nieces and nephews who are developmentally disabled. This “all children” rhetoric that you hear so much in educational reform seems to shut its eyes to the existence of people on the far end of the bell curve.

Anyhow, at the other end of the bell curve, Egan has something interesting to say, too.

The Body Keeps The Score3 mentions across 3 issues

The Body Keeps The Score is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between February 13, 2021 and July 21, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "In The Body Keeps The Score , Bessel van der Kolk writes about the deep link between trauma and poor bodily awareness"; "It gives me the understanding of the trauma-somatization link that The Body Keeps The Score never quite managed"; "I enjoyed The Body Keeps The Score partly because it told the other side of this history". It most often appears alongside America, Crazy Like Us, Dr. van der Kolk.

Article page: The Body Keeps The Score
Mention count: 3
Issue count: 3
First seen: February 13, 2021
Last seen: July 21, 2021
Book title: The Body Keeps The Score

Outbound links

Issue trail

The Precision Of Sensory Evidence February 13, 2021
Book Review: Crazy Like Us July 15, 2021
Highlights From The Comments On "Crazy Like Us" July 21, 2021

America 2 shared issues
Crazy Like Us 2 shared issues
Dr. van der Kolk 2 shared issues
Japan 2 shared issues
neurasthenia 2 shared issues

Source context

February 13, 2021 · Original source

- In The Body Keeps The Score, Bessel van der Kolk writes about the deep link between trauma and poor bodily awareness. For example, trauma patients do much worse than normal on tests of stereoagnosia, where you have to identify an object (eg a key) by touch alone. He gives the example of a trauma patient undergoing massage therapy who was so out-of-touch with his body that he didn't even notice the massage had started. Trauma patients tend to say they "can't feel their bodies" or "they're living in a fog"; on successful treatment, they say they "feel alive again" or "I'm back in my body".

Inline links: The Body Keeps The Score

So this model, where inappropriately narrow sensory evidence channels create a bottleneck that makes it impossible to process sufficiently traumatic memories, ties a lot of things together. It gives me the understanding of the trauma-somatization link that The Body Keeps The Score never quite managed. It helps tie together the mechanisms of action for psychedelics, meditation, and therapy. And it resolves the apparent dichotomy between depression as low confidence and depression as negative prior that's been bothering me for so long. This is the most exciting paper I've read so far this year and an important addition to my understanding of predictive processing and psychiatry in general.

Book Review: Crazy Like Us

July 15, 2021 · Original source

In fact, at the very beginning of the emergence of modern PTSD - around the Vietnam War - the original researchers of the condition called it “post-Vietnam syndrome” and tried to define it as a distinctly Vietnamese experience. The idea was that soldiers in past “good” wars had been fighting for something they believed in , had the support of the population back home, and didn’t have psychological problems. Since soldiers in Vietnam were developing all these new symptoms, that was yet more evidence that it was a “bad” war which had to be stopped. Over the course of decades (plus lots of marketing by enthusiastic therapists), PTSD expanded from a Vietnam-only problem, to all wars, to all natural disasters, to abuse and sexual violence, to the modern understanding where people say they got PTSD from a bad boss, a bad roommate, or an insufficiently woke college reading assignment. I enjoyed The Body Keeps The Score partly because it told the other side of this history, from one of the researchers involved in the popularization, who faced roadblocks like “the VA refused to fund studies because they couldn’t see what relevance PTSD might have for veterans”.

Inline links: The Body Keeps The Score

Highlights From The Comments On "Crazy Like Us"

July 21, 2021 · Original source

And yet, in 1960s there was total, absolute denial in American society that childhood sexual abuse even existed. From The Body Keeps the score:

This is a great point and a great example; see my review of The Body Keeps The Score for more.

Inline links: The Body Keeps The Score

The Complete Rhyming Dictionary and Poet’s Craft Book3 mentions across 3 issues

The Complete Rhyming Dictionary and Poet’s Craft Book is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between August 23, 2024 and October 11, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "putting together The Complete Rhyming Dictionary and Poet’s Craft Book in 1936"; "The Complete Rhyming Dictionary and Poet’s Craft Book is, on the surface, a book of contradictions"; "I highly recommend the 1936 edition of The Complete Rhyming Dictionary and Poet’s Craft Book". It most often appears alongside Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa, Dominion, Don Juan.

Article page: The Complete Rhyming Dictionary and Poet’s Craft Book
Mention count: 3
Issue count: 3
First seen: August 23, 2024
Last seen: October 11, 2024
Book title: The Complete Rhyming Dictionary and Poet’s Craft Book
Likely author: David

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: The Complete Rhyming Dictionary and Poet's Craft Book (1936 Edition) August 23, 2024
Vote In The 2024 Book Review Contest September 27, 2024
Book Review Contest 2024 Winners October 11, 2024

Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa 2 shared issues
Dominion 2 shared issues
Don Juan 2 shared issues
How Language Began 2 shared issues
How the War Was Won 2 shared issues

Source context

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

August 23, 2024 · Original source

If you stop right there and decide to write a book about the trip, you’re in all likelihood Clement Wood, putting together The Complete Rhyming Dictionary and Poet’s Craft Book in 1936. You have a grand vision in front of you about poetry, with very clear ideas as to what direction it’s going to take. There’s such a large body of poetry in English that a little bit of polyrhythm in place of strict iambic metre (or even better, this new-fangled eighty-year-old invention called ‘free verse’), and consonance or assonance instead of strict rhyme, could introduce some much-needed fresh blood into the scene. You dream of a day in which poetry is “a regular pattern, with restrained freedom and variety in its use”. You see a time when the various fixed forms like sonnets and ballades were enhanced by a healthy dose of irregularity, unlike the unforgiving metre the “poets, bound by fossilized conventions” of your day would prefer. And, eventually, a decade and a half after the book, you die peacefully, having completed a wondrous journey.

Inline links: The Complete Rhyming Dictionary and Poet’s Craft Book

The Complete Rhyming Dictionary and Poet’s Craft Book is, on the surface, a book of contradictions. It’s a rhyming dictionary, prefaced by a guide to metre and the fixed poetic forms, written by a poet sick of fixed poetic conventions in general and rhyming in particular.

Overall, I highly recommend the 1936 edition of The Complete Rhyming Dictionary and Poet’s Craft Book to anyone who wants a genuine introduction and reference guide to the art of poetry.

September 27, 2024 · Original source

1: Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa 2: Dominion 3: Don Juan 4: The Family That Couldn’t Sleep 5: How Language Began 6: Real Raw News 7: Two Arms And A Head 8: How The War Was Won 9: Silver Age Marvel Comics 10: The Complete Rhyming Dictionary And Poet’s Craft Book 11: The History Of The Rise And Influence Of The Spirit Of Rationalism In Europe 12: The Pale King 13: Nine Lives 14: The Ballad Of The White Horse

Your Book Review: The Family That Couldn’t Sleep

October 11, 2024 · Original source

The Complete Rhyming Dictionary And Poet’s Craft Book, reviewed by David. David is a materials science PhD and programmer who blogs with co-author Felipe at The Hall of Impossible Dreams about fanfiction, poetry, video game machine learning, and fanfiction poetry about video game machine learning. He is currently looking for work, and can be reached at david@hallofdreams.org.

Inline links: The Complete Rhyming Dictionary And Poet’s Craft Book, The Hall of Impossible Dreams, fanfiction, poetry, video game machine learning, fanfiction poetry about video game machine learning, david@hallofdreams.org

The Family That Couldn’t Sleep3 mentions across 3 issues

The Family That Couldn’t Sleep is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between July 12, 2024 and October 11, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Family That Couldn’t Sleep by D. T. Max was published in late 2006"; "The Family That Couldn’t Sleep is beneath all else a 'character-driven narrative'"; "The Family That Couldn’t Sleep portrays him as all four". It most often appears alongside Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa, Dominion, Don Juan.

Article page: The Family That Couldn’t Sleep
Mention count: 3
Issue count: 3
First seen: July 12, 2024
Last seen: October 11, 2024
Book title: The Family That Couldn’t Sleep

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: The Family That Couldn’t Sleep July 12, 2024
Vote In The 2024 Book Review Contest September 27, 2024
Book Review Contest 2024 Winners October 11, 2024

Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa 2 shared issues
Dominion 2 shared issues
Don Juan 2 shared issues
How Language Began 2 shared issues
How the War Was Won 2 shared issues

Source context

July 12, 2024 · Original source

The Family That Couldn’t Sleep by D. T. Max was published in late 2006. This glues it to a very particular era. A spectre was haunting Europe – the spectre of mad cow disease. Something was tearing through Britain’s cows, turning them inside out, eating their brains and thrashing their souls. It had been doing so since, DTM thinks, “the late 1970s”. When we look back in retrospect and think about a timeline like this, knowing everything we know, you can’t help but feel a shiver down your spine.

The Family That Couldn’t Sleep comes from this era of...optimism? Yeah, let’s say optimism. The wildest predictions – that hundreds of thousands of people across Britain would be struck by vCJD around the turn of the millennium – were clearly wrong. The disease was severe enough to strike the fear of prion diseases into people’s hearts; the name, entirely unfamiliar a few years earlier, now defines a bogeyman cluster of The Worst Diseases Possible. It seemed possible they could be human epidemics, if small ones. This was enough to be scary. But it wasn’t quite as scary as a Game Over.

Accordingly, The Family That Couldn’t Sleep is beneath all else a “character-driven narrative”. It first introduces us to, of all poetic things, a fallen noble-blooded Venetian family. The money ran out, you see – not because of profligate spendthrifts or revolutionary uprisings, but because of whispers, taunts, that its members were cursed to go mad. In midlife, it seemed, a strangely high fraction of them were struck by a specific sort of insanity. It started with a fever that never quite let down, even after any supposed illness should have ran its course. A little trouble sleeping – but is that so unusual, for someone feverish in the languid Italian summers?

September 27, 2024 · Original source

1: Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa 2: Dominion 3: Don Juan 4: The Family That Couldn’t Sleep 5: How Language Began 6: Real Raw News 7: Two Arms And A Head 8: How The War Was Won 9: Silver Age Marvel Comics 10: The Complete Rhyming Dictionary And Poet’s Craft Book 11: The History Of The Rise And Influence Of The Spirit Of Rationalism In Europe 12: The Pale King 13: Nine Lives 14: The Ballad Of The White Horse

October 11, 2024 · Original source

The Family That Couldn’t Sleep, reviewed by Vat, a neuropsychology/genetics student who writes at Vates Rising.

Inline links: The Family That Couldn’t Sleep, Vates Rising

The Golden Bough3 mentions across 3 issues

The Golden Bough is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between August 19, 2022 and July 15, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "reminded me strongly of a major theme of The Golden Bough by James Frazer"; "a major theme of The Golden Bough by James Frazer"; "Sir James Frazier’s seminal work on anthropology, The Golden Bough". It most often appears alongside America, Australia, Aztecs.

Article page: The Golden Bough
Mention count: 3
Issue count: 3
First seen: August 19, 2022
Last seen: July 15, 2025
Book title: The Golden Bough
Likely author: James Frazer

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: 1587, A Year Of No Significance August 19, 2022
My 2024 Presidential Debate June 27, 2024
Book Review: Arguments About Aborigines July 15, 2025

America 2 shared issues
Australia 2 shared issues
Aztecs 2 shared issues
1587 1 shared issues
1587 1 shared issues

Source context

My 2024 Presidential Debate

August 19, 2022 · Original source

This ironic powerlessness of a seemingly supreme monarch, more a pampered prisoner of the Forbidden City than the lord of everything under heaven, reminded me strongly of a major theme of The Golden Bough by James Frazer, a pioneering work in the anthropology of religion which has continually caused controversy since its first publication in 1890. It's no more “scientific” than comparable 19th-century theories from formerly valorized - and now generally discredited - authors like Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, or Mary Baker Eddy. That said, Frazer never claimed his theories were anything more than speculative, and he wasn't wrong about everything. His accounts of widespread ancient belief in sacrificial god-kings seem relevant to Wan-li's story:

June 27, 2024 · Original source

Biden: Scott, I think about these things through the lens of Sir James Frazier’s seminal work on anthropology, The Golden Bough. Frazier writes that all rituals descend from the same ur-ritual: sacrificing the king to restore the fertility of the soil. As time went on, instead of sacrificing the literal king, societies changed this ritual into more and more figurative forms. In one common instantiation, typified by the Roman festival of Saturnalia, a commoner was chosen as the “mock king” or “king of fools”. He would be feted for a time, given the finest goods and the most delicate foods, and then sacrificed to the gods in place of the true king. I think of cancel culture as an outgrowth of this phenomenon. We take undeserving commoners and promote them to celebrities. For a time they bask in limitless wealth and the adoration of all. Then we destroy them. This may seem harsh to the uninitiated. But without it, the corn would fail in Iowa, the grapes would wilt on the vine in California, and the apple trees of New England would wither and die. Our celebrities know by what bargain they have gained their ephemeral reign. Let none mourn the inevitable consequences.

Book Review: Arguments About Aborigines

July 15, 2025 · Original source

In the nineteenth century, anthropologists - buoyed by the success of Darwin’s theory of evolution - tried to invent grand Theories of Everything about the rise of humankind. These usually looked like “All savages originally did P, then passed through intermediate stages where they did Q, R, and S sequentially, and finally reached the light of civilization where they did T”. We still remember some of these fondly: the classic motif of a caveman clubbing a random woman and dragging her off to be his wife comes from a real theory by anthropologist John McLennan that this was the original marriage ritual of humankind, with advanced cultures eventually adding epicycles like “consent” and “courtship”. There is still dim cultural awareness of James Frazier’s The Golden Bough, which purports to prove that all religion came from an ur-ritual of killing the king to ensure the fertility of the land. Still, observers eventually noticed that “all savages do P” isn’t true for basically any P, and after some delay anthropologists stopped trying to argue that surely some X was actually a distant distorted cultural memory of P which all savages must have done in an even-more-savage past.

The Laws of Trading3 mentions across 3 issues

The Laws of Trading is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between July 21, 2023 and September 15, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "With The Laws of Trading, Agustin Lebron has written something different"; "The Laws of Trading opens the door to this world a crack"; "10 : The Laws Of Trading". It most often appears alongside Bitcoin, Lying For Money, Njal’s Saga.

Article page: The Laws of Trading
Mention count: 3
Issue count: 3
First seen: July 21, 2023
Last seen: September 15, 2023
Book title: The Laws of Trading
Likely author: Dan Reardon

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: The Laws of Trading July 21, 2023
Vote In The 2023 Book Review Contest September 08, 2023
Book Review Contest 2023 Winners September 15, 2023

Bitcoin 2 shared issues
Lying For Money 2 shared issues
Njal’s Saga 2 shared issues
On the Marble Cliffs 2 shared issues
Public Citizens 2 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: The Laws of Trading

July 21, 2023 · Original source

Tales of Icarus flying too close to the sun, where readers revel in schadenfreude, e.g., When Genius Failed. With The Laws of Trading, Agustin Lebron has written something different: part love letter to trading, part philosophical treatise on epistemology and modeling the world around us, and part guide to applied decision-making. Lebron’s Laws are Laws of the Jungle, not Laws of Nature. He views financial markets as the most competitive Darwinian environment on Earth, where participants must adapt or die. According to Lebron, the book is for people working in finance and trading, as well as anyone in the business of making rational decisions. This explicitly rationalist bent is similar to Julia Galef’s The Scout Mindset or Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets. Where The Laws of Trading sets itself apart is with the best description of financial market dynamics that I’ve ever seen while diving deep into philosophical concepts. Why trust Lebron? He is an engineer, worked as a quantitative trader and researcher at Jane Street, and has a deep understanding of trading. He has what Taleb would describe as skin in the game. You and I may read Astral Codex Ten in our spare time, post on LessWrong, and navel gaze about our epistemic certainty, but at the end of the day most of us are pursuing rationality for fun, as a hobby. Traders like Lebron pursue rationality as a profession: Their livelihood depends on having a better model of the world than their competition. There are lessons to learn from them that apply to our daily lives. 1: Motivation Know why you are doing a trade before you trade. “What is trading about? Fundamentally, it’s about the relationship between you and the rest of the world.” Right now, you’re making a trade. You’re trading your time to read this book review. You have a cost: you could be spending time with your loved ones, exercising, working, sleeping. You might be hoping to learn something, to take away lessons that you can apply to your life, or simply to entertain yourself. Here, off the bat, are two key insights: We are all making trades, all of the time.

Inline links: The Laws of Trading

The Laws of Trading opens the door to this world a crack and allows the rest of us to peek in, ever so slightly.

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

Your Book Review: The Mind Of A Bee

September 15, 2023 · Original source

The Laws of Trading, reviewed by Dan Reardon. Dan is a data scientist working in the crypto space. You can read his writing and contact him here.

Inline links: The Laws of Trading, here

The Mind of a Bee3 mentions across 3 issues

The Mind of a Bee is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between August 18, 2023 and September 15, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Lars Chittka, who wrote The Mind of a Bee"; "14 : The Mind Of A Bee"; "The Mind of a Bee , reviewed by Peter Curry". It most often appears alongside Lying For Money, Njal’s Saga, On the Marble Cliffs.

Article page: The Mind of a Bee
Mention count: 3
Issue count: 3
First seen: August 18, 2023
Last seen: September 15, 2023
Book title: The Mind of a Bee
Likely author: Peter Curry

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: The Mind Of A Bee August 18, 2023
Vote In The 2023 Book Review Contest September 08, 2023
Book Review Contest 2023 Winners September 15, 2023

Lying For Money 2 shared issues
Njal’s Saga 2 shared issues
On the Marble Cliffs 2 shared issues
Public Citizens 2 shared issues
Secret Government 2 shared issues

Source context

August 18, 2023 · Original source

Both bees and crab spiders are well-matched for strength and speed, and in the Rumble with the Bumble, the crab spider doesn’t necessarily win. Bees can often evade the spider, and live to pollinate another day. Lars Chittka, who wrote The Mind of a Bee, and who can safely be blamed for this book review, got thinking. He and his lab decided to build fake robotic crab spiders, and had them really robotically attack bumble bees when they visited flowers.

Inline links: The Mind of a Bee

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

Book Review: The Origins Of Woke

September 15, 2023 · Original source

The Mind of a Bee, reviewed by Peter Curry. Peter is a writer and researcher, and his Substack is King Cnut. He writes about neuroscience there with a specific focus on learning, memory and animal cognition. He's available for research work, so if anyone would like to get in contact, please reach out - there’s a contact page on the blog.

Inline links: The Mind of a Bee, King Cnut, a contact page

The Origins Of Woke3 mentions across 3 issues

The Origins Of Woke is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between May 01, 2024 and February 27, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Origins Of Woke, by Richard Hanania, has an ambitious thesis"; "This is why I called the book “The Origins of Woke”"; "policy prescriptions from The Origins Of Woke got adopted". It most often appears alongside Hanania, Richard Hanania, Twitter.

Article page: The Origins Of Woke
Mention count: 3
Issue count: 3
First seen: May 01, 2024
Last seen: February 27, 2025
Book title: The Origins Of Woke
Likely author: Richard Hanania

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: The Origins Of Woke May 01, 2024
Highlights From The Comments On "The Origin Of Woke" May 07, 2024
Links For February 2025 February 27, 2025

Hanania 3 shared issues
Richard Hanania 3 shared issues
Twitter 3 shared issues
Africa 2 shared issues
Black Lives Matter 2 shared issues

Source context

May 01, 2024 · Original source

The Origins Of Woke, by Richard Hanania, has an ambitious thesis. And it argues for an ambitious thesis. But the thesis it has isn’t the one it argues for.

Inline links: The Origins Of Woke, Richard Hanania

The claimed thesis is “the cultural package of wokeness is downstream of civil rights law”. It goes pretty hard on this. For example, there’s the title, The Origins Of Woke. Or the Amazon blurb: “The roots of the culture lie not in the culture itself, but laws and regulations enacted decades ago”. Or the banner ad:

Highlights From The Comments On "The Origin Of Woke"

May 07, 2024 · Original source

1) Yes, civil rights law does not directly explain why things got so crazy in the 2010s. In the book, however, I take issue with the idea that this period of time was as much of a watershed as people think it was. The basic ideas – disparate impact, tests are racist, crime fighting is racist, etc. – were already woven into American life for decades. I argue that the 2010s was the culture catching up to law. This is why I called the book “The Origins of Woke,” as it was not meant to be an all-encompassing explanation for everything that happened as a result of civil rights law. Basically I think if you’re going to have a one sentence explanation of how society became woke, “It was civil rights law” would be the closest thing to the truth. It would of course be massively incomplete, inconsistent with some evidence, and not be an all-encompassing theory of everything. If someone was going to study a topic they’d ideally want to know more than one sentence about it, but to the extent to which we can put the blame on one thing in order to make the world legible, this is it.

Why was Duke Power Co decided the way it was, since they asked people to take a mechanical aptitude test for a mechanical job? Sam kindly answered: 1) He may be right about that (I don't know actually) but even if he is right, so what? If a test is relevant to a job, that evidence will apply to each worksite. It's not like there's some affirmative requirement that employers prove the test works before they can implement it--they can do whatever they want and the only check is a lawsuit. A plaintiffs' attorney is not going to bring that case if it doesn't have some evidence the 2) Very easy. You just have to show there is a “manifest relationship to the employment in question" (a more lenient standard added by subsequent more conservative courts) then the burden shifts to the plaintiffs to prove its not legitimate or that the employer could achieve the same goal in a way that doesn't have a disparate impact. In Griggs, there was direct evidence from the employer's own experience that the test they were using was uncorrelated with job performance. 3) That is likely enough. But if, for example, their experience showed that people with a criminal history were no likelier to be violent and criminal than that argument would rightly fail. I think it is also unlikely the EEOC will win this case in the current legal environment. 4) As I said above, if you read the actual case, the facts were that the test did not predict success at the job. This turns out to be very common. More discussion of Duke v. Griggs - this is all coming from one very long thread, which you might prefer to read directly, starting with Mr. Doolittle: I don't think the EEOC is being disingenuous when they think a company is discriminating. Their perspective is coming from the side that sees actual discrimination, often hidden behind convenient stories. Read Duke Power sometime in detail - there's no doubt that the company was flagrantly discriminating and lying about it. That said, I don't think the EEOC has an actual problem with merit tests like Google having someone write code for a coding job. They have a real problem with mission-creep tests (like requiring that coding test for lower level employees) or anything that might be a hidden way to discriminate. I think they also have some true-believer "woke" types that really think that any disparate impact is hidden discrimination, but for legal reasons this is significantly less prevalent than in other "woke-adjacent" contexts. Bob Frank (blog) writes: » “Read Duke Power sometime in detail - there's no doubt that the company was flagrantly discriminating and lying about it.” ...which was quite adequately remedied at the appeals court level. The plaintiffs got everything they could have reasonably wanted. But the EEOC didn't want to fix the problem they were ostensibly suing over; they wanted to use it as a premise to push their social agenda, so they appealed to the Supreme Court, and we ended up with one of the most damaging rulings in history. I wrote about this in some detail last year: Forewarned Is Forearmed The Most Significant Case You've Never Heard Of People often think of the 1960s as a tumultuous time in our nation’s history, but in many ways the real damage was done in the 1970s. The 70s was a time when a lot of the chaos of the 60s settled down, but unfortunately it didn’t happen by conditions getting back to normal so much as by surrender, assimilating the chaos into a “new normal” that was sig… Read more 3 years ago · 5 likes · Bob Frank gdanning writes: Your article refers to what you call "Duke Power’s use of industry-standard aptitude tests in employment decisions. " But here are the actual facts: » ”The Company added a further requirement for new employees on July 2, 1965, the date on which Title VII became effective. To qualify for placement in any but the Labor Department it became necessary to register satisfactory scores on two professionally prepared aptitude 428*428 tests, as well as to have a high school education. Completion of high school alone continued to render employees eligible for transfer to the four desirable departments from which Negroes had been excluded if the incumbent had been employed prior to the time of the new requirement. In September 1965 the Company began to permit incumbent employees who lacked a high school education to qualify for transfer from Labor or Coal Handling to an "inside" job by passing two tests— the Wonderlic Personnel Test, which purports to measure general intelligence, and the Bennett Mechanical Comprehension Test. Neither was directed or intended to measure the ability to learn to perform a particular job or category of jobs […] » On the record before us, neither the high school completion requirement nor the general intelligence test is shown to bear a demonstrable relationship to successful performance of the jobs for which it was used. Both were adopted, as the Court of Appeals noted, without meaningful study of their relationship to job-performance ability. Rather, a vice president of the Company testified, the requirements were instituted on the Company's judgment that they generally would improve the overall quality of the work force. » The evidence, however, shows that employees who have not completed high school or taken the tests have continued to perform satisfactorily and make progress in departments for which the high school and test criteria are now used.” This leaves me with more questions than it answers. For example, if a company hasn’t explicitly measured how tests correlate with performance (which I assume is the case with most tests), are the tests okay or not? Also, could someone who’s annoyed at ballooning degree requirements (eg me) sue every company that requires a college degree, asking them to prove that it’s really necessary? Steve Sailer describes his personal experience: I worked for a marketing research startup firm from 1982-2000. In 1982, our hiring exam was the final exam given by one of our founders, a college professor, in his Quantitative Methods in Marketing Research course. It was a great test, and we hired a lot of good people in the 1980s. Our biggest client gave a similar exam and hired a lot of good people. When the EEOC went after our biggest, most prestigious client over their hiring exam, the firm then spent a lot of money on consulting firms to have it validated as related to work performance to the necessary legal standard. And they continued to hire good people. In contrast, when the EEOC finally noticed us in the 1990s, we found out how much it would cost to validate our exam and decided to save money by throwing it out. That turned out to penny wise and pound foolish. If this is true, it sounds like the burden of proof is on the test-giver, and it’s a pretty high burden. I don’t know how this meshes with what Sam B is saying, unless Steve’s experience was before the change in the law that Sam mentions. Hadi Khan (blog) writes: » “As I said above, if you read the actual case, the facts were that the test did not predict success at the job. This turns out to be very common.” This does not mean the test isn't a good test in the sense that it doesn't measure job performance. See how there is no correlation between a players height in the NBA and how well they perform. This is because if there was a correlation then selectors would be leaving money on the table and they could improve their selection for the coming year by increasing the weighting on height (compared to everything else), which would in turn reduce the amount of correlation. Rinse and repeat until there is no correlation left. The test not predicting job performance could equivalently mean that Duke Power had a very well calibrated way to choose their employees where they were prefectly capturing the information from the apitutde test compared to all the other factors involved in hiring. Indeed the fact that this turns out to be very common suggests to me that this is going on here (and elsewhere). Good point! I don’t know when the correlation between test score and job performance was measured, and whether it should be expected to have this problem. 5: The Origins Of Modern Wokeness (again, you might want to read Hanania’s post answering objectors on this point) Carateca writes: I hew more to the Tumblr theory of the origins of woke (Katherine Dee has written about this, although at infuriatingly short length.) All this was incubated on Tumblr by mentally ill teenagers in the mid-00s, expanded from there to various web forums/proto-social media of the era such as Something Awful and Livejournal where the mentally ill teenagers could gain cultural or moderation power, and then exploded onto Twitter where it cowed cultural leaders into compliance and suddenly people at your office were putting pronouns in their bios, doing land acknowledgments and sterilizing their kids. Civil rights law under this theory was a weapon for the woke to pick up, not the cause of the problem. (Edit: and not even that relevant of a weapon, regardless of its merit otherwise; wokeness's greatest damage is cultural, not legal.) I agree with the Tumblr theory too, though I think some blogs (eg Shakesville, Pandagon) might have been closer to Patient Zero. I continue to be a little confused how and why stuff that deranged teenagers were discussing on microblogs made it to the halls of power, and I would appreciate a more focused Origins Of Woke book discussing this process. Desertopa writes: So, I don't think I'm qualified to write that book, and if anything I'm less qualified now than I was twelve years or so ago, since it's been a long while since I've brushed up on the source material. But I think I'm better versed in what went into it than most people, and I'm prepared to at least take a stab at a substack comment on the subject. My impression, as of around 2009, before people identified "woke" as a thing, and before the social justice subculture that gave rise to the term had really solidified, but at a point when it was distinctly trending in that direction, is that the movement was essentially a result of academic ideas filtered through a specific, mostly online social context. While a lot of people, especially back then, would argue that the academic basis of the movement was sound, but often interpreted poorly by radical ideologues, my impression, as someone who read a lot more of the actual academic work than most, is that this was a mistaken interpretation, that the academic work actually *was* written largely by radical ideologues in the first place, and simply dressed up in language suited to an academic audience. I still identify as much more left wing than right wing, and this was even more the case at the time, since the far left end hadn't moved nearly as far away from me at that point. But, my impression is that at least as far back as the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement, there was a balance between the left and right wings on issues of racial and gender justice etc. where both sides essentially held to the norms of trying to enact their desired changes via collective political action and measured civil disobedience, with the left wing making more or less continual progress against the right, until the left wing decided to defect first. This began in academia, with writers who framed the issue of racial justice essentially in terms of existential warfare. Basically "we are opposed by a group of ideological enemies who are trying to destroy us and everything we represent. The mechanisms of gradual change collective political action and measured civil disobedience are fundamentally aligned against us in the favor of our ideological enemies, thus we have to break away from those and fight with tools which fundamentally favor our cause in order to be able to effectively defend ourselves." Because the writers in question were academics with cushy university positions, their actual mechanism of political action was writing books arguing people ought to do these things, which were mostly only read by other academics and ignored by the general populace. But when social justice started becoming a major component of the online subculture which was incubating in the mid to late 2000s, although only a minority of people actually read the work of actual academics on the subject, people who did were extremely influential in the movement, and ideas which originated in academia propagated to fixation through it. In the earlier days of the social justice movement, there were separate strains which cooperated on object-level goals, but disagreed over big-picture questions like "should we frame social agendas in terms of Us vs. Them conflict drawn around identity groups, or in terms of alignment with philosophical goals?" and "should we attempt to move towards progressively more colorblind ideals of egalitarianism, or ones which consciously privilege minority groups?" The identitarian strain eventually became more or less hegemonic over the movement, partly I think because it's an easier sell based on ordinary patterns of human thought (we've been engaged in identitarian tribal conflict for the entirety of human history,) and partly because almost all the academic underpinning behind the movement actually argued in support of the identitarian strain. I personally started to distance myself from the social justice movement around 2009, while remaining broadly aligned with its object-level goals, in large part because I started reading enough of the academic philosophy behind it to realize that the academics other people were treating as foundational figures (even if most of them didn't actually read their work) were essentially arguing that we needed to abandon the societal institution of liberalism because it was fundamentally aligned against the goals of social justice, while failing to acknowledge that the mechanisms of liberalism had been producing consistent incremental gains for social justice for the last several decades. This is also how I remember things. The part that seems mysterious to me is how the left defected from pre-existing norms so successfully - or rather, if defection gave such an obvious advantage, how the pre-existing norms had stayed in place before. Neike Taika-Tessaro writes: Interestingly, I was going to say Hanania's missing element could just be graphs like these: i.e. affirmative action laid the groundwork for this, then people connected, coordinated, and used it much more aggressively. I feel like that's basically what you're saying, except that what I'm (ignorantly) ascribing to Hanania here and what you're saying disagree on the cause. I guess in Hanania's framing, wokeness was inevitable once affirmative action existed in the legal framework; whereas in Dee's faming, wokeness was not inevitable once affirmative action existed, but is a separate phenomenon that then seized upon the tool. I'm probably doing both of them an injustice with that, mind. (To be clear, I'm not in the US and avoid most social media, so I don't particularly have opinions on this either way, I just immediately thought 'the internet' when Scott referred to the cultural turn between 2010 and 2015 and asked "Why would 1964 and 1991 laws turn wokeness into a huge deal in 2015?".) Yeah, something like this also has to be part of the picture, although I still don’t feel like I understand the mechanism well enough that I could have predicted this ahead of time. More patient zero speculation, from MarsDragon: Historical nitpick: it's less that Tumblr infected LiveJournal so much as LJ users were forced to move to Tumblr as LJ got increasingly difficult to use starting around 2009-2010. The migration had more or less completed by 2012. Tumblr being so much more of a "modern" social media platform where it was easy to repost content and you got a random jumble of posts instead of a carefully-curated set of friends made it much easier for social justice thinking to spread. I think the whole shift to showing users a melange of content instead of a staid list of people the user chose to follow was a big driver of that sort of thinking. It allowed ideas to spread, upped controversy, and drives that sort of "we must purge this!" was of thinking. The LiveJournal experts here say the key event to look at was Racefail, when, according to Carateca: I had a front row seat and it was remarkable how the whole superstructure of a totalitarian state just congealed out of thin air in days and instantly took over a whole subculture. Sometimes I think that if Charlie Stross and the rest of them had just had some fucking balls and stood up to the bullies -- or, hell, just pushed the block button a few times -- none of this would ever have happened. I support any theory that lets us blame everything on Charlie Stross. naraburns writes: Anyway, I would argue that "woke" does not begin with civil rights law, but rather that both are the result of the same intellectual tradition. "Woke" attitudes are basically analogous to what was called "cultural Marxism" decades ago (see e.g. Weiner's (1981) "Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology"), but since "Cultural Marxism" has been retconned as an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, people needed a different name for it. The linguistic treadmill is merciless, especially when dealing with political movements attempting to escape accountability for their past failures (or successes). I agree that there’s a crappy trick that goes: Take a thing that you don’t want people to be allowed to talk about. For example, maybe Coca-Cola doesn’t want people to talk about how soda makes you fat.

Inline links: kindly answered, one very long thread, blog, Forewarned Is Forearmed The Most Significant Case You've Never Heard Of People often think of the 1960s as a tumultuous time in our nation’s history, but in many ways the real damage was done in the 1970s. The 70s was a time when a lot of the chaos of the 60s settled down, but unfortunately it didn’t happen by conditions getting back to normal so much as by surrender, assimilating the chaos into a “new normal” that was sig… Read more 3 years ago · 5 likes · Bob Frank, writes, describes his personal experience, blog, Hanania’s post answering objectors on this point, writes, writes, writes, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!9wmv!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa774249b-b07c-4205-a3e4-68d95e763bfa_808x303.png, MarsDragon, Racefail, Carateca, writes

Links For February 2025

February 27, 2025 · Original source

33: Congrats to Richard Hanania, whose policy prescriptions from The Origins Of Woke got adopted wholesale by the new administration, probably causally. And thanks to @ObhishekSaha for reminding me that my review ended with “Read [this] in order to feel like you were ahead of the curve if Executive Order 11246 gets repealed on January 21, 2025.” (Executive Order 11246 was repealed on January 21)

Inline links: reminding, my review, was repealed

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich3 mentions across 3 issues

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between August 04, 2023 and September 15, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "I read William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich"; "In preparation for writing The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, he supplemented his first-hand experience"; "I’ve learned from reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich". It most often appears alongside Lying For Money, Njal’s Saga, On the Marble Cliffs.

Article page: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
Mention count: 3
Issue count: 3
First seen: August 04, 2023
Last seen: September 15, 2023
Book title: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich August 04, 2023
Vote In The 2023 Book Review Contest September 08, 2023
Book Review Contest 2023 Winners September 15, 2023

Lying For Money 2 shared issues
Njal’s Saga 2 shared issues
On the Marble Cliffs 2 shared issues
Public Citizens 2 shared issues
Secret Government 2 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

August 04, 2023 · Original source

I read William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich because I wanted to be able to answer this question. You could consider this book review as the spiritual sibling to Scott’s dictator book club. Scott writes in his review of The New Sultan:

Inline links: his review of

My hope is that this review of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich can help us identify what it looks like when Hitler is actually about to come to power, so that we can save that most urgent alarm bell—the one marked with the swastika and the Charlie Chaplin mustache—for this one situation only and avoid a boy-who-cried-wolf-scenario. Consider this an exercise in fine-tuning our threat models so that we can tell the difference between bad and this-is-stage-one-in-Hilter’s-rise-to-power bad.

Our guide to Hitler is William L. Shirer. Shirer was an American journalist stationed in Berlin in the years leading up to World War II. He had the opportunity to observe first-hand the Nazi consolidation of power in Germany. In preparation for writing The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, he supplemented his first-hand experience with an in-depth review of the German confidential papers captured by the Allies at the end of the War. He even corresponded with retired Nazi generals. He gives us a nice combination of eyewitness insight and research.

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

September 15, 2023 · Original source

The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich, reviewed by J. J. spends his time writing stories and reading literary novels. He has a master's degree and three-quarters of a doctorate in philosophy, with specializations in Pragmatism and aesthetics.

Inline links: The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich

The Scout Mindset3 mentions across 3 issues

The Scout Mindset is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between September 29, 2021 and July 21, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Julia Galef brings us The Scout Mindset (subtitle: “Why Some People See Things Clearly And Others Don’t)"; "a book (for instance, The Scout Mindset, The Money Illusion, The Metropolitan Man)"; "Julia Galef’s The Scout Mindset". It most often appears alongside effective altruism, India, Julia.

Article page: The Scout Mindset
Mention count: 3
Issue count: 3
First seen: September 29, 2021
Last seen: July 21, 2023
Book title: The Scout Mindset

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: The Scout Mindset September 29, 2021
Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places August 26, 2022
Your Book Review: The Laws of Trading July 21, 2023

effective altruism 2 shared issues
India 2 shared issues
Julia 2 shared issues
Julia Galef 2 shared issues
LessWrong 2 shared issues

Source context

September 29, 2021 · Original source

You tried Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset, but the replication crisis crushed your faith. You tried Mike Cernovich’s Gorilla Mindset, but your neighbors all took out restraining orders against you. Yet without a mindset, what separates you from the beasts? Just in time, Julia Galef brings us The Scout Mindset (subtitle: “Why Some People See Things Clearly And Others Don’t).

Inline links: Growth Mindset, Gorilla Mindset, the beasts, The Scout Mindset

Your Book Review: The Laws of Trading

August 26, 2022 · Original source

VIENNA, AUSTRIA Contact: Manuel, manuel[dot]turonian[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 2:00 PM Location: Wiener Stadtpark at the Strauss Monument; will have an ACX Meetup sign. Coordinates: 8FWR693H+GP2 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Rationality Vienna is a group of about 30 people who meet once a month in person or via Zoom. You can join our Facebook group. Notes: We may want to shift to an indoor location depending on weather and the local Covid numbers. BRUSSELS, BELGIUM Contact: Bruno D, bruno[dot]astral[dot]codex[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 18, 4:00 PM Location: Guingette Henri, George Henri parc Coordinates: 9F26RCWC+84 Event link(s): LessWrong SOFIA, BULGARIA Contact: Anastasia, sofia[dot]acx[dot]meetup[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 4:00 PM Location: Shade Garden (Сенчестата градинка; part of Borisova garden) Coordinates: 8GJ5M8GW+J9 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Sofia ACX started with last year's Meetups Everywhere round. We have Serious Meetups once per month at which we discuss a blog post, a short story, or a book (for instance, The Scout Mindset, The Money Illusion, The Metropolitan Man); and sporadic non-serious social meetups that mostly include getting dinner, going on a walk, watching a film, or playing board games. Attendance hovers around 6-8 people out of a pool of 13. People get invited to the Discord server after they've attended at least one in-person meetup. ZAGREB, CROATIA Contact: DJStern, dorian[dot]sternvukotic[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 6:00 PM Location: Krivi Put Coordinates: 8FQQRX38+V6W Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Croatian LessWrong active group communicates mainly through a Telegram group, we meetup semi regularly, approx once a month. The group is mostly social, and the meetups are not structured (sometimes we all just meet at a random party) Notes: Send me an Email and I will add you to a Telegram group where everything (active) LessWrong Croatia/Zagreb happens LIMASSOL, CYPRUS Contact: Arseniy, runescape[at]list[dot]ru, @anchorheld (Telegram / Instagram) Time: Saturday, September 3, 12:00 PM Location: By the Municipal Zoo Coordinates: 8G6MM3M3+Q6 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please hit me up on Mail, Telegram, or Instagram if you're actually going PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC Contact: Jiri Nadvornik, jiri[dot]nadvornik[at]efektivni-altruismus[dot]cz Time: Thursday, October 6, 6:00 PM Location: Garden of Dharmasala Teahouse Coordinates: 9F2P3CRW+FP7 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event COPENHAGEN, DENMARK Contact: Søren Elverlin, soeren[dot]elverlin[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 3:00 PM Location: Rundholtsvej 10, 2300 København S Coordinates: 9F7JMH38+GFP Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event, Meetup.com Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong TALLINN, ESTONIA Contact: Andrew W, andrew_n_west[at]yahoo[dot]co[dot]uk Time: Monday, September 26, 7:00 PM Location: St Vitus, Tallinn. I don't know if anyone will turn up, but I'll be wearing a suit, a beard, and a book. Coordinates: 9GF6CPRH+MQ Event link(s): LessWrong HELSINKI, FINLAND Contact: Joe Nash, joenash499[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 4:00 PM Location: Restaurant Töölönranta, Helsinginkatu 56 Coordinates: 9GG65WMJ+2J Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: LessWrong group FONTAINEBLEAU, FRANCE Contact: Ebrahim Akbari, ea[dot]akbari[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 6:00 PM Location: Glasgow bar, Fontainebleau Coordinates: 8FW4CP32+J8 Event link(s): LessWrong PARIS, FRANCE Contact: Olivier, w20l2qtf[at]mailer[dot]me, We have a Discord and a matrix server (both servers are bridged together) Time: Friday, September 23, 6:00 PM Location: In the jardin du carrousel, next to jardin des Tuileries Coordinates: 8FW4V86J+GH Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Regular meetups organized via discord or the newsletter every 3 months with around 20 people. Notes: We have a mailing list if you are interested in future meetups. Please don't hesitate to send me an email to RSVP that you're coming to help gauge the interest. TOULOUSE, FRANCE Contact: Alfonso, barsom[dot]maelwys[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 8, 7:00 PM Location: Bar 'Le Biergarten' (60 Gd Rue Saint-Michel, 31400 Toulouse). We'll be sitting at a table with an ACX MEETUP sign on it. Coordinates: 8FM3HCQW+9H Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP by email TBILISI, GEORGIA Contact: Evgenia Karunus, lakesare[at]gmail[dot]com, https://twitter.com/lakesare Time: Saturday, September 17, 7:00 PM Location: Coffee Place Coordinates: 8HH6MRQ2+WH Event link(s): LessWrong AACHEN, GERMANY Contact: Jörn, acx[at]j[dot]stoehler[dot]eu Time: Tuesday, September 27, 7:00 PM Location: Chico Mendes Coordinates: 9F28Q3HJ+9Q Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP here so I can reserve the right number of tables. BERLIN, GERMANY Contact: Ruben Arslan, ssc[at]alphabattle[dot]xyz Time: Sunday, October 2, 2:00 PM Location: Südplateau Fritz-Schloss-Park Coordinates: 9F4MG9H4+4X Event link(s): LessWrong, Google Calendar Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong. I'll bring some beverages. COLOGNE, GERMANY Contact: Marcel Müller, marcel_mueller[at]mail[dot]de Time: Saturday, October 8, 5:00 PM Location: Marienweg 43, 50858 Köln, private venue, just ring the bell or follow the sign. Coordinates: 9F28WRMX+96H Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: LW / ACX / Rationalist meetup group. Monthly, mostly social meetups. Other activities welcome. Unless noted otherwise we will meet at Marienweg 43 in 50858 Cologne on the 2nd Saturday of each month at 5 pm. Please email me to be added to our mailing list where deviations will be posted. Caution! September Meetup will be at a different venue! Notes: If you read this you are welcome. Our Covid rules are still in effect: You must be tested negative on the same day. Self tests will be available at the meetup. If there is any problem, like you do not find us or I did not see your mail, call me +491788862254. FREIBURG IM BREISGAU, GERMANY Contact: Omar, info[at]rationality-freiburg[dot]de Time: Friday, October 14, 6:00 PM Location: FlexRooms, Salzstr. 1, 79098 Freiburg. We will carry a cardboard sign saying “Rationality Freiburg”. Coordinates: 8FV9XVV2+V56 Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com, Website Group info: The group started in May 2022 and before the summer break we had five meetups with 4-11 people attending. Every two weeks seems like a good rhythm, but nothing is set in stone. So far we always read something beforehand and then discussed it, as well as trying some practical exercises such as TAPs and Personal Calibration. Afterwards we went to have dinner and continued talking about everything and anything for hours. Everything is new and flexible, so come and help us improve! Notes: We have a Signal messenger group and ask you to attend a meetup once to be able to join. HAMBURG, GERMANY Contact: Gunnar Zarncke, g[dot]zarncke[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 5:00 PM Location: Kleine Wallanlagen on the lawn near Memorial Holstenglacis. Look for pink blankets; I will also have an ACX sign. Here is an Open Street Map link which also shows the short-cut tunnel from the subway station. Coordinates: 9F5FHX4H+RXC Event link(s): LessWrongLessWrong Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong KARLSRUHE, GERMANY Contact: Marcus Wilhelm, mail[at]marcuswilhelm[dot]de Time: Saturday, September 24, 3:00 PM Location: Botanischer Garten Karlsruhe Coordinates: 8FXC2C72+85X Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet weekly, alternating offline and online, see our LessWrong page KASSEL, HESSEN, GERMANY Contact: Tobias, Sphinxfire[at]outlook[dot]de Time: Saturday, September 10, 2:00 PM Location: Friedrichsplatz, to the left of the DocumentaHall Coordinates: 9F3F8F6X+R6 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Telegram group Notes: Please join the Telegram group if you are interested in coming. It will be helpful for coordinating something beyond 'let's just see who shows up and take it from there', plus, it will also make me feel a lot better on a purely subjective level if I know beforehand that at least one other person is interested. If you prefer the surprise factor of 'knowing as little as possible about who you're going to meet', you can also just write me via E-mail, of course. LEIPZIG, GERMANY Contact: Gunther Forderung, notavailable[at]riseup[dot]net Time: Tuesday, October 4, 6:00 PM Location: In the Lene-Voigt-Park, in the secluded area opposite of the swings Coordinates: 9F3J8CM2+PF Event link(s): LessWrong TÜBINGEN, GERMANY Contact: Emma, emma[dot]tuebingen[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 23, 6:00 PM Location: The ACX/SSC meetup and dinner (with vegan options) will be on October 23rd at the Annette Kade dormitory (Mohlstraße 44, 8FWFG3H5+XR). If you’d like to attend, please write me an email, and I’ll send you an invitation to our WhatsApp group. Coordinates: 8FWFG3H5+XR Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please email me to get my phone number. If a lot of people are out of town for the holidays and can't come we could meet on, say, October 1st. I would like to know how many people to expect. ATHENS, GREECE Contact: Spyros, spyros[dot]dovas[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Monday, September 5, 7:00 PM Location: On the plaza in front of the National Library Coordinates: 8G95WMQR+WRP Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Group info: We have organized 2 events so far, fall and spring, we just sit around and discuss. We have a Whatsapp group that hasn't picked up momentum yet. Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong or Meetup.com BUDAPEST, HUNGARY Contact: Tim Underwood, timunderwood9[at]gmail[dot]com, WhatsApp 19513120591 Time: Sunday, September 11, 2:00 PM Location: Champs Sziget bar on Margit Sziget, near the front. I'll have a big hardcover copy in Hungarian of a book by Richard Dawkins. Coordinates: 8FVXG2CW+2H Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We've been meeting in Budapest for two years now, with our first meeting being the 2020 ACX meetups everywhere. We meet about once a month, and usually we have two articles that are suggested reading that we discuss. CORK, IRELAND Contact: Mikey, Godojhana[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, September 29, 6:00 PM Location: If sunny: The Lough. If not, then the game arcade on the parade Coordinates: 9C3HVGQ7+JQ Event link(s): LessWrong DUBLIN, IRELAND Contact: Lucius, lucius[at]bushnaq[dot]de, LessWrong profile Time: Sunday, October 2, 12:30 PM Location: Clement & Pekoe, William Street South, Dublin 2. We'll be sitting inside, and there'll be a sign with ACX written on it on the table Coordinates: 9C5M8PRP+JV Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: LessWrong FOLIGNO, ITALY Contact: Mauro, orfino[at]yandex[dot]com, LW profile, Telegram Time: Saturday, September 24, 5:00 PM Location: Parco dei Canapé, at the open air cafe, ask the barista Coordinates: 8FJJXP22+HC Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know how much food to get. No kids please. MILANO, ITALY Contact: Raffaele, raffa[dot]mauro[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 16, 6:30 PM Location: Viale Luigi Majno, 18, 20129 Milano MI - Primo Ventures / T8P, IInd floor. Coordinates: 8FQFF6C4+9C Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet once per month. The group started in May 2022. Notes: Please RSVP by email by the 1st of September PADOVA, ITALY Contact: Carlo, carlo[dot]martinucci[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 1, 3:30 PM Location: Prato della Valle, fountain in the middle. I'll be carrying a sign with ACX MEETUP on it :) Coordinates: 8FQH9VXG+9J Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: We'll probably find a bar to have a hot chocolate or tea or something :) PISA, ITALY Contact: Raffaele, raffaelesalvia[at]alice[dot]it Time: Saturday, October 22, 5:00 PM Location: We will meet in Piazza dei Cavalieri, near the steps of Palazzo della Carovana Coordinates: 8FMGPC92+R44 Event link(s): LessWrong ROMA, ITALY Contact: Grigorio, greghero12[at]gmail[dot]com, Facebook, +393920366026 Time: Saturday, October 8, 6:00 PM Location: We'll be around Gardenie metro station, at the benches, and I will be wearing a red shirt and sitting on top of the station to be seen Coordinates: 8FHJVHP9+8F Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet around 20-25 times a year but it is asymmetrical, focused in summer, Christmas and Easter. We discuss opinions, engage in circling, play games where we spot logical fallacies and biases by attacking our members ideological weakpoints and formalize some debating stances. Occasionally we find the willpower to devote meetups in steelmanning and understanding the outgroup (roughly 4-5 times a year) Notes: If you are into ACX enough to see this post, I believe we have enough common ground to be worth meeting each other. Aren't you curious who else is within this niche community in Rome? Come on, take a leap of faith. P.S. Would be nice if you sent me a message in WhatsApp with your name and probability of attendance, but I love walk-ins just fine. No space limit after all ;-) RIGA, LATVIA Contact: Andis, cerulean[dot]lemniscate[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 4:00 PM Location: Bastejkalns (on top of the hill) Coordinates: 9G86X426+Q5Q Event link(s): LessWrong AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS Contact: Pierre, pierreavdb[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 3:00 PM Location: Kanarie Klub (Bellamyplein 51, 1053 AT Amsterdam) Coordinates: 9F469V89+W4 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: The rationality community is growing in the Netherlands, and we're now planning on having monthly meetups! Join the Rationality NL Discord server. Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I can plan a different venue if needed DELFT, NETHERLANDS Contact: Pierre Bongrand, bongrand[dot]pierre[at]gmail[dot]com, 0033620644013 (Whatsapp/Telegram/Signal) Time: Thursday, September 22, 6:30 PM Location: Delftse Hout Beach, on the grass, in the center of the beach, I will be wearing a red T-shirt and carrying a sign with ACX MEETUP on it. Coordinates: 9F4629FG+66 Event link(s): LessWrong HATTEM, NETHERLANDS Contact: Shoshannah, shos[dot]rationality[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: Dark#0849 Time: Saturday, October 8, 2:00 PM Location: Lijsterbeslaan 6, Hattem Coordinates: 9F48F378+PR Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: We support and coordinate groups across the country, including everything from social meetups to structured events and applied rationality. The intention is to connect all Dutch rationalists and rationalists in the Netherlands. We also discuss rationality topics online and coordinate events on our Discord server. Notes: Feel free to bring kids. Ours will be there :) Also, please park 't Heem if you are coming by car. It's a 2 minute walk to our house. HELMOND, NETHERLANDS Contact: Rutger, silvery[dot]swift[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 3:00 PM Location: De Motte (On top of the hill). Nearest road is Palladio. Coordinates: 9F37FMC5+VR Event link(s): LessWrong THE HAGUE, NETHERLANDS Contact: Kristof Redei, acxmeetup[at]kristof[dot]me Time: Wednesday, September 14, 6:00 PM Location: Paleistuin, Prinsessewal, 2513 EE Den Haag, Netherlands. We'll have a picnic blanket with an ACX sign on the large central field, somewhere near the playground. Coordinates: 9F4638J3+GP Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Notes: Please RSVP on Facebook if possible! All ages/species welcome. If it's not outdoor weather, we'll go to The Bookstor Cafe next door as a backup. OSLO, NORWAY Contact: Hans Andreas & Jonas, acxoslomeetup[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 1:00 PM Location: Look for the sign of Moloch at Café Billabong - Bogstadveien 53B 0366 Oslo Coordinates: 9FFGWPH7+QP Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Group info: We're hoping to do at least a quarterly meetup, but we'll base it on the turnout and enthusiasm of this event. Notes: The cafe has historically been accepting of guests' not ordering--please don't let financial reasons keep you away! GDAŃSK, POLAND Contact: Frank, frankastralcodexten[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: frhrpr#1663 Time: Saturday, August 27, 3:00 PM Location: Next to Park Kuźniczki, opposite the train station, on the circular benches around the water pump; I will be wearing a red armband Coordinates: 9F6W9JJ4+JW Event link(s): LessWrong KRAKÓW, POLAND Contact: Mateusz Bagiński, bagginsmatthew[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 2:30 PM Location: Celna 6/9, the office of the Optimum Pareto Foundation Coordinates: 9F2X2WVX+V2 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: We meet every month, here is our Facebook group. LUBLIN, POLAND Contact: Piotr, piotrekzlublina[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 5:00 PM Location: Między Słowami cafe, Rybna 4, Lublin Coordinates: 9G346HX8+FX Event link(s): LessWrong POZNAŃ, POLAND Contact: Ofelia Kerr, ofel[dot]kerr[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: ofelia#0001 Time: Saturday, October 8, 6:00 PM Location: Van Gogh Pub, Żydowska 12, 61-761. I'll most likely be on the ground floor and I'll have an ACX sign. Coordinates: 9F4RCW5P+X3F Event link(s): LessWrong WARSAW, POLAND Contact: Michał, rationalwarsaw[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 4, 6:00 PM Location: Południk Zero, Wilcza 25 Coordinates: 9G4362G8+2V Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Group info: The community of Warsaw LessWrong/SSC/ACX/etc. readers is active for over 8 years now. We're trying to organise regular monthly meetups. You can join our Facebook group or Meetup.com. LISBOA, PORTUGAL Contact: Luís Campos, luis[dot]filipe[dot]lcampos[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 3:00 PM Location: Jardim Amália Rodrigues, close to Linha d'Água cafe, in the top of a hill, below a bunch of trees Coordinates: 8CCGPRJW+V8 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We've been meeting every month for around 1 year. Get in contact if you want to participate in the WhatsApp group. :) BUCHAREST, ROMANIA Contact: Tony, skyrimtracer[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 16, 3:00 PM Location: Plaza România Mall, Bd. Timișoara 26 - food court Coordinates: 8GP8C2HM+9X Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP by email CLUJ-NAPOCA, ROMANIA Contact: Marius Pop, pop[dot]marius[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 11:00 AM Location: Deva Host, Strada Deva 1-7 Coordinates: 8GR5QH8F+MW Event link(s): LessWrong BELGRADE, SERBIA Contact: Ivica Bogosavljevic, ibogosavljevic[at]gmail[dot]com, Viber +381 65 3473 433 Time: Monday, September 12, 6:00 PM Location: Pool Cafe on Prve pruge Coordinates: 8GP2RCP7+G7 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP on my Viber number, so I know how big the room we need. BRATISLAVA, SLOVAKIA Contact: Viliam, viliam[at]bur[dot]sk Time: Saturday, September 10, 3:00 PM Location: Medická záhrada, by the fountain Coordinates: 8FWV44X9+XW8 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: I will post an announcement on LessWrong later. In case of rain, a new meeting place nearby will be announced there. LJUBLJANA, SLOVENIA Contact: Demjan Vester, demjan[dot]vester[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Wednesday, September 14, 6:00 PM Location: Probably Lili Novy bar, near modern gallery and park Tivoli Coordinates: 8FRP3F3X+6V Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Group info: We meet about 0.7 times a month. Notes: Please RSVP because last time we just barely got a place big enough. BARCELONA, SPAIN Contact: Alfonso, alfonso[dot]martinez[at]upf[dot]edu, WhatsApp +34693846738 Time: Sunday, October 2, 5:30 PM Location: Parc de la Ciutadella, by the Lion Catcher statue; I'll have an ACX sign Coordinates: 8FH495QP+96 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: The idea is to sit on the grass; bring a foulard along for your comfort, or a foldable chair if preferred. Don't worry about the language: English, Spanish, Catalan, we'll find a way. MADRID, SPAIN Contact: Jaime, jaimesevillamolina[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 5:00 PM Location: Teatro de títeres del Parque del Retiro. We'll be on the stands with an ACX sign Coordinates: 8CGRC897+F8C Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We are an EA / rationality group, we've been active for around 5 years but have less in-person activity since the pandemic started. We have a WhatsApp group and a channel in the Spanish-speaking EA Slack. SEVILLA, SPAIN Contact: Edu, edur[dot]acx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 8:00 PM Location: Parque de María Luisa. I'll be on the grass behind the Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions. I'll be the guy next to an ACX sign, a white wooden chair, and a cardboard ukulele with a tiny cardboard hat on it. Coordinates: 8C9P92F6+3RG Event link(s): LessWrong GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN Contact: Joacim, joacimj[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 3:00 PM Location: Condeco Fredsgatan. I'll have a stack of three books on my table. Coordinates: 9F9HPX4C+39G Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN Contact: Sal, niktonick[at]gmail[dot]com, Telegram Time: Sunday, September 25, 3:00 PM Location: Humlegården, Karlavägen. We will meet near blue gazebo, I will have 'ACX meetup' sign. Coordinates: 9FFW83RF+3M5 Group info: Facebook group BERN, SWITZERLAND Contact: Daniel, dd14214+acx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 2, 4:00 PM Location: Grosse Schanze, at the statue in front of the main uni building, heading to the Pittaria if it's cold or raining Coordinates: 8FR9XC2Q+4G Event link(s): LessWrong GENEVA, SWITZERLAND Contact: Eric, eric[dot]c[dot]p[dot]meier[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 11, 4:00 PM Location: Park de la Grange, just towards the lake below Villa de la grange Coordinates: 8FR86548+J4 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We have a small persistent group who has tried to meet up once a month since last years Meetup. Notes: Feel free to bring other people you think would be interested! ZURICH, SWITZERLAND Contact: MB, acxzurich[at]proton[dot]me Time: Saturday, September 24, 3:00 PM Location: TBD Event link(s): LessWrong ISTANBUL, TURKEY Contact: J, jinai[dot]jyap[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 25, 4:00 PM Location: The House Cafe in Ortaköy. I am a young Asian woman and imagine I'll be easy to spot, but will also try to bring a sign with ACX MEETUP on it. Coordinates: 8GHF22XG+23P Event link(s): LessWrong, Partiful Group info: I do not live here; I am just digital nomading for an indefinite amount of time and would like to meet anyone who's here! Notes: Please RSVP via the Partiful link (you can RSVP as a Maybe)! BIRMINGHAM, UK Contact: Thomas Read, thomas[dot]read[dot]acx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 1:00 PM Location: We'll be at The Wellington, 37 Bennetts Hill, on the roof terrace if possible. I'll wear an orange shirt and have a sign saying ACX on the table. Coordinates: 9C4WF3JX+7Q Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: It's only a few minutes walk from the stations, so hopefully people can join from all over the West Midlands! BRIGHTON, UK Contact: Alan Enright, alanenright[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 11:00 AM Location: We'll be at the Alcampo Lounge on London Road—we will try and get a table on the raised area in front of you and to the left as you come in but will also have a little ACX sign. Coordinates: 9C2XRVM6+3X Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com BRISTOL, UK Contact: Nick Lowry, bristoleffectivealtruism[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 2:00 PM Location: We’ll be meeting at entrance closet to Tesco Express in the Galleries, Bristol City Centre Coordinates: 9C3VFC45+RJM Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event, Meetup.com Group info: Meet twice monthly for socials, more regular 'productive' meetups. Been active for 3+ years, please message for WhatsApp group CAMBRIDGE, UK Contact: Hamish Todd, hamish[dot]todd1[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 2:00 PM Location: Bath House Pub, UPSTAIRS!! I will have a copy of Peter Singer's The Most Good You Can Do Coordinates: 9F426439+J9 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: We meet on the third Saturday of every month. The group has been around almost a year and is well-attended! Notes: My phone/WhatsApp number is +44 0730 *** 3550, where the *** are replaced by the serial number of the Boeing plane whose first flight was on September 2, 1998. Email me to get on the mailing list for future events if you'd like that :) CARDIFF, WALES Contact: AF, strmnova[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 16, 5:00 PM Location: Little Man Coffee (note new location!) Coordinates: 9C3RFRHH+W2 Event link(s): LessWrong EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND, UK Contact: Sam, acxedinburgh[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 2:00 PM Location: Pleasance Cafe. Go through the arch and the door to the cafe is on your left Coordinates: 9C7RWRW9+M8 Group info: ~Monthly meetups, often in Pleasance Cafe but have experimented with other locations. Email me to join the mailing list & WhatsApp group. LANCASTER, UK Contact: Gruffydd Gozali, gruffyddgozali[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 15, 3:00 PM Location: Lancaster University Library, will be on the ground floor by the tree wearing an EA shirt. Coordinates: 9C6V2657+WJR Event link(s): LessWrong LINCOLN, UK Contact: Tobias, tobias[dot]showan[at]yahoo[dot]co[dot]uk Time: Saturday, September 10, 2:00 PM Location: Nosey Parker pub, I'll bring a little paper ACX sign. Coordinates: 9C5X6C9R+XJ Event link(s): LessWrong LONDON, UK Contact: Edward Saperia, edsaperia[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 25, 2:00 PM Location: Newspeak House Coordinates: 9C3XGWGH+3F7 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event, Meetup.com, Eventbrite Group info: You can join our mailing list or our Meetup.com group MANCHESTER, UK Contact: Matthew Gibson, melkartmtg[at]hotmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 18, 11:00 AM Location: Sackville Gardens, Alan Turing Memorial Coordinates: 9C5VFQG7+MH Event link(s): LessWrong NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE, UK Contact: Joshua William, iamjoshwilliam[at]icloud[dot]com, Telegram Time: Saturday, September 3, 12:30 PM Location: Trinity Square, High Street Gosforth. You can get the bus to Gosforth from the city center just outside the famous 'Tyneside Cinema' (bus number: 30, 31, or 35 at Monument Pilgrim Street bus stop), or you can take a walk if you want to get your 'steps' in (if you'd like to do the latter, send me an email and I'll send you the directions), which takes ~60-min. Coordinates: 9C7W294H+5V Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: To my knowledge, there isn't an ACX meet up in this city, or region of the UK, though if there is a demand for a reoccurrence, I'd be happy to keep facilitating such. I'd also happily formulate a WhatsApp group if theres interest, after the meet up. Notes: We have a deli, '1901 cafe', on the square, which we can grab an immediate bite to eat at [so save some hunger if you'd like to do that]. There's a safe [and lovely] park with some benches just by the way, which, if the weather is nice, we can sit at after a bite to eat, or, otherwise, we can remain in the cafe. OXFORD, UK Contact: Sam, ssc[at]sambrown[dot]eu, There's a Signal group people can join :) contact Sam for info Time: Wednesday, October 19, 6:30 PM Location: The Star, Rectory Road, Oxford. We'll be in the beer garden round the back, with a sign ?? Coordinates: 9C3WPQX6+QP9 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event, Meetup.com Group info: We run socials every months, and applied rationality workshops from time to time! Notes: Please RSVP on any of the platforms (or email) for free pizza PENRYN, CORNWALL, UK Contact: mini t, tminns[at]btinternet[dot]com Time: Saturday, August 27, 3:00 PM Location: glasney playing field and valley Coordinates: 9C2P5V8V+P9 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: I don't mind rescheduling, or organizing another event, not many people are likely to turn up this far out of the way.

July 21, 2023 · Original source

Tales of Icarus flying too close to the sun, where readers revel in schadenfreude, e.g., When Genius Failed. With The Laws of Trading, Agustin Lebron has written something different: part love letter to trading, part philosophical treatise on epistemology and modeling the world around us, and part guide to applied decision-making. Lebron’s Laws are Laws of the Jungle, not Laws of Nature. He views financial markets as the most competitive Darwinian environment on Earth, where participants must adapt or die. According to Lebron, the book is for people working in finance and trading, as well as anyone in the business of making rational decisions. This explicitly rationalist bent is similar to Julia Galef’s The Scout Mindset or Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets. Where The Laws of Trading sets itself apart is with the best description of financial market dynamics that I’ve ever seen while diving deep into philosophical concepts. Why trust Lebron? He is an engineer, worked as a quantitative trader and researcher at Jane Street, and has a deep understanding of trading. He has what Taleb would describe as skin in the game. You and I may read Astral Codex Ten in our spare time, post on LessWrong, and navel gaze about our epistemic certainty, but at the end of the day most of us are pursuing rationality for fun, as a hobby. Traders like Lebron pursue rationality as a profession: Their livelihood depends on having a better model of the world than their competition. There are lessons to learn from them that apply to our daily lives. 1: Motivation Know why you are doing a trade before you trade. “What is trading about? Fundamentally, it’s about the relationship between you and the rest of the world.” Right now, you’re making a trade. You’re trading your time to read this book review. You have a cost: you could be spending time with your loved ones, exercising, working, sleeping. You might be hoping to learn something, to take away lessons that you can apply to your life, or simply to entertain yourself. Here, off the bat, are two key insights: We are all making trades, all of the time.

Inline links: The Laws of Trading

The Society Of The Spectacle3 mentions across 3 issues

The Society Of The Spectacle is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between May 23, 2022 and August 28, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "The full list of Book Review Contest finalists is: ... The Society Of The Spectacle"; "Published in 1967, The Society of the Spectacle is his magnum opus and lasting legacy"; "Debord emphasized the visual character of the spectacle, as you can see from his choice of book cover: Cover of The Society of the Spectacle". It most often appears alongside Consciousness and the Brain, Making Nature, The Anti-Politics Machine.

Article page: The Society Of The Spectacle
Mention count: 3
Issue count: 3
First seen: May 23, 2022
Last seen: August 28, 2022
Book title: The Society Of The Spectacle

Outbound links

Issue trail

Open Thread 225 May 23, 2022
Your Book Review: The Society Of The Spectacle July 22, 2022
Open Thread 239 August 28, 2022

Consciousness and the Brain 2 shared issues
Making Nature 2 shared issues
The Anti-Politics Machine 2 shared issues
The Castrato 2 shared issues
The Dawn Of Everything 2 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: The Society Of The Spectacle

May 23, 2022 · Original source

1: The full list of Book Review Contest finalists is: Consciousness And The Brain, Making Nature, The Anti-Politics Machine, The Castrato, The Dawn Of Everything (EH’s review), The Future Of Fusion, The Illusion Of Grand Strategy, The Internationalists, The Outlier, The Righteous Mind (BW’s review), The Society Of The Spectacle, and Viral.

July 22, 2022 · Original source

“The Society of the Spectacle will make no sense if the reader feels there is nothing fundamentally wrong with contemporary society.”

Debord in France, 1954 Published in 1967, The Society of the Spectacle is his magnum opus and lasting legacy. It unfolds in staccato bursts, almost like a book of aphorisms. The writing is pithy and poetic, albeit with the occasional lapse into the meandering, circular prose so typical of critical theory. This makes it extremely readable, particularly for a work of political philosophy. One downside of his style is that he tends to state his points in just-so fashion. We’ll have to do some of the legwork for him to flesh things out. Strap in, boys - we’ve got a bumpy road ahead of us. I. A More Perfect Union The spectacle is never outright defined; or rather, the entire book is a series of definitions, each approaching from a different angle. What Debord describes is really a combination of two things; the total triumph of capitalism, and the rise of mass media. It might seem strange for Debord to declare capitalism victorious at the height of the Cold War. The Soviet Union was very much a superpower, and Nixon had yet to go to China. But as a real Marxist, he had already arrived at what would become the historical consensus - communism, as practiced, was merely an inferior cousin to its free market foes. Unsurprisingly, capitalism is the best system for the accumulation of capital. And despite their pretensions, communist societies had the same goals as every modern nation - wealth, prosperity, innovation, and growth. In Debord’s reading of history, “the bourgeoisie is the only revolutionary class that has ever won; and it is also the only class for which the development of the economy was both the cause and the consequence of its taking control of society.” The revolutions of the previous centuries were economic in nature, replacing kings with merchant princes. As a result, all societies began to judge themselves in almost purely economic terms, regardless of their ideological leanings. [2] Media developed symbiotically with capitalism, and together these twin forces changed the world. Twentieth-century forms of media were one-way communications. The owners of society were also the owners of the media, and the messaging reflected this power dynamic. Long before the general public became disillusioned with the news, Debord was woke to the fact that ‘the free press’ was largely a myth. He saw the shaping of the narrative firsthand, and well knew the ability of the media to amplify or ignore as convenient. As the spectacle conquered the earth, it took on different forms. Debord differentiated between the concentrated, diffuse, and integrated modes of the spectacle: Communism and fascism were the primary examples of the concentrated spectacle, with totalitarian control of the economy and the media centralized in the hands of the State.

Inline links: The Society of the Spectacle

Cover of The Society of the Spectacle He never outright explains why he thought photos and film were more pernicious than newspapers or radio, but I imagine the advertising industry played a major role. We’ve grown accustomed to GoDaddy ads and ALL CAPS YouTube titles, but Mad Men shenanigans were a worrisome development at the time. It must’ve been highly alarming to see such brazen manipulation of the public. Whatever the reasoning, we now arrive at one definition of the spectacle: "The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images." Also: “The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.” Well, that’s about as clear as Flint water. Here’s something meatier: "In all of its particular manifestations — news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment — the spectacle represents the dominant model of life." If you’re familiar with Girard, that is a huge statement. [3] Girardian mimetic desire is triangular; there is you (the desirer), the object (of desire), and the model (another person who also desires the object). Most of our desires are rooted in imitation. Nobody has to tell you to want steak or sex, but almost everything else is learned. How does everybody know that they should want a Rolex or a Rolls Royce? There’s no genetic imperative for luxury goods. You acquire those tastes from the people around you. Or you used to, at least. Before the spectacle, your models, mentors, and rivals were real people you knew in real life. Now we have an acronym for that - IRL - because reality is everywhere in retreat. This is not a small thing. What we desire is at the core of who we are. What do you want out of life? What kind of person do you want to be? For the entirety of human history, those questions found answers close at hand. Your local community was your world, for better and worse. Now we are global citizens with global perspectives, and it’s difficult to overstate how much that changes what it means to be human. Imprisoned in a flattened universe bounded by the screen of the spectacle that has enthralled him, the spectator knows no one but the fictitious speakers who subject him to a one-way monologue about their commodities and the politics of their commodities. The spectacle as a whole serves as his looking glass. What he sees there are dramatizations of illusory escapes from a universal autism. The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him. Now our role models are media creations. Some are literal fictional characters (James Bond); others are nominally real people (Kylie Jenner). But both are merely representations - images usurping an essential formative role. ‘William Shatner’ and ‘Robert Downey, Jr.’ are only marginally more real than Captain Kirk and Tony Stark, yet they occupy way more headspace than people that live down the street. Most people can name more celebrities, in more detail, than people they’ve known in person. I know the names of Will Smith’s kids - I don’t even know if my best friends from high school have any. This is an issue of The Map and The Territory. Pre-modern Maps were narrow but deep. You might have had only a vague notion of ‘Africa’ or ‘The Pope’, but you knew every square inch of the town you lived in. Spectacular Maps are broad but shallow, and they are drawn for us by spectacular hands. The average person ‘knows’ way more about Africa now, but how well does that knowledge reflect the facts on the ground? Meanwhile, firsthand reality has been reduced to the narrow slices connecting house to car to work, with precious few exceptions. The Society Of The Spectacle is one long lament for this loss of The Real, although Debord doesn’t state it as such. Borrowing again from The Uruk Machine, this sense of loss tracks with the gradual displacement of metis [4] by episteme [5],[6]. III. Everything New Is Old Again Debord has a lot to say about the ‘falsification of the world’: The first stage of the economy’s domination of social life brought about an evident degradation of being into having — human fulfillment was no longer equated with what one was, but with what one possessed. The present stage, in which social life has become completely dominated by the accumulated productions of the economy, is bringing about a general shift from having to appearing — all ‘having’ must now derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances. As he might have put it - we have graduated from conspicuous consumption to consuming conspicuousness. Spectacular technology has not dispersed the religious mists into which human beings had projected their own alienated powers, it has merely brought those mists down to earth, to the point that even the most mundane aspects of life have become impenetrable and unbreathable. In the spectacle, a part of the world presents itself to the world and is superior to it. The spectacle is simply the common language of this separation. Spectators are linked solely by their one-way relationship to the very center that keeps them isolated from each other. The spectacle thus reunites the separated, but it reunites them only in their separateness. These themes are familiar to us by now. It’s not exactly news that people are getting more isolated and untethered by the year. What is striking to me is not what he is saying, but when he is saying it. Anybody with sense has spent time thinking about how to manage the challenges of modern life. We talk about digital minimalism and social media fasts. Turn off your phone. Get outside and touch grass. Go see people in meatspace. Be present. All great advice. But what are we envisioning, when we imagine a healthy connection to The Real? For most of us, we are picturing life as it was lived… right around the time Debord was saying that everything is phony and toxic. What does the average person think of as the peak of journalistic integrity in America? Probably Vietnam and Watergate - right after this was written. When we mock Millennials and Zoomers, what standard are we measuring them by? The Greatest Generation, who were running the show by the late sixties. In terms of self-reliance and resilience, the average adult in 1967 would be a massive outlier in 2022. Yet here is Debord, saying in no uncertain terms that this American ideal was fraudulent and devoid of meaning. What have we lost? Every era has its cynics, doomsayers, Luddites, and misanthropes. Maybe Debord was just a Boomer’s Boomer, railing against progress and the passage of time. But I don’t think so. We’ve all felt the shockwaves of the Internet explosion. Life is different now. It takes an act of will to put down your phone so you can focus on the TV. Low battery is an emergency. Losing signal is bereavement. Navigating without GPS is an anxiety attack. Do you remember what it was like, not so long ago? How exciting it was to play videogames with someone a thousand miles away? How cool it was the first time you streamed a movie on an airplane? That sense of possibility and promise, like all the world was in the palm of your hand? How quickly things change. For maybe the first time in history, most people are apprehensive about the relentless march of technology. While we’ve always been afraid of advances in weaponry, it’s starting to feel like everything is being weaponized. Who truly believes the metaverse will be a positive step for humanity? Who now is excited at the prospect of gene editing, AI, or transhumanism? There appears to be a growing sentiment along the lines of ‘MGTOW for modernism’. We hope for the best, but 2122 is shaping up to be some unholy amalgam of Gattaca, The Matrix, and Minority Report. Sometimes it seems like the world we grew up in is categorically distinct from the world we inhabit. But I’m sure Debord would argue that we are merely experiencing an intensification of a process that has been in motion longer than any of us have been alive. Pre-spectacular society has already passed beyond living memory. Soon we will hit another inflection point - where no one alive even knew someone who lived before the spectacle. All of human history is now before and after; it will soon become literally impossible to understand the inner life and daily reality of pre-modern man - if it’s not already. As an example: how much of your daily environment, as a percentage, do you truly understand? Look around the room and reflect on how “even the most mundane aspects of life have become impenetrable and unbreathable.” Your kitchen and your medicine cabinet are filled with mystical objects. Hell, just look at what’s on your person. The phone in your hand, the cash in your wallet, the clothes on your back, the food in your belly - how many lifetimes would it take to truly grok the building blocks of everyday existence? Compare that to, say, a homesteader. It really hasn’t been that long since people lived in a comprehensible universe. Our collective knowledge of the universe has deepened tremendously, but theoretical physics is only less slightly hermetical than the occult beliefs it replaced. It is notionally true that anyone could go get a Ph.D. and verify our working model of the cosmos. But in practice, the science is received wisdom, taken on faith. Our belief in the God Particle is functionally indistinguishable from the belief in God of ages past. It’s worth noting that our current theories will surely be supplanted in a century or three. They are placeholders for better, truer ideas. And so our greater grasp of the wider world has less value than we think, while our day-to-day grows ever more opaque. Is it any wonder epistemic learned helplessness is a thing? IV. With Typical Extravagance Debord was also ahead of the curve on commoditization: This constant expansion of economic power in the form of commodities transformed human labor itself into a commodity, into wage labor, and ultimately produced a level of abundance sufficient to solve the initial problem of survival — but only in such a way that the same problem is continually being regenerated at a higher level. Economic growth has liberated societies from the natural pressures that forced them into an immediate struggle for survival; but they have not yet been liberated from their liberator. Once his workday is over, the worker is suddenly redeemed from the total contempt toward him that is so clearly implied by every aspect of the organization and surveillance of production, and finds himself seemingly treated like a grownup, with a great show of politeness, in his new role as a consumer. Debord correctly perceived the totalitarian nature of spectacular capitalism. Your time, your attention, your opinions - all are bought and sold, and can be influenced to better facilitate such transactions. He would have been totally unsurprised by the rise of Big Data and the corporate surveillance (e.g. Alexa, your phone) that accompanies it. Every piece of your life is a commodity. Every moment that you are not producing or consuming is a missed opportunity. Never fear - someone, somewhere is going to find a way to solve that ‘need’. Nothing is spared. Even opposition is assimilated: Complacent acceptance of the status quo may also coexist with purely spectacular rebelliousness — dissatisfaction itself becomes a commodity as soon as the economy of abundance develops the capacity to process that particular raw material. Once again, Debord is shockingly prescient in noting that the conflicts of our time are largely distractions from bigger systemic issues: Fallacious archaic oppositions are revived — regionalisms and racisms which serve to endow mundane rankings in the hierarchies of consumption with a magical ontological superiority — and pseudoplayful enthusiasms are aroused by an endless succession of ludicrous competitions, from sports to elections. Genuine grassroots movements (Occupy, the Tea Party, BLM, Canadian truckers) almost always fizzle out without accomplishing anything of substance. They will either be ignored, crushed, or co-opted. Any remnants that endure will be reduced to figureheads that offer ‘representation’ for a point of view without actually producing any change. (‘The Squad’, Rand Paul, etc…) If the extremes of either side gain enough momentum to pose a threat, they will face a united front from the establishment wings of both parties (Bernie, Trump). It’s fashionable at the moment to blame the Woke Left for the politicization of everything, but we’ve all been around long enough to know better. It’s the same shit, different decade. During the Bush years, it was the left who opposed unending wars, government overreach, and media gaslighting. Today those positions are often considered right wing, but only because the pendulum of power has swung in the other direction. Moloch pursues its own goals, wearing whatever ideological guise it deems most effective. From Debord’s perspective, everything is becoming politicized because everything is getting monetized. In the integrated spectacle, the primary concerns of the State are economic, so the personal turning political is simply a downstream effect of the growth of capitalism. V. A Short History of Time It would do Debord a disservice to reduce his work to ammunition in our present disputes. There are two whole chapters in the book devoted to time as a historical development. It’s not something we think about much, but time and history had to be invented. Before the beginning, humanity lived in what Debord calls cyclical time. Countless generations came and went, because nobody was counting. Survival was the name of the game; to be or not to be was the only question. Eventually we formed early societies, which brought into being a ruling class that had the freedom to take actions above and beyond the daily grind: The owners of this historical surplus value are the only ones in a position to know and enjoy real events. Separated from the collective organization of time associated with the repetitive production at the base of social life, this historical time flows independently above its own static community. This is the time of adventure and war, the time in which the masters of cyclical society pursue their personal histories; it is also the time that emerges in the clashes with foreign communities that disrupt the unchanging social order. History thus arises as something alien to people, as something they never sought and from which they had thought themselves protected. The murkiness of pre-civilization was shaped into coherence by these rulers, who used their unique agency to literally make history: The succession of generations within a natural, purely cyclical time begins to be replaced by a linear succession of powers and events. This irreversible time is the time of those who rule, and the dynasty is its first unit of measurement. With writing there appears a consciousness that is no longer carried and transmitted directly among the living — an impersonal memory, the memory of the administration of society. ‘Writings are the thoughts of the state; archives are its memory’ (Novalis). The owners of history have given time a direction, a direction which is also a meaning. But this history develops and perishes separately, leaving the underlying society unchanged, because it remains separated from the common reality. Over time, these narratives gathered a religious dimension. This helped legitimize the rule of regimes, but it also changed the way ordinary people saw themselves in the world. Although still living in cyclical time, they gained purpose through a spiritual journey culminating in Heaven. The clashes of the Mediterranean peoples and the rise and fall of the Roman state gave rise instead to semihistorical religions, which became a new armor for separate power and basic components of a new consciousness of time. The Middle Ages, an incomplete mythical world whose consummation lay outside itself, is the period when cyclical time, though still governing the major part of production, really begins to be undermined by history. An element of irreversible time is recognized in the successive stages of each individual’s life. Life is seen as a one-way journey through a world whose meaning lies elsewhere: the pilgrim is the person who leaves cyclical time behind and actually becomes the traveler that everyone else is symbolically. The Renaissance created a profound break with this mythic raison d'être and reoriented man towards the accumulation of knowledge as a species: The Renaissance was a joyous break with eternity. Though seeking its heritage and legitimacy in the ancient world, it represented a new form of historical life. Its irreversible time was that of a never-ending accumulation of knowledge… This transformation of our relationship with history and progress was accompanied by the rise of the bourgeoisie: The bourgeoisie is associated with a labor time that has finally been freed from cyclical time. With the bourgeoisie, work becomes work that transforms historical conditions. The bourgeoisie is the first ruling class for which work is a value. The victory of the bourgeoisie is the victory of a profoundly historical time, because it is the time corresponding to an economic production that continuously transforms society from top to bottom. So long as agrarian production remains the predominant form of labor, the cyclical time that remains at the base of society reinforces the joint forces of tradition, which tend to hold back any historical movement. But the irreversible time of the bourgeois economy eradicates those vestiges throughout the world. History, which until then had seemed to involve only the actions of individual members of the ruling class, and which had thus been recorded as a mere chronology of events, is now understood as a general movement — a relentless movement that crushes any individuals in its path. Irreversible time initially appeared at the societal level as a narrative of events. The bourgeoisie brought irreversible time to the masses. Progress became something that we personally experience in the form of rapid technological innovation. It is hard to miss the motion of history when you go from horses to space travel in a single lifetime. History thus became as much about things as events. Eli Whitney and Thomas Edison took their places alongside generals and heads of state in our narrative of who we are and where we’re going. Our notion of progress became dominated by the economic prejudice. We talk about raising the standard of living and lifting people out of poverty - laudable goals, to be sure - but we deliver them from physical privation into deprivation of a different kind. One way that deprivation manifests is in our current conception of time: Pseudocyclical time is associated with the consumption of modern economic survival — the augmented survival in which everyday experience is cut off from decisionmaking and subjected no longer to the natural order, but to the pseudo-nature created by alienated labor. It is thus quite natural that it echoes the old cyclical rhythm that governed survival in preindustrial societies, incorporating the natural vestiges of cyclical time while generating new variants: day and night, work and weekend, periodic vacations." As capitalism commoditized time itself, we recreated cyclical time with the standard work week. But this artificial substitute has been about as successful as vegan chicken nuggets. It’s not the same, and it never will be. The workday used to be determined by the work, but now the work is determined by the workday. And everyone has to work, not because we need what they produce, but because we need them to spend - else the whole thing comes crashing down. Irreversible time keeps marching on, giving us new widgets and new wonders, but the continual churn of innovation masks the stifling sameness of spectacular progress. We know something is missing, but we lack the capacity to understand or express the problem. This individual experience of a disconnected everyday life remains without language, without concepts, and without critical access to its own past, which has nowhere been recorded. Uncommunicated, misunderstood and forgotten, it is smothered by the spectacle's false memory of the unmemorable. VI. The Coming Revolution Debord spends a good chunk of words describing how the spectacle has affected art [7] and physical space, but you can guess the gist by now. Everything’s fake, everything’s worse, everything’s changing but also the same. The last topic of the book worth discussing is the imminent socialist revolution. Debord walks us through the various ways that Marxism has been done wrong, then attempts to offer an alternative. He goes into a fair amount of detail, but it boils down to this: The anarchists properly rejected society in its entirety, but remained dogmatically attached to a 'one size fits all' mentality and failed to organize in an effective manner.

Inline links: epistemic learned helplessness, Moloch

August 28, 2022 · Original source

The Society Of The Spectacle

Inline links: The Society Of The Spectacle

The Wizard and the Prophet3 mentions across 3 issues

The Wizard and the Prophet is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between April 30, 2021 and July 10, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Charles Mann’s The Wizard and the Prophet"; "By starting The Wizard and the Prophet with these two men and their lives"; "The second half of The Wizard and the Prophet explores four areas where humankind faces major dilemmas". It most often appears alongside Addiction By Design, Double Fold, Down and Out in Paris and London.

Article page: The Wizard and the Prophet
Mention count: 3
Issue count: 3
First seen: April 30, 2021
Last seen: July 10, 2021
Book title: The Wizard and the Prophet
Likely author: The Wizard

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: The Wizard And The Prophet April 30, 2021
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

Source context

April 30, 2021 · Original source

Some books really stick with me. Like, literally, stick with me: I’m one of those people with pretentious literary tattoos. So far, just two books have been meaningful enough for me to permanently etch their totem on my skin: the glyph of the underground postal service from The Crying of Lot 49, and the line "Everything Is Permitted," Jean-Paul Sartre’s misquoting of Dostoevsky’s take on atheism from The Brothers Karamazov. (I wasn’t kidding about pretentious!) People have all sorts of reasons for getting tattoos – mine are there for some of the standard superficial ones (looking cool and tough, obviously), but also to act as little daily mantras for how I want to live and think about the world. To this very short list of inked paragons, I’m thinking of adding a new one: a few stylized stalks of wheat in honor of Charles Mann’s The Wizard and the Prophet.

Inline links: misquoting

According to the instructions on the tin, The Wizard and the Prophet is meant to outline the origin of two opposing attitudes toward the relationship between humans and nature through their genesis in the work and thought of two men: William Vogt, the "Prophet" polemicist who founded modern-day environmentalism, and Norman Borlaug, the "Wizard" agronomist who spearheaded the Green Revolution. Roughly speaking, Wizards want continual growth in human numbers and quality of life, and to use science and technology to get there: think Gene Roddenbury’s wildest dreams, full of replicators and quantum flux-harnessing doodads that untether us from our eons-long project of survival on limited resources and allow us to expand limitlessly. "Prophets'' believe that we can’t keep growing our population or impact on the world without eventually destroying it, and ourselves along with it. Their ideal future is like one of those planets the Federation ships would Prime-Directive right over, where humankind scales back and lives in harmony with the land, taking just enough to sustain our (smaller) numbers and allowing the intricate web of human and non-human creatures to flourish.

Inline links: Green Revolution

By starting The Wizard and the Prophet with these two men and their lives, Mann sets up a dichotomy that’s difficult not to carry through the rest of the book. Vogt’s worldview is aligned with all the worst causes – elitism, white supremacy, and eugenics. Borlaug, on the other hand, seems to be guided by nothing other than the purest race-and-nation-blind agape for all mankind. Actually, dichotomy isn’t quite the right word; it’s more of a chiasmus, a trusty ancient Greek rhetorical device where the starting premises criss-cross to the delight and instruction of the audience. Vogt, the bourgeois coastal elite, wants to return the world to a primitive pastoral Eden. Borlaug, the blue-collar Midwesterner who grew up in an actual, non-idealized primitive pastoral setting, dreams of a world of bourgeois plenty for all.

Inline links: chiasmus

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

In The Long Run, We're All Dad

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)

Torah3 mentions across 3 issues

Torah is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between December 22, 2023 and November 03, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Your father’s ancestors called them Torah and tikkun olam"; "My favorite counterexample is the Torah, which says that Moses was the most humble man in the world"; "giving AIs hundreds of great works of literature and ethics - everything from the Torah to Reasons and Persons". It most often appears alongside effective altruism, Jews, John.

Article page: Torah
Mention count: 3
Issue count: 3
First seen: December 22, 2023
Last seen: November 03, 2025
Book title: Torah

Outbound links

Issue trail

In The Long Run, We're All Dad December 22, 2023
Highlights From The Comments On Nietzsche August 08, 2024
Writing For The AIs November 03, 2025

effective altruism 2 shared issues
Jews 2 shared issues
John 2 shared issues
Reddit 2 shared issues
Sam Kriss 2 shared issues

Source context

December 22, 2023 · Original source

My poor, fragile, little cognitive engines! These, then, will be the twin imperatives of your life: surprisal minimization and active inference. If your brains are still too small to process such esoteric terms, there are others available. Your father’s ancestors called them Torah and tikkun olam; your mother’s ancestors called them Truth and Beauty; your current social sphere calls them Rationality and Effective Altruism. You will learn other names, too: no perspective can exhaust their infinite complexity. Whatever you call them, your lives will be spent in their service, pursuing them even unto that far-off and maybe-mythical point where they blur into One.

Inline links: surprisal minimization, active inference

Another Bay Area House Party

August 08, 2024 · Original source

I’m skeptical of this. My favorite counterexample is the Torah, which says that Moses was the most humble man in the world (Numbers 12:3), plus the ensuing scholarly debate on how Moses himself could write this in the Torah with a straight face. My favorite answer claim that God forced Moses to write that he was the most humble man in the world, but Moses fought back by making some of the alephs in the Torah really small as a sort of steganographic claim that he was embarrassed by having to praise himself. See also this essay, “In the Jewish tradition, humility is among the greatest of the virtues, as its opposite, pride, is among the worst of the vices.”

Inline links: the ensuing scholarly debate, favorite answer, this essay

In general I’m skeptical of most attempts to draw a bright line between Jewish and Christian philosophies (“Jews think like this, Christians think like that”). Christianity grew out of Judaism, and most post-1400s Jewish scholarship was written in Christian societies, so both religions had ample chance to influence each other. “Everybody knows” that Christianity judges you by belief and Judaism judges you by your actions, but the Talmud says “The following have no part in the World to Come: One who says that the resurrection of the dead is not biblical, or that the Torah is not from Heaven, or the Epicurean.”

Inline links: the Talmud says

Writing For The AIs

November 03, 2025 · Original source

I once talked to someone who had an idea of giving AIs hundreds of great works of literature and ethics - everything from the Torah to Reasons and Persons - and doing some kind of alignment training to get them to internalize the collective wisdom of humankind. I spend a half-hour arguing why this was a bad idea, after which he said he was going to do it anyway but very kindly offered me an opportunity to recommend books for his corpus. This guy was absolutely legit - great connections with major companies - but I found myself paralyzed in trying to think of a specific extra book. How do you even answer that question? What would it be like to write the sort of book I could unreservedly recommend to him?

Talmud2 mentions across 2 issues

Talmud is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between February 22, 2022 and October 19, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "anything not explicitly prohibited in the Bible and Talmud is assumed to be permitted"; "The Talmud - Berakhot 61a - says that ‘a person has two kidneys". It most often appears alongside Bay Area, Bible, Elizabeth.

Article page: Talmud
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: February 22, 2022
Last seen: October 19, 2022
Book title: Talmud

Outbound links

Issue trail

Links For February February 22, 2022
Another Bay Area House Party October 19, 2022

Bay Area 2 shared issues
Bible 2 shared issues
Elizabeth 2 shared issues
Google 2 shared issues
Wikipedia 2 shared issues

Source context

Links For February

February 22, 2022 · Original source

Judaism is lenient on genetic engineering as "Jewish tradition posits that man was created in the 'image of G-d' to be a partner with G-d in mastering and perfecting himself and the natural world" and Judaism has a "general principle that anything not explicitly prohibited in the Bible and Talmud is assumed to be permitted." Rabbi Dr. Avraham Steinberg, the co-chair of Israel's National Bioethics Council, writes, "As long as the act of perfecting the world does not violate halakhic prohibitions, or lead to results which would be halakhically prohibited, then we are given a mandate to use science and technology to improve the world." Genetic engineering of course is not halakhically prohibited. He "believes that we should proceed with ... genetic engineering [even if it is non-life-preserving] as long as we believe that the benefits to man outweigh the risks."

Inline links: Judaism is lenient on genetic engineering, Rabbi Dr. Avraham Steinberg

October 19, 2022 · Original source

“Oh no, it’s more complicated than that. The Talmud - Berakhot 61a - says that ‘a person has two kidneys, one of which counsels him to do good, and the other counsels him to do evil.’ If the Sages are right, then someone who gives away one of their kidneys would end up either totally good or totally evil.”

“Oh no, the Talmud is very clear, the left kidney is the evil one. And most surgeons take the left kidney, because it has a longer associated renal vein.”

The Alexander Romance2 mentions across 2 issues

The Alexander Romance is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between September 15, 2023 and September 19, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Alexander Romance , reviewed by Scott Alexander"; "The Alexander Romance, reviewed by Scott Alexander"; "The Alexander Romance is what happens when you spend a thousand years running this process in reverse". It most often appears alongside 15th century Sicilian manuscript, @campeters4, A Strange Dream.

Article page: The Alexander Romance
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: September 15, 2023
Last seen: September 19, 2023
Book title: The Alexander Romance
Likely author: Scott Alexander

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review Contest 2023 Winners September 15, 2023
Book Review: The Alexander Romance September 19, 2023

15th century Sicilian manuscript 1 shared issues
@campeters4 1 shared issues
A Strange Dream 1 shared issues
a_reader 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues

Source context

September 15, 2023 · Original source

The Alexander Romance, reviewed by Scott Alexander. I worried people would figure out which review was mine, so to make it harder I entered twice. Alexander Romance was my second entry. It placed 37th, nowhere near high enough to make the finals. I hope this is encouraging for anyone else who didn’t make the finals - apparently there’s a lot of variance even among reviews by the same person! I still liked this one and will probably put it up as a normal post here soon.

Inline links: figure out which review was mine

Your Book Review: The Ballad of the White Horse

September 19, 2023 · Original source

The Alexander Romance is what happens when you spend a thousand years running this process in reverse. Each generation, you make the story of Alexander the Great a little wackier. By the Middle Ages, Alexander is fighting dinosaurs and riding a chariot pulled by griffins up to Heaven.

The Alexander Romance And Popular Literature

Almost everything that happens to Alexander the Great in The Alexander Romance has also happened to Batman. Alexander invented a submersible to explore the ocean depths; Batman has done the same. Alexander discovered the Fountain of Youth, and so did Batman. Alexander sealed evil nations behind a magic door, and so did Batman. Alexander fought dinosaurs; Batman did too.

Inline links: Batman has done the same, and so did Batman, and so did Batman, Batman did too

The Ballad of the White Horse2 mentions across 2 issues

The Ballad of the White Horse is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between September 20, 2024 and September 27, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Ballad of the White Horse is a 2,684 line poem about conservatism"; "I disagree: the Ballad of the White Horse is his masterpiece"; "Why is the poem named The Ballad of the White Horse?". It most often appears alongside Adam, Alfred, Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa.

Article page: The Ballad of the White Horse
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: September 20, 2024
Last seen: September 27, 2024
Book title: The Ballad of the White Horse

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: The Ballad of the White Horse September 20, 2024
Vote In The 2024 Book Review Contest September 27, 2024

Adam 1 shared issues
Alfred 1 shared issues
Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa 1 shared issues
Ballad 1 shared issues
Buddhism 1 shared issues

Source context

September 20, 2024 · Original source

The Ballad of the White Horse is a 2,684 line poem about conservatism, and it is brilliant. It has been called the last great epic poem written in English. I have not read the three dozen or so English epic poems that Wikipedia claims have been written since, so I cannot confirm the “last” part, but I can confirm the rest. It is a great poem, in both quality and size, and it is undoubtedly an epic poem. It has almost all the qualities required of an epic poem: it begins by invoking a muse (his wife), it starts in media res, the plot is centered around a hero of legend, there are supernatural visions and interventions, and an omniscient narrator. The only epic requirement it lacks is a long boring list shoved in somewhere, for which I am grateful.

Inline links: The Ballad of the White Horse

Why is the poem named The Ballad of the White Horse?

Beneath that, not all that well hidden, the Ballad is Chesterton’s love song to conservatism as he understands it. In it Chesterton weaves the ideas that he has been writing about all his life and creates a cohesive narrative theme. The Ballad is like a melody that all his other works, fiction and nonfiction, dance to. Chesterton wrote many books, yet none seemed to stand higher than the others in terms of quality or popularity. Because of this he has been called “the master without a masterpiece” (though, appropriately, the quote itself seems legendary: I have found it referenced everywhere but I cannot find the source). I disagree: the Ballad of the White Horse is his masterpiece. It is Chesterton boiled down to his essence. Within it we find two core themes of Chesterton’s body of work: hope in defiance of fate, and the eternal revolution.

Your Book Review: Humankind

September 27, 2024 · Original source

1: Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa 2: Dominion 3: Don Juan 4: The Family That Couldn’t Sleep 5: How Language Began 6: Real Raw News 7: Two Arms And A Head 8: How The War Was Won 9: Silver Age Marvel Comics 10: The Complete Rhyming Dictionary And Poet’s Craft Book 11: The History Of The Rise And Influence Of The Spirit Of Rationalism In Europe 12: The Pale King 13: Nine Lives 14: The Ballad Of The White Horse

The Better Angels of Our Nature2 mentions across 2 issues

The Better Angels of Our Nature is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between May 28, 2021 and June 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature tabulates violent deaths"; "Steven Pinker, in The Better Angels of Our Nature, discusses a “Hobbesian trap”". It most often appears alongside Africa, Britain, Europe.

Article page: The Better Angels of Our Nature
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: May 28, 2021
Last seen: June 10, 2022
Book title: The Better Angels of Our Nature

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: Humankind May 28, 2021
Your Book Review: The Dawn Of Everything June 10, 2022

Africa 2 shared issues
Britain 2 shared issues
Europe 2 shared issues
homo sapiens 2 shared issues
Steven Pinker 2 shared issues

Source context

May 28, 2021 · Original source

We don't know anything about pre-historic man, but let's speculate wildly in the thesis's favour How did this play out for pre-farming man? Were we friendly, or was life 'nasty, brutish and short'? Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature tabulates violent deaths for:

Your Book Review: The Dawn Of Everything

June 10, 2022 · Original source

In asking “What took so long?” the Sapient Paradox is the prehistoric analog of the Fermi Paradox. Instead of: “Why are we alone in the universe?” the Sapient Paradox asks: “Why were we trapped in prehistory?” And just as the Fermi Paradox implies a Great Filter, the Sapient Paradox implies a Great Trap, a trap in which human society lived for, at minimum, 50,000 years, and, at maximum, something like 200,000 years or even more. Depending on your politics, the Great Trap might be an oppressive patriarchy, or perhaps a decadent matriarchy, or a lazy commune, etc (e.g., Steven Pinker, in The Better Angels of Our Nature, discusses a “Hobbesian trap” of mutual warfare between tribes—although he does not connect this to the Sapient Paradox).

The City of God2 mentions across 2 issues

The City of God is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between May 06, 2021 and August 11, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "I haven’t even read Augustine’s The City of God"; "Saint Augustine wrote the most famous work of Christian political philosophy, the City of God". It most often appears alongside Africa, Augustine, Catholic Church.

Article page: The City of God
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: May 06, 2021
Last seen: August 11, 2023
Book title: The City of God

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: Through The Eye Of A Needle May 06, 2021
Your Book Review: The Weirdest People in the World August 11, 2023

Africa 2 shared issues
Augustine 2 shared issues
Catholic Church 2 shared issues
Greece 2 shared issues
north Africa 2 shared issues

Source context

May 06, 2021 · Original source

...Catholic theology and ancient heresies then it may have been more interesting. I don’t know much more than Sunday school level theology – I haven’t even read Augustine’s The City of God. Brown uses these primary sources to narrate the entry of the rich into the Christian churches of the western Roman empire. Christ said, “it is easier for a camel to go...

...book. If I was knowledgeable on Catholic theology and ancient heresies then it may have been more interesting. I don’t know much more than Sunday school level theology – I haven’t even read Augustine’s The City of God. Brown uses these primary sources to narrate the entry of the rich into the Christian churches of the western Roman empire. Christ said, “it is easier for a camel to go...

August 11, 2023 · Original source

...rrect me. In any case, it seems relevant, because shortly after the fall of Rome in 410 AD, Saint Augustine wrote the most famous work of Christian political philosophy, the City of God , and this is one of the first places where the ban on cousin marriage is discussed: “For affection is now given its proper place, so that men, for whom it is beneficial...

...Western thought, but I'm happy for an expert on Confucius or Ibn Khaldun to correct me. In any case, it seems relevant, because shortly after the fall of Rome in 410 AD, Saint Augustine wrote the most famous work of Christian political philosophy, the City of God , and this is one of the first places where the ban on cousin marriage is discussed: “For affection is now given its proper place, so that men, for whom it is beneficial...

The Collapse Of Complex Societies2 mentions across 2 issues

The Collapse Of Complex Societies 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: 13: The Collapse Of Complex Societies"; "The Collapse Of Complex Societies , reviewed by Etirabys". It most often appears alongside Addiction By Design, Double Fold, Down and Out in Paris and London.

Article page: The Collapse Of Complex Societies
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: June 18, 2021
Last seen: July 10, 2021
Book title: The Collapse Of Complex Societies
Likely author: Etirabys

Outbound links

Issue trail

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

Source context

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

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)

The Giving Tree2 mentions across 2 issues

The Giving Tree is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between February 16, 2022 and April 20, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "here’s Teach on The Giving Tree"; "The entire childish fantasy of “motherly love” collapses the moment obligation enters into it, which is why, in The Giving Tree, it never does"; "The Giving Tree is an anagram for I Get Even, Right ?". It most often appears alongside Coke, Freud, Lacan.

Article page: The Giving Tree
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: February 16, 2022
Last seen: April 20, 2022
Book title: The Giving Tree

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: Sadly, Porn February 16, 2022
Highlights From The Comments On "Sadly, Porn" April 20, 2022

Coke 2 shared issues
Freud 2 shared issues
Lacan 2 shared issues
Sadly, Porn 2 shared issues
Shel Silverstein 2 shared issues

Source context

Highlights From The Comments On "Sadly, Porn"

February 16, 2022 · Original source

Some are outright psychoanalytic dream interpretations, and the rest draw from this tradition. The underlying theory is that every work of art (including porno) is an expression of some repressed desire, which has to be different from the open desires (so eg Oedipus can’t really be about marrying your mother, because Oedipus openly marries his mother). So for example, here’s Teach on The Giving Tree - yes, this is a long quote, but a review this book won’t make sense until you see the kind of thing he’s doing:

Take a look back at Shel Silverstein’s 60s storyboard, The Giving Tree. Here’s an invalid but reliable statistical observation: if you sell 7 million copies of a book with a positive message and it doesn’t make people live the message, then they didn’t get that message. What they did get was a very strong defense against the actual message, see also The Gospel Of Mark.

It’s universally agreed that The Giving Tree represents a mother. This is a very odd association to make, because it’s clearly not a mother, it’s a tree, if it was a mother than [sic] the boy would be a sapling. “It’s literally a tree, but the tree is a metaphor.” Obviously it’s a metaphor, what I want to know is why you chose the wrong one. The boy is a biped and has a human girlfriend; the fact that the story requires organisms from two different kingdoms not only complicates the possibility it represents a mother, it requires the reader to force the interpretation on the book, to “do violence to the text”. You know, like rape.

April 20, 2022 · Original source

But maybe none of it is "actual points", and those are just the bits that fit in with my worldview; maybe that's what The Giving Tree feels like to somebody who takes it as some kind of truth.

Seems like an interesting book. Teach's interpretation of "The Giving Tree" feels right to me, actually. It doesn't matter what Shel Silverstein intended it to mean; the point is that there's another reading that actually makes more sense, that gets behind the book's saccharine sentimentality to reveal a deeper and more credible psychology. Art is like that, if it's worth anything at all; it says things the artist didn't know he was saying. That the tree is less a mother than an idealized fantasy of motherhood with no correspondence to reality seems obviously correct, at least, and Teach makes some very good points about the relationship between love and obligation.

The Gospel Of Mark2 mentions across 2 issues

The Gospel Of Mark is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between February 16, 2022 and June 28, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "see also The Gospel Of Mark"; "In the Gospel of Mark, God says to “preach the gospel to every creature”". It most often appears alongside 2023 special, Abercrombie & Fitch, ACX grant winners.

Article page: The Gospel Of Mark
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: February 16, 2022
Last seen: June 28, 2024
Book title: The Gospel Of Mark

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: Sadly, Porn February 16, 2022
Your Book Review: Dominion June 28, 2024

2023 special 1 shared issues
Abercrombie & Fitch 1 shared issues
ACX grant winners 1 shared issues
African Gray Parrot 1 shared issues
Alex 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: Dominion

February 16, 2022 · Original source

Take a look back at Shel Silverstein’s 60s storyboard, The Giving Tree. Here’s an invalid but reliable statistical observation: if you sell 7 million copies of a book with a positive message and it doesn’t make people live the message, then they didn’t get that message. What they did get was a very strong defense against the actual message, see also The Gospel Of Mark.

Teach seems to think something like this can also happen en masse, eg how wokeness originated as a call to destroy the system and ended up as a Coke marketing gimmick.

This is in Hungarian because there was some brouhaha in Hungary that got it to the top of the search engines, and I’m lazy. In one kind of surreal passage, Teach discusses the psychoanalytic interpretation of dreams. Dreams contain content that the mind wants to repress, but then - why dream it? Why go to a psychoanalyst specializing in dream interpretation? When the CIA wants to keep something classified, they don’t cloak it in a riddle and email it to the KGB’s Riddle Decoding Division.

June 28, 2024 · Original source

Not so fast, says Scully. Christians are supposed to be good stewards, only using animals as necessary and never being cruel. A careful reading of scripture reveals myriad instances where it’s either directly said or strongly implied that all creatures deserve kindness. In the Gospel of Mark, God says to “preach the gospel to every creature”. Moses is chosen in part because he was kind to a lamb: “You who have compassion for a lamb shall now be the shepherd of my people Israel.”

It’s the variety of ways in which he tries to make his plea for mercy that gives the book its unique flavor. He explores hunting, whaling, factory farming, religion, ethics, capitalism, and the science of consciousness. He puts boots on the ground at hunting conventions and inside factory farms, touching squealing piglets with his bare hands. He talks to hippie activists. He engages with lifelong hunters who will die on the hill that dolphins are, in fact, really dumb. He secures interviews with high ranking diplomats from Japan. He can be repetitive, and some of his arguments miss the mark, but the sheer determination of the effort has to be commended. I have yet to encounter another animal welfare writer who put their credibility on the line to secure an exclusive interview with a high-ranking meat industry executive and then called them a moral monster to their face.

Science and reason aside, the bedrock of Scully’s generous spirit toward animals comes from a personal belief that all of God’s creatures deserve “whatever measure of happiness their creator intended for them.” We should care for them simply because “they are fellow creatures, sharing with you and me the breath of life, each in their own way bearing His unmistakable mark.”

The Great Divorce2 mentions across 2 issues

The Great Divorce is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between September 29, 2021 and April 20, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "It reminds me of C.S. Lewis - especially The Great Divorce, whose conceit was"; ""-"The Great Divorce," C.S. Lewis". It most often appears alongside C.S. Lewis, A.E. Waite, Adlerian psychology.

Article page: The Great Divorce
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: September 29, 2021
Last seen: April 20, 2022
Book title: The Great Divorce

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: The Scout Mindset September 29, 2021
Highlights From The Comments On "Sadly, Porn" April 20, 2022

C.S. Lewis 2 shared issues
A.E. Waite 1 shared issues
Adlerian psychology 1 shared issues
AL 1 shared issues
Alex Power 1 shared issues

Source context

Highlights From The Comments On "Sadly, Porn"

September 29, 2021 · Original source

I’m mentioning this story in particular because because of how it straddles the border between “rationality training” and “being-a-good-person training”. It reminds me of C.S. Lewis - especially The Great Divorce, whose conceit was that the damned could leave Hell for Heaven at any time, but mostly didn’t, because it would require them to admit that they had been wrong. I think Julia thinks of rationality and goodness as two related skills: both involve using healthy long-term coping strategies instead of narcissistic short-term ones.

April 20, 2022 · Original source

-"The Great Divorce," C.S. Lewis

the Great Gender Divergence2 mentions across 2 issues

the Great Gender Divergence is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between December 28, 2021 and November 04, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "her research and associated book on 'the Great Gender Divergence'"; "Alice Evans’ Research On “The Great Gender Divergence”". It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, ACX Grants, African Swine Fever.

Article page: the Great Gender Divergence
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: December 28, 2021
Last seen: November 04, 2022
Book title: the Great Gender Divergence

Outbound links

Issue trail

ACX Grants Results December 28, 2021
ACX Grants: Project Updates November 04, 2022

1DaySooner 2 shared issues
ACX Grants 2 shared issues
African Swine Fever 2 shared issues
Alex Hoekstra 2 shared issues
Alice Evans 2 shared issues

Source context

ACX Grants Results

December 28, 2021 · Original source

Alice Evans, $60,000, for sabbatical and travel to fund her research and associated book on "the Great Gender Divergence", ie why some countries developed gender equality norms while others didn't. A large body of research shows that gender equality, aside from its moral benefits, is also deeply important for economic development. Dr. Evans is an expert on the interaction of gender, history, and economics, whose work has been cited on BBC, Al Jazeera, and Sky News. She blogs here and podcasts here.

Inline links: Alice Evans, here

ACX Grants: Project Updates

November 04, 2022 · Original source

4: Alice Evans’ Research On “The Great Gender Divergence” (?/10) Dr. Evans has done over four months of research in Morocco, Italy, India, and Turkey. You can find some of her most recent thoughts at her blog here. Her book is still on track to be published from Princeton Press, more details tbd.

Inline links: at her blog here, book

The History of Rationalism2 mentions across 2 issues

The History of Rationalism is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 30, 2024 and October 11, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "The History of Rationalism is an essay on the decay of medievalism and the emergence of rationalism"; "The History Of Rationalism , reviewed by Louis Morgan". It most often appears alongside 38 Onslow Gardens, A Memoir of the Right Hon. William Edward Hartpole Lecky By His Wife, Agobard.

Article page: The History of Rationalism
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: August 30, 2024
Last seen: October 11, 2024
Book title: The History of Rationalism
Likely author: Louis Morgan

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: The History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe August 30, 2024
Book Review Contest 2024 Winners October 11, 2024

38 Onslow Gardens 1 shared issues
A Memoir of the Right Hon. William Edward Hartpole Lecky By His Wife 1 shared issues
Agobard 1 shared issues
Alps 1 shared issues
AmandaFromBethlehem 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: The History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe

August 30, 2024 · Original source

Lecky became an established member of the London literary world, and married Elisabeth van Dedem in 1871. The newlyweds settled in London in the house to which the blue plaque is now affixed. Ms. Lecky’s Memoir details both the happy life they spent together and her husband’s subsequent adventures as an author, man of letters, and member of parliament. Lecky died, in his library, in 1903. 3. The History of Rationalism The History of Rationalism is an essay on the decay of medievalism and the emergence of rationalism. No precise definitions are attempted. Medievalism refers to that collection of Christian beliefs and theological dogmas that explained all aspects of reality and had dominated Europe for 1500 years since first emerging triumphant from the declining Roman Empire.

Your Book Review: The History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe

October 11, 2024 · Original source

The History Of Rationalism, reviewed by Louis Morgan, a curmudgeon and cunctator who lives in a swamp in south Louisiana

Inline links: The History Of Rationalism

The History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe2 mentions across 2 issues

The History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 30, 2024 and September 27, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "The History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe (the “ History of Rationalism ” hereafter) was published in January 1865"; "11: The History Of The Rise And Influence Of The Spirit Of Rationalism In Europe". It most often appears alongside 38 Onslow Gardens, A Memoir of the Right Hon. William Edward Hartpole Lecky By His Wife, Agobard.

Article page: The History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: August 30, 2024
Last seen: September 27, 2024
Book title: The History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: The History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe August 30, 2024
Vote In The 2024 Book Review Contest September 27, 2024

38 Onslow Gardens 1 shared issues
A Memoir of the Right Hon. William Edward Hartpole Lecky By His Wife 1 shared issues
Agobard 1 shared issues
Alps 1 shared issues
American Civil War 1 shared issues

Source context

August 30, 2024 · Original source

The History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe (the “History of Rationalism” hereafter) was published in January 1865 in two volumes: Part I and Part II, (the links are to revised editions). The book was an immediate success. Friedrich Nietzsche, for one, read it closely in the German translation.

Inline links: Part I, Part II

Lecky became an established member of the London literary world, and married Elisabeth van Dedem in 1871. The newlyweds settled in London in the house to which the blue plaque is now affixed. Ms. Lecky’s Memoir details both the happy life they spent together and her husband’s subsequent adventures as an author, man of letters, and member of parliament. Lecky died, in his library, in 1903. 3. The History of Rationalism The History of Rationalism is an essay on the decay of medievalism and the emergence of rationalism. No precise definitions are attempted. Medievalism refers to that collection of Christian beliefs and theological dogmas that explained all aspects of reality and had dominated Europe for 1500 years since first emerging triumphant from the declining Roman Empire.

The History of Rationalism is an essay on the decay of medievalism and the emergence of rationalism. No precise definitions are attempted. Medievalism refers to that collection of Christian beliefs and theological dogmas that explained all aspects of reality and had dominated Europe for 1500 years since first emerging triumphant from the declining Roman Empire.

Hardball Questions For The Next Debate

September 27, 2024 · Original source

1: Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa 2: Dominion 3: Don Juan 4: The Family That Couldn’t Sleep 5: How Language Began 6: Real Raw News 7: Two Arms And A Head 8: How The War Was Won 9: Silver Age Marvel Comics 10: The Complete Rhyming Dictionary And Poet’s Craft Book 11: The History Of The Rise And Influence Of The Spirit Of Rationalism In Europe 12: The Pale King 13: Nine Lives 14: The Ballad Of The White Horse

The Iliad2 mentions across 2 issues

The Iliad is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between November 07, 2023 and November 17, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "A POETIC FORM FROM THE ILIAD WHICH IS WIDELY CONSIDERED IMPOSSIBLE TO IMITATE IN ENGLISH"; "the Iliad". It most often appears alongside America, Cronus, Israel.

Article page: The Iliad
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: November 07, 2023
Last seen: November 17, 2023
Book title: The Iliad

Outbound links

Issue trail

Hardball Questions For The Next Debate November 07, 2023
Book Review: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning November 17, 2023

America 2 shared issues
Cronus 2 shared issues
Israel 2 shared issues
Troy 2 shared issues
Abel 1 shared issues

Source context

November 07, 2023 · Original source

[On the bottom of the TV screen, we see the phrase “SECOND ROUND CONSTRAINT: ANSWERS MUST BE SPOKEN ENTIRELY IN HEROIC HEXAMETER, A POETIC FORM FROM THE ILIAD WHICH IS WIDELY CONSIDERED IMPOSSIBLE TO IMITATE IN ENGLISH”]

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.

The Myth of the Rational Voter2 mentions across 2 issues

The Myth of the Rational Voter is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between June 24, 2022 and July 07, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "whose work The Myth of the Rational Voter was cited extensively"; "Bryan Caplan’s book The Myth of the Rational Voter". It most often appears alongside Bryan Caplan, United States, 501(c)(3).

Article page: The Myth of the Rational Voter
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: June 24, 2022
Last seen: July 07, 2023
Book title: The Myth of the Rational Voter

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy June 24, 2022
Your Book Review: Secret Government July 07, 2023

Bryan Caplan 2 shared issues
United States 2 shared issues
501(c)(3) 1 shared issues
80,000 Hours 1 shared issues
11 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy

June 24, 2022 · Original source

The press should include Tetlock’s superforecasting/prediction markets when reporting the forecasts by the military and national security bureaucracy at public interviews, official reports, and congressional testimony 7. Conclusion And Further Readings Gordon Tullock, one of the founding fathers of public choice theory who coined “rent-seeking”, has always wished for a book like this, and now it exists. It is clear to me that Hanania’s public choice model should usurp the conventional unitary actor model, and any scholar who insists on American grand strategy is deluding themselves. The book hasn’t been reviewed by mainstream outlets (which probably only reviews “pop” nonfiction), but have been unanimously praised by scholars in adjacent fields: Steven Pinker praised it as “cynical but probably accurate”; Robin Hanson was “quite impressed”, Byran Caplan, whose work The Myth of the Rational Voter was cited extensively by Hanania, praised it as “eye-opening”; Tyler Cowen praised the book as impressive in spite of finding Hanania’s view to be more sceptical than his own — a sentiment I share after reading about the East Asian economic miracle (the greatest anti-poverty program in history) facilitated by American intervention in How Asia Works (another contrarian economics-related work I’ve reviewed). Russian Invasion of Ukraine At the time of writing, Russia is invading Ukraine, so it is interesting to see how well the public choice model’s predictions fit. Indeed, the unitary actor model can describe autocratic states to some degree — to understand Russia we only have to get into the head of Putin (the model still falls short in accounting for the oligarchs who run the mafia state). Ukraine is central to Putin’s ideology and subjectively important to Russian society, and the desire to obliterate and absorb the nation of Ukraine far predates the history of NATO (see also Adam Tooze’s excellent essay on understanding Russia as a strategic petrostate). As Hanania writes on his Substack (worthy of your subscription, by the way)4: We know what the Russians want. They have made clear, openly and consistently, that they do not want NATO to keep expanding. When it became apparent in December that an invasion was on the table, the US started a diplomatic process that has involved trying to work out concessions on other things, while refusing to take NATO membership for Ukraine off the table. Putin has become Satan in liberal imagination, and when it comes to the culture war, the emotional response is overwhelming. Hanania writes: Brexit, Trump, and the rise of Orban and other right-wing populists in Europe have helped solidify a narrative in which Russian hackers and influence operations are behind everything liberal elites find distasteful, from opposition to Syrian refugees to bans on Critical Race Theory. Here’s a website laying out all the things Russia has been accused of “weaponizing” in the media, including dolphins, federalism, and the weather. The details of debates surrounding the wisdom of NATO expansion and whether Ukraine actually matters to the United States are lost in the larger story, as emotional denunciations of Putin as the source of all anti-democratic activity drives attitudes and policies. Inconvenient facts are ignored because it’s not really about “democracy,” “international law,” or any of the other words they use to obscure the fact that it’s culture wars all the way down. And the Western response is driven by extreme public outcry to an unprecedented extent: It’s all a competition to see who can signal “I hate Putin” the most, but Germany was still shutting down all its nuclear power plants to rely on Russian gas despite warnings from every other EU state (Russia accounts for 40% of Europe’s gas imports) — so much for grand strategy. That is not to excuse Putin’s invasion (he is, after all, the aggressor) and no, Ukraine is not “the West’s fault” as Mearsheimer has claimed in his viral lecture, but “NATO’s door remains open” for me and “we're going to start WW3 because you're in my sphere of influence” for thee is no grand strategy at all. Indeed, the irrational Western response is not predictable by the unitary actor model, but by the public choice model. Hanania writes: If you were going to cut Russia off from SWIFT, for example, why wouldn’t you announce it beforehand? The whole point of a punishment like that is supposed to be its deterrent effect, but if you don’t communicate that a specific action will happen, then it can’t influence behaviour. The answer here seems to be a lack of grand strategy, with leaders responding to events according to emotion and public relations more than anything. Cutting off SWIFT, or even threatening to do so, seems extreme before an invasion occurs, but not after it has begun. The West cannot rely on sanctions to make Russia abandon its core national security interests, which at the very least include a no-NATO commitment, the acceptance of the secession of Donetsk and Luhansk, and the recognition of the annexation of Crimea. Sanctions will also push Putin closer to Beijing, and the US will continue down the self-defeating path of alienating both of the other two superpowers — so much for American grand strategy. Hanania writes: Even if Putin has maximalist aims at this point, that doesn’t mean sanctions are worth doing. Their costs are high and they may have major consequences for the global economy. One has to consider the possibility that they make Russia more repressive at home and more brutal in its persecution of the war. Putin is getting sanctioned, but ordinary Russians are getting cancelled. The Metropolitan Opera of New York has announced it will no longer stage performers who have supported Russian President Vladimir Putin. Carnegie Hall has done the same, and the Royal Opera House in London is cancelling a planned Bolshoi Ballet residency (one of the oldest and most prestigious ballet companies in the world). Eurovision banned Russia. Tchaikovsky is cancelled. As Tyler Cowen writes, cancel culture against Russians is the new McCarthyism. The culture war has morphed into a hyperreal form on the Internet. Just as COVID is the first pandemic in the Age of Twitter, so the Ukraine invasion is, in some sense, the first war in the Age of Twitter. As it unfolds, we are seeing many disturbing parallels to the events of early 2020. People are rapidly normalising once-fringe ideas like a NATO-enforced no-fly zone (while completely oblivious to the fact that it means shooting down Russian planes and causing WW3), direct US conflict with Russia, regime change in Moscow, and even, incredibly, the use of nuclear weapons. The overnight flips on German defence spending and SWIFT are like the overturning of conventional public health policies on masking and lockdowns. We have entered the age of shitpost diplomacy, as coined by Tanner Green, in which the official Twitter account of the US Embassy in Kiev literally posts memes to spite Putin: A Russian sixth-grader could explain why celebrating the glories of Kievan Rus does not subvert Putin’s claims about the history of the Russian nation so much as reinforce them. Just like Hong Kong’s protests, Ukraine has won the meme war with utterly lopsided propaganda and unanimous international support on the Internet. As Yoshimi writes: Floating ghostlike above it is our war, the myth of the ‘Ghost of Kyiv’, ace MIG-29 pilot who has apparently shot down six Russian planes, or the legend of the Ukrainian soldiers defending an island outpost who replied “Russian warship go fuck yourselves” to a surrender offer and may or may not have died heroically, or two Russian II-76 transport aircraft that maybe were shot down near Kiev, or videos of air strikes or dead bodies which variously are Russian or Ukrainian until they turn out to be from Gaza six years ago, or the viral video of an old Ukrainian woman telling off a Russian soldier by offering him sunflower seeds so when he dies, sunflowers (Ukraine’s national flowers) will sprout from the soil. We’re raising funds for the Ukrainian army on crowdfunding apps and giving advice to the civilians being handed assault weapons about how to disable tanks, sharing weird homophobic pictures of Putin as a gay icon and spamming Russian government posts. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has made the decision to stay and fight rather than flee like most would-be leaders who go all in for American foreign policy, and now is being deified by us as “badass”, “a true leader”, etc. etc., alongside his people, whose resistance to authoritarianism we are told is unparalleled in the modern world. After all, so it goes, who could be next? And like in Hong Kong, despite winning the culture war in hyperreality, the actual war in reality is won by the side with overwhelming military might, not morality. The real war is where Ukrainians are experiencing the genuine life-shattering effects of military conflict. It matters because this is the first time Western response is driven by Twitter outcry, and it will not be the last. A New EA Cause? Besides Hanania’s recommendations in the last section (which he admits are more or less impossible in an excellent interview with Caplan), a worthy EA priority might be to somehow turn the public tide on sanctions, which literally kill more people than Putin. Americans should be appalled by the atrocity committed in their names. The banality of the incompetence of foreign policy elites does not excuse their evil. With how entrenched the special interests are, I have no idea if it’s even worth trying, but at the very least the sheer amount of suffering and death from sanctions should be made common knowledge. Nuclear security is one of the top priorities in Effective Altruism, per 80,000 Hours, Future of Life Institute, and Our World In Data. Toby Orb, who wrote the definitive book on existential risk, The Precipice, estimates x-risk from nuclear war to be ~1 in 1000 in the next century. Luisa Rodriguez estimates a 1.1% chance of nuclear war each year and that the chances of a US-Russia nuclear war may be in the ballpark of 0.38% per year; summarised by Max Roser as: Nuclear risk is neglected by the public because of Pax Americana since the collapse of the USSR, and is not discussed as often in EA as it’s thought to be relatively well-funded and mainstream, but in fact major donors like the MacArthur Foundation have been withdrawing funding. As Joan Rohling details in an 80,000 Hours podcast there is much to be done, especially when Ukraine gave up their nuclear arsenal in 1994 in exchange for Russia’s promise to never threaten or use military force against them. A worthwhile adjacent cause area might be de-escalation of public outcry to reduce x-risk from nuclear war beyond just regular anti-proliferation efforts — even a Russian specialist from the RAND Corporation is surprised by how much public outrage is driving policy: Even just the pace of the sanctions: we went to 11 out of 10 in like two days — farther than many expected we’d ever get in short order. And I think the same is true about these military assistance initiatives. We’re just trying to do something because there’s a public demand for action. So that’s what worries me, that the sort of public outrage that’s being channeled in Western democracies through political systems could result in decisions that prove ultimately unwise. Despite how odd it is that some wars are “legal” while others aren’t, we should be glad UNSC exists as much as everyone laughs at how useless the rest of the UN is. All is fair in love and war, but international norms is all that stands between us and nuclear annihilation. It is hard to emphasise just how delusional it is for the public to fixate on no-fly zones — I, like Scott, am surprised we’re still capable of jingoism. 80,000 Hours has updated their top career recommendations to include China specialist to improve China-Western coordination on global catastrophic risk, which seems more important after reading how irrational and captured the American foreign policy apparatus is. As Hanania writes, “great power competition” is an anachronism. If Ukraine is the first war warped by hyperreality, it won’t be the last. Now that US foreign policy elites have driven Putin into the arms of China, let’s hope IR specialists can imbibe the public choice model instead of antagonising yet another nuclear rival. Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy is an important work because it raises the sanity waterline, which at the least should make us stop killing millions for no reason, and at the most should make the human race more knowledgeable of how to prevent total extinction from nuclear armageddon. Pax Americana is dead, but a multipolar world will be more humane. Endnotes In the fiscal year 2018, the top five government contractors were all weapons manufacturers, with Lockheed Martin in first place at $40.6 billion. The Department of Defence spent $358 billion on contracting, ten times higher than second place Department of Energy. Collective action problems that stop a bunch of smaller companies from effectively influencing policy are no hindrance for companies like Lockheed Martin.

Inline links: Gordon Tullock, cynical but probably accurate, Robin Hanson, The Myth of the Rational Voter, eye-opening, impressive, reviewed, predates, essay, writes, website, public outcry, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!R3g3!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F693f0593-7460-4fb0-bc4a-e185cf6f0e06_964x506.png, not, viral lecture, NATO’s door remains open, we're going to start WW3 because you're in my sphere of influence, writes, writes, cancelled, banned, cancelled, writes,, German defence spending, shitpost diplomacy, posts, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!j4gR!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3c5db00c-e420-4b54-b826-b85d9ddf186d_900x647.png, writes, interview, 80,000 Hours, Future of Life Institute, Our World In Data, The Precipice, ~1 in 1000, estimates, summarised, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!PRc2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe90b1bb5-d84b-45dc-b9fa-2edddbf6b9fa_1600x1006.png, Pax Americana, MacArthur Foundation, details, gave up, surprised, Scott, jingoism, China specialist, captured, writes, the sanity waterline, a multipolar world will be more humane

Your Book Review: Secret Government

July 07, 2023 · Original source

Secrecy in government is only a problem, then, if we are fully committed to promissory representation. Kogelmann argues that we should reject the intuitive appeal of promissory representation because it will inevitably lead to pandering: politicians supporting policies they know to be bad or ineffective because of popular support. For an enumeration of all the ways in which expert opinion differs from lay opinion, see Bryan Caplan’s book The Myth of the Rational Voter. I would go further and argue that the reason citizens elect representatives in the first place is because of this difference of opinion. Citizens do not want to spend all of their time embroiled in the arcane details of healthcare regulation or fiscal policy. They want somebody else to do the work for them. The fact that opacity conflicts with promissory representation, then, is not a problem.

The Others Within Us2 mentions across 2 issues

The Others Within Us is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between May 21, 2024 and May 28, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "At least this is what I take from The Others Within Us, by Robert Falconer"; "The Others Within Us tries to argue that this had negative effects"; "In my book review of The Others Within Us". It most often appears alongside Carl Jung, Falconer, IFS.

Article page: The Others Within Us
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: May 21, 2024
Last seen: May 28, 2024
Book title: The Others Within Us
Likely author: Robert Falconer

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: The Others Within Us May 21, 2024
What Is Going On In IFS? May 28, 2024

Carl Jung 2 shared issues
Falconer 2 shared issues
IFS 2 shared issues
Internal Family Systems 2 shared issues
Sabby 2 shared issues

Source context

Book Review: The Others Within Us

May 21, 2024 · Original source

At least this is what I take from The Others Within Us, by Robert Falconer, a veteran IFS therapist.

Inline links: The Others Within Us

So IFS therapists are telling patients about all their Parts. And they say “all of these Parts are beautiful facets of your variegated Self”, and most patients believe them. But occasionally if there’s some sort of really repressed ego dystonic thing, then their lucid-dream-trance mind will say “No, that one isn’t part of my Self, it’s an evil invader that I hate”. IFS is prepared for this and walks them through how no, really, it’s a beautiful facet of your variegated Self that you’ve just really repressed and which you consider ego dystonic - I don’t want to accuse them of not doing this; The Others Within Us is very clear that they push this line as hard as they can. Still, some patients just don’t buy it. Some patients have some perverse part of them that they can’t identify with in any way, at all, something with no redeeming value according to the moral system of their dominant personality. No matter how hard their IFS therapist tells them it’s a part of them, they’ll insist it’s not. And if they’re in a lucid-dream-trance, they’ll say that they can sense it as some form of foreign dark energy, and that it entered them from the outside during an abuse episode - which is as good a metaphor for trauma as any other that I’ve heard.

The Others Within Us tries to argue that this had negative effects. We might avoid outright demonic encounters, but we have worse versions of everything else, and lots of demon-shaped trauma knots that we can’t acknowledge or do anything about and fruitlessly try to hit with our “some brain circuit is overactive” hammer, hoping they will one day reveal themselves as nails. Falconer also cites research that we have worse outcomes from schizophrenia than other cultures (although I think some of that has been challenged by claims about diagnostic variability), and makes the common alt-psychiatry point that maybe schizophrenia is a shamanic crisis, of the sort that other cultures would resolve by becoming shamans6. He thinks that opening ourselves up to spiritual ideas would help our trauma, our schizophrenia, and maybe our anxiety and depression to boot7.

Inline links: 6, 7

What Is Going On In IFS?

May 28, 2024 · Original source

In my book review of The Others Within Us, I wrote:

Inline links: my book review of

The Question of Separatism2 mentions across 2 issues

The Question of Separatism is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between May 19, 2023 and May 22, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Question of Separatism sits awkwardly in Jane Jacobs’s bibliography"; "a detour through the other book, The Question of Separatism"; "The Question of Separatism book cover : from Amazon". It most often appears alongside Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Quebec, 1980.

Article page: The Question of Separatism
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: May 19, 2023
Last seen: May 22, 2023
Book title: The Question of Separatism
Likely author: Amazon

Outbound links

Issue trail

The Question Of Separatism May 19, 2023
Open Thread 277 May 22, 2023

Cities and the Wealth of Nations 2 shared issues
Quebec 2 shared issues
1980 1 shared issues
1980 referendum 1 shared issues
1995 referendum 1 shared issues

Source context

Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!BjyZ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe0bfbafa-7e10-4d83-abe4-34251c126728_332x499.png, Phillips curve, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!9wEn!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F850ce64a-4367-4a7a-a9ec-e8eb1af3ed08_399x292.png, Our World in Data, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zS15!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7d533e64-f407-4b05-aea5-5b5a9dbdc7bc_1600x1130.png, import replacement, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!5j2T!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7f2675d9-ce56-4ac5-9b78-a16720269dea_1600x1159.png, import substitution industrialization, Scott’s review of, Bardou, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!RfMs!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc119b085-f7b3-4e09-a586-9f4fc4c2ea21_1200x1600.png

May 19, 2023 · Original source

Mere days after I finished reading it, thinking it was indeed one of the best essays I’d ever read, I checked the same public bookshelf again. And lo! There was a second Jane Jacobs book: The Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle Over Sovereignty. This book is Jacobs’s least read. It was published in 1980, right after the first referendum where Quebecers voted to remain a part of Canada. It is based on lectures that Jacobs (who was an American but had moved to Canada in 1968) gave in Toronto right before the referendum. It’s not hard to guess why the book didn’t have a huge (read: any) impact. First, most people outside Quebec or Canada don’t have any reason to care. Second, the essay — which was written in English — argues in favor of the secession of Quebec, which virtually no one among the English-speaking population of Canada agreed with. The natural reaction from Canada’s intelligentsia was to ignore the book altogether. Meanwhile, few people in Quebec itself read it, since the referendum was over; it wasn’t even translated into French until decades later. As a result, The Question of Separatism sits awkwardly in Jane Jacobs’s bibliography, as if it were “a mistake in an otherwise brilliant career,” like I read somewhere. In a 2005 interview, one year before her death, Jacobs said that no journalist ever asked her about it. But the book was not a mistake. I don’t claim any special insight here: Jane Jacobs herself said so in that same interview. She said that she would have written the same book in 2005, “because that’s the way it is in the world, and it still holds.” Besides, The Question of Separatism is in fact not that much about the specifics of Quebec’s political situation, but rather about interesting generalities: what size means for countries and organizations, and why the fate of nations depends primarily on what happens in their cities. Taken together with Cities and the Wealth of Nations, which Jacobs wrote a few years later to expand on those ideas, we get a coherent and deeply interesting philosophy of economics: one that favors the local scale, cities and small countries, antifragility long before Nassim Taleb coined the term, and avoiding grandstanding theories that always fail to take into account the real complexity of the world. I. A Fake Mystery Cities and the Wealth of Nations opens on an economic mystery. “For a little while in the middle of this century,” writes Jacobs, “it seemed that the wild, intractable, dismal science of economics had yielded up something we all want: instructions for getting or keeping prosperity.” This was the 1940s to 1960s, and economists thought they had it all figured out. It was the golden age of high modernism and scientific technocracy. Everywhere from China to the Soviet Union to the United States and Britain and the nascent European Economic Community, leaders were coming up with elaborate plans, rooted in macroeconomic theories, that were supposed to guarantee future wealth and avoid economic crises. The theories had been developed by many thinkers over the previous two hundred years: Richard Cantillon, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes. Jacobs explains how they each had their own ideas of how the economy worked, disagreeing over things like whether supply or demand was the main driving mechanism, but they all agreed on a fundamental fact: inflation and unemployment have an inverse relationship to each other, like a seesaw. High inflation comes with low unemployment; high unemployment comes with low inflation, or even deflation when prices drop. The Great Depression, a time of deflation, had provided proof of the seesaw. Big government projects, as prescribed by Keynesians, were a way for states to reduce unemployment and bring the seesaw back in a balanced state. Economists developed fancy models, based on historical data, to predict the behavior of the economy. The Phillips curve in particular became popular. It was the golden age of technocracy; it was the triumph of high modernism. From now on wealth was assured, because we weren’t blind anymore: we had the curves. And yet — by the 1970s and 1980s, when Jane Jacobs was writing, the theories all stopped working. There was high inflation and high unemployment. People called it stagflation. Keynesian advisers in various governments were devastated: either their ideas were wrong, or they were applying them wrong. Economists such as Milton Friedman, from a rival school of economists called the monetarists or the Chicago school, came to the rescue — but their remedy, Jacobs believes, only made things worse. Whatever governments did to increase employment made inflation worse; whatever they did to attenuate inflation killed employment. The seesaw from the theories was working in application, even though it didn’t explain reality anymore. Stagflation was not supposed to exist, so stagflation could not be fought. At this point we’re near the end of Chapter 1, the densest part of the book. Jacobs has artfully guided us along economic history and laid out the mystery for us. What’s going on? we wonder. How are we supposed to deal with the two-headed monster of stagflation, if all economists are stumped? Then Jacobs, in a masterstroke, flips the whole thing over. I was impressed enough that I would have inserted a spoiler alert here, if it didn’t feel so silly putting a spoiler alert in an essay on economics. Stagflation is not a strange monster from legend. It is, Jacobs says, just the normal state of everything. Backward economies are in fact constantly in a state of stagflation. The prices in a poor country like Portugal or India (her two examples) feel low for an American or Canadian, but they’re high for most Portuguese or Indian people. At the same time, Portugal and India provide too few jobs to their residents. Inflation and unemployment are both perennially high, and none of that feels surprising whatsoever. Stagflation, in short, is just good ol’ poverty. All these fancy economists, from Cantillon in 1700s France to Keynes and Friedman in the 20th century Anglosphere, were thinking and writing about unusual places: rich countries that were undergoing fast economic development. They were making the classic mistake of treating poverty as a mystery and wealth as a given, when in fact poverty is the normal order of things and wealth, when it does occur, is what warrants an explanation. The result is that we don’t really know how to fix the economy of poor countries, nor do we know how to deal with decline in rich countries, whether we call it stagflation or something else. Jacobs derives from this a pretty damning view of macroeconomics. It is to her a science that has failed again and again, each time engulfing the equivalent of billions of dollars in wasted wealth. “We must,” she writes at the close of Chapter 1, “find more realistic and fruitful lines of observation and thought than we have tried to use so far. It is bootless to choose among existing schools of thought. We are on our own.” Fortunately, she has some ideas. II. Nations and the Wealth of Cities The original sin of macroeconomics, Jacobs believe, is to treat sovereign countries, or nations, as the main unit of economic analysis. This error, she claims, goes back to mercantilism, one of the first formal economic policies. Oversimplified, mercantilism states that wealth is synonymous with the amount of gold and silver in a nation’s treasury. This makes nations the main unit of economic analysis by definition. It’s a tautology — and one that was somehow embedded so deep in economic thinking that even the non-mercantilist Adam Smith would eventually choose, for his masterpiece of economic theory, the title An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Today, even though mercantilism has long been obsolete, we perpetuate the same tautology whenever we talk of the Gross Domestic Product or look at the very nice charts from Our World in Data, which for the most part allow only one level of resolution: sovereign countries. Of course, nations are an economically important concept because of that one property: they are sovereign, and therefore they write laws and implement policies that affect the economy. These policies can be productively compared. But that’s about it — for everything else, nations aren’t the right way to think about wealth. One reason is simply that they’re very different from one another: “it affronts common sense,” Jacobs writes, “to think of units as disparate as, say, Singapore and the United States, or Ecuador and the Soviet Union, or the Netherlands and Canada, as economic common denominators.” I would add that countries are arbitrary and changing: when the Soviet Union was replaced by 15 sovereign countries, the economic reality didn’t suddenly reshape itself to match the new borders. Lastly, nations contain, under the hood, many sub-economies that are also highly different from one another. None of that is secret or forbidden knowledge. Everyone has always been aware that New York City, or Milan, are economically very different from rural Mississippi or Sicily. But I find that it’s far easier to think in terms of “the United States” or “Italy,” especially when you’re not from there. Nations are an abstraction of real-life complexity, and are accordingly very tempting to use. Also, they’re often the entities that collect statistics, which is another difficult-to-resist temptation for anyone who likes quantitative data. Cities as Radiators of Economic Forces If nations aren’t the best unit to analyze the economy, what is? This is a Jane Jacobs book, so the answer is obviously going to be cities. Jacobs doesn’t actually give a clear argument why. Maybe that was in her previous book, The Economy of Cities. So far as I can see, her reasoning is, ironically, a bit tautological: “all developing economic life depends on city economies; it depends on them by definition because, wherever economic life is developing, the very process itself creates cities and has probably always done so.” But so far as I can see, this reasoning is correct. Cities concentrate people, and therefore economic life, and therefore economic power. The driving force for all this is a phenomenon that, from what I gather, was discovered by Jacobs when she wrote The Economy of Cities: import replacement. Consider, say, Boston back when it was a tiny settlement, not yet a city, in colonial times. At first, Boston didn’t produce much, especially not much that would be of interest to its main trading partner, London. It exported some natural resources: timber, fish. Whatever else the Bostonians needed, they needed to import it from other cities, again mostly London. (Remember to think of imports and exports in terms of cities, not nations.) For instance, at first, all metal tools in Boston came from European cities, and were paid for by the revenue from selling the timber and fish. Then, one day, some Bostonians decided to build an ironworks and make metal tools themselves. (Pictured: a reconstruction of the Saugus Iron Works, established 1646.) This wasn’t of any interest to London or other European cities. The Bostonians weren’t nearly as good or efficient at making metal tools as Londonians were. So Boston couldn’t export the metal tools back to Europe — but it could use them internally, and also export them to other American cities that were about as poor as Boston was, or poorer. Internally, this meant the spark of a manufacturing economy in Boston, as easily obtained metal parts made it easier for other Bostonians to replace other imports from European cities, and eventually develop a symbiotic network of industries. It also meant that the revenue from fish and timber could be used to import new things, including new innovations from European cities (which would later become opportunities for more import replacement). And because there were customers for Boston-made metal goods in New York and Philadelphia, and eventually Cincinnati and Chicago and Pittsburgh as these cities came into existence, it meant additional revenue for Boston that it could reinvest into developing its production further. For Jacobs, virtually all city development can be seen through the lens of import replacement (which, to be clear, has approximately nothing to do with policies of import substitution industrialization; import replacement is not a policy, but a naturally arising free market phenomenon). Her book contains many other examples than Boston, such as Venice, which started off in the early Middle Ages as a small town that sold salt to Constantinople, but then diversified its production to become one of the wealthiest cities of its time; or Taipei and Kaohsiung, two cities in Taiwan that kickstarted their development not long before the 1980s, by forcing expropriated landlords to invest into local import-replacing businesses. One is reminded of Scott’s review of How Asia Works. Import replacement, then, is what makes cities economically powerful. And this power is so great that it causes ripples in distant places. In fact it is the main reason that anything happens at all in non-city areas. Jacobs gives the example of Bardou, a small village in southern France. Bardou looks like this: To the extent that Bardou ever had an economic life, that life was almost entirely driven by distant cities. In ancient times, the area was populated because of iron mines nearby. The mines were exploited to serve the needs of people in the distant cities of Lugdunum (Lyon), Nemausus (Nîmes), or even Rome. As Jacobs notes, we could say that the mines served “the Roman Empire,” but that would be another example of using the abstraction of sovereign countries when we should instead be specific. It was Lugdunum, Nemausus and Rome that wanted the iron — not some random rural area of the empire, and certainly not the part of the empire in which Bardou was located. Eventually the mines and the region were abandoned. More than 1,000 years later, peasants moved into the area and built the modern village. For centuries they lived a wretchedly poor life of subsistence farming. No cities exerted any influence on it, and indeed nothing happened. Then, in the 19th century, the people of Bardou learned that they could improve their situation by moving to distant cities such as Paris, and most of them did. Again, the force wasn’t being exerted by “France”; Bardou was already part of France. The force was specifically being exerted by Paris and other cities with jobs for poor peasants. By the 1960s, only one old man was left. That’s when two foreign visitors, a German and an American, happened upon the village, decided to buy most of it, revitalized it, and turned it into a tourist spot (and even, for a brief time, into a set for a movie company). Today Bardou is a popular place for travelers — who are mostly city people, and spend money that was mostly earned in cities. The Bardou story contains examples of several of the forces that import-replacing cities radiate, according to Jacobs. These forces are central to her thinking. There are five of them: Markets. Cities house a lot of people who need a lot of goods and services, and are therefore strong markets to sell goods and services to. This was the force that acted on the Bardou area when it was a Roman mining region, and again today when it functions as a tourist spot for city vacationers.

This book is Jacobs’s least read. It was published in 1980, right after the first referendum where Quebecers voted to remain a part of Canada. It is based on lectures that Jacobs (who was an American but had moved to Canada in 1968) gave in Toronto right before the referendum. It’s not hard to guess why the book didn’t have a huge (read: any) impact. First, most people outside Quebec or Canada don’t have any reason to care. Second, the essay — which was written in English — argues in favor of the secession of Quebec, which virtually no one among the English-speaking population of Canada agreed with. The natural reaction from Canada’s intelligentsia was to ignore the book altogether. Meanwhile, few people in Quebec itself read it, since the referendum was over; it wasn’t even translated into French until decades later. As a result, The Question of Separatism sits awkwardly in Jane Jacobs’s bibliography, as if it were “a mistake in an otherwise brilliant career,” like I read somewhere. In a 2005 interview, one year before her death, Jacobs said that no journalist ever asked her about it. But the book was not a mistake. I don’t claim any special insight here: Jane Jacobs herself said so in that same interview. She said that she would have written the same book in 2005, “because that’s the way it is in the world, and it still holds.” Besides, The Question of Separatism is in fact not that much about the specifics of Quebec’s political situation, but rather about interesting generalities: what size means for countries and organizations, and why the fate of nations depends primarily on what happens in their cities. Taken together with Cities and the Wealth of Nations, which Jacobs wrote a few years later to expand on those ideas, we get a coherent and deeply interesting philosophy of economics: one that favors the local scale, cities and small countries, antifragility long before Nassim Taleb coined the term, and avoiding grandstanding theories that always fail to take into account the real complexity of the world. I. A Fake Mystery Cities and the Wealth of Nations opens on an economic mystery. “For a little while in the middle of this century,” writes Jacobs, “it seemed that the wild, intractable, dismal science of economics had yielded up something we all want: instructions for getting or keeping prosperity.” This was the 1940s to 1960s, and economists thought they had it all figured out. It was the golden age of high modernism and scientific technocracy. Everywhere from China to the Soviet Union to the United States and Britain and the nascent European Economic Community, leaders were coming up with elaborate plans, rooted in macroeconomic theories, that were supposed to guarantee future wealth and avoid economic crises. The theories had been developed by many thinkers over the previous two hundred years: Richard Cantillon, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes. Jacobs explains how they each had their own ideas of how the economy worked, disagreeing over things like whether supply or demand was the main driving mechanism, but they all agreed on a fundamental fact: inflation and unemployment have an inverse relationship to each other, like a seesaw. High inflation comes with low unemployment; high unemployment comes with low inflation, or even deflation when prices drop. The Great Depression, a time of deflation, had provided proof of the seesaw. Big government projects, as prescribed by Keynesians, were a way for states to reduce unemployment and bring the seesaw back in a balanced state. Economists developed fancy models, based on historical data, to predict the behavior of the economy. The Phillips curve in particular became popular. It was the golden age of technocracy; it was the triumph of high modernism. From now on wealth was assured, because we weren’t blind anymore: we had the curves. And yet — by the 1970s and 1980s, when Jane Jacobs was writing, the theories all stopped working. There was high inflation and high unemployment. People called it stagflation. Keynesian advisers in various governments were devastated: either their ideas were wrong, or they were applying them wrong. Economists such as Milton Friedman, from a rival school of economists called the monetarists or the Chicago school, came to the rescue — but their remedy, Jacobs believes, only made things worse. Whatever governments did to increase employment made inflation worse; whatever they did to attenuate inflation killed employment. The seesaw from the theories was working in application, even though it didn’t explain reality anymore. Stagflation was not supposed to exist, so stagflation could not be fought. At this point we’re near the end of Chapter 1, the densest part of the book. Jacobs has artfully guided us along economic history and laid out the mystery for us. What’s going on? we wonder. How are we supposed to deal with the two-headed monster of stagflation, if all economists are stumped? Then Jacobs, in a masterstroke, flips the whole thing over. I was impressed enough that I would have inserted a spoiler alert here, if it didn’t feel so silly putting a spoiler alert in an essay on economics. Stagflation is not a strange monster from legend. It is, Jacobs says, just the normal state of everything. Backward economies are in fact constantly in a state of stagflation. The prices in a poor country like Portugal or India (her two examples) feel low for an American or Canadian, but they’re high for most Portuguese or Indian people. At the same time, Portugal and India provide too few jobs to their residents. Inflation and unemployment are both perennially high, and none of that feels surprising whatsoever. Stagflation, in short, is just good ol’ poverty. All these fancy economists, from Cantillon in 1700s France to Keynes and Friedman in the 20th century Anglosphere, were thinking and writing about unusual places: rich countries that were undergoing fast economic development. They were making the classic mistake of treating poverty as a mystery and wealth as a given, when in fact poverty is the normal order of things and wealth, when it does occur, is what warrants an explanation. The result is that we don’t really know how to fix the economy of poor countries, nor do we know how to deal with decline in rich countries, whether we call it stagflation or something else. Jacobs derives from this a pretty damning view of macroeconomics. It is to her a science that has failed again and again, each time engulfing the equivalent of billions of dollars in wasted wealth. “We must,” she writes at the close of Chapter 1, “find more realistic and fruitful lines of observation and thought than we have tried to use so far. It is bootless to choose among existing schools of thought. We are on our own.” Fortunately, she has some ideas. II. Nations and the Wealth of Cities The original sin of macroeconomics, Jacobs believe, is to treat sovereign countries, or nations, as the main unit of economic analysis. This error, she claims, goes back to mercantilism, one of the first formal economic policies. Oversimplified, mercantilism states that wealth is synonymous with the amount of gold and silver in a nation’s treasury. This makes nations the main unit of economic analysis by definition. It’s a tautology — and one that was somehow embedded so deep in economic thinking that even the non-mercantilist Adam Smith would eventually choose, for his masterpiece of economic theory, the title An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Today, even though mercantilism has long been obsolete, we perpetuate the same tautology whenever we talk of the Gross Domestic Product or look at the very nice charts from Our World in Data, which for the most part allow only one level of resolution: sovereign countries. Of course, nations are an economically important concept because of that one property: they are sovereign, and therefore they write laws and implement policies that affect the economy. These policies can be productively compared. But that’s about it — for everything else, nations aren’t the right way to think about wealth. One reason is simply that they’re very different from one another: “it affronts common sense,” Jacobs writes, “to think of units as disparate as, say, Singapore and the United States, or Ecuador and the Soviet Union, or the Netherlands and Canada, as economic common denominators.” I would add that countries are arbitrary and changing: when the Soviet Union was replaced by 15 sovereign countries, the economic reality didn’t suddenly reshape itself to match the new borders. Lastly, nations contain, under the hood, many sub-economies that are also highly different from one another. None of that is secret or forbidden knowledge. Everyone has always been aware that New York City, or Milan, are economically very different from rural Mississippi or Sicily. But I find that it’s far easier to think in terms of “the United States” or “Italy,” especially when you’re not from there. Nations are an abstraction of real-life complexity, and are accordingly very tempting to use. Also, they’re often the entities that collect statistics, which is another difficult-to-resist temptation for anyone who likes quantitative data. Cities as Radiators of Economic Forces If nations aren’t the best unit to analyze the economy, what is? This is a Jane Jacobs book, so the answer is obviously going to be cities. Jacobs doesn’t actually give a clear argument why. Maybe that was in her previous book, The Economy of Cities. So far as I can see, her reasoning is, ironically, a bit tautological: “all developing economic life depends on city economies; it depends on them by definition because, wherever economic life is developing, the very process itself creates cities and has probably always done so.” But so far as I can see, this reasoning is correct. Cities concentrate people, and therefore economic life, and therefore economic power. The driving force for all this is a phenomenon that, from what I gather, was discovered by Jacobs when she wrote The Economy of Cities: import replacement. Consider, say, Boston back when it was a tiny settlement, not yet a city, in colonial times. At first, Boston didn’t produce much, especially not much that would be of interest to its main trading partner, London. It exported some natural resources: timber, fish. Whatever else the Bostonians needed, they needed to import it from other cities, again mostly London. (Remember to think of imports and exports in terms of cities, not nations.) For instance, at first, all metal tools in Boston came from European cities, and were paid for by the revenue from selling the timber and fish. Then, one day, some Bostonians decided to build an ironworks and make metal tools themselves. (Pictured: a reconstruction of the Saugus Iron Works, established 1646.) This wasn’t of any interest to London or other European cities. The Bostonians weren’t nearly as good or efficient at making metal tools as Londonians were. So Boston couldn’t export the metal tools back to Europe — but it could use them internally, and also export them to other American cities that were about as poor as Boston was, or poorer. Internally, this meant the spark of a manufacturing economy in Boston, as easily obtained metal parts made it easier for other Bostonians to replace other imports from European cities, and eventually develop a symbiotic network of industries. It also meant that the revenue from fish and timber could be used to import new things, including new innovations from European cities (which would later become opportunities for more import replacement). And because there were customers for Boston-made metal goods in New York and Philadelphia, and eventually Cincinnati and Chicago and Pittsburgh as these cities came into existence, it meant additional revenue for Boston that it could reinvest into developing its production further. For Jacobs, virtually all city development can be seen through the lens of import replacement (which, to be clear, has approximately nothing to do with policies of import substitution industrialization; import replacement is not a policy, but a naturally arising free market phenomenon). Her book contains many other examples than Boston, such as Venice, which started off in the early Middle Ages as a small town that sold salt to Constantinople, but then diversified its production to become one of the wealthiest cities of its time; or Taipei and Kaohsiung, two cities in Taiwan that kickstarted their development not long before the 1980s, by forcing expropriated landlords to invest into local import-replacing businesses. One is reminded of Scott’s review of How Asia Works. Import replacement, then, is what makes cities economically powerful. And this power is so great that it causes ripples in distant places. In fact it is the main reason that anything happens at all in non-city areas. Jacobs gives the example of Bardou, a small village in southern France. Bardou looks like this: To the extent that Bardou ever had an economic life, that life was almost entirely driven by distant cities. In ancient times, the area was populated because of iron mines nearby. The mines were exploited to serve the needs of people in the distant cities of Lugdunum (Lyon), Nemausus (Nîmes), or even Rome. As Jacobs notes, we could say that the mines served “the Roman Empire,” but that would be another example of using the abstraction of sovereign countries when we should instead be specific. It was Lugdunum, Nemausus and Rome that wanted the iron — not some random rural area of the empire, and certainly not the part of the empire in which Bardou was located. Eventually the mines and the region were abandoned. More than 1,000 years later, peasants moved into the area and built the modern village. For centuries they lived a wretchedly poor life of subsistence farming. No cities exerted any influence on it, and indeed nothing happened. Then, in the 19th century, the people of Bardou learned that they could improve their situation by moving to distant cities such as Paris, and most of them did. Again, the force wasn’t being exerted by “France”; Bardou was already part of France. The force was specifically being exerted by Paris and other cities with jobs for poor peasants. By the 1960s, only one old man was left. That’s when two foreign visitors, a German and an American, happened upon the village, decided to buy most of it, revitalized it, and turned it into a tourist spot (and even, for a brief time, into a set for a movie company). Today Bardou is a popular place for travelers — who are mostly city people, and spend money that was mostly earned in cities. The Bardou story contains examples of several of the forces that import-replacing cities radiate, according to Jacobs. These forces are central to her thinking. There are five of them: Markets. Cities house a lot of people who need a lot of goods and services, and are therefore strong markets to sell goods and services to. This was the force that acted on the Bardou area when it was a Roman mining region, and again today when it functions as a tourist spot for city vacationers.

Inline links: Phillips curve, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!9wEn!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F850ce64a-4367-4a7a-a9ec-e8eb1af3ed08_399x292.png, Our World in Data, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zS15!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7d533e64-f407-4b05-aea5-5b5a9dbdc7bc_1600x1130.png, import replacement, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!5j2T!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7f2675d9-ce56-4ac5-9b78-a16720269dea_1600x1159.png, import substitution industrialization, Scott’s review of, Bardou, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!RfMs!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc119b085-f7b3-4e09-a586-9f4fc4c2ea21_1200x1600.png

There is a nice modern road in that screenshot, but between its 18th-century founding and the 1920s, there wasn’t even a path that a horse-drawn wagon could use, and so Higgins was extremely isolated. It barely sold anything to anyone outside, and accordingly imported very little. The people lived from subsistence farming. Their lives were so difficult, so focused on sheer survival, that they gradually forgot many of the skills and techniques that their British ancestors had, like candle making, weaving from a loom, and even masonry. When Jacobs’ aunt arrived as a Presbyterian missionary in 1922, and suggested that they build a church out of stone, the people of Higgins confidently stated that this was impossible: mortar just wasn’t strong enough. “These people came of a parent culture that had not only reared stone parish churches from time immemorial, but great cathedrals,” Jacobs writes, and yet eventually they forgot that stone buildings were a possibility at all. Such is the fate of regions that get cut off from cities. Jacobs calls them bypassed places. Sometimes these places are entire countries, such as Ethiopia, once the seat of an empire, but which as of the 1980s had barely any links to cities except its own backward ones. Unsurprisingly, Ethiopia has high prices (for Ethiopians) and too few jobs. That will always be so, unless one of its cities can start the process of import replacement. III. Should Everything Be a City-State? That was roughly the first half of the book. After that, Jane Jacobs discusses various consequences of her theory, including why decline happens and how we can, in theory, prevent it. We’ll get there — but first, it’s time for a detour through the other book, The Question of Separatism, which provides a great case study of Jacobs’s ideas. After an introductory chapter in which Jacobs acknowledges that separatism always makes everyone emotional, and warns that she’s going to study it in a dispassionate manner anyway, she starts by describing the issues in Quebec and Canada through a specific lens. You can probably guess which lens. That’s right — cities. To her, the question of Quebec separatism is primarily the question of how the two main cities in Canada, Toronto and Montreal, have coexisted and will coexist in the future. At this point you need at least a basic understanding of Canadian history. Here’s a quick primer, focusing on those two cities. Canadian History Speedrun (Jane’s Version) Canada, a word that used to refer to the large valley around the St. Lawrence river and the Great Lakes, was originally a colony of the Kingdom of France. Then the Kingdom of Great Britain conquered it in 1760. For various reasons, most of the French settlers stayed in Canada rather than emigrating to France or being deported, so at first, a small British elite ruled over a mostly French-speaking and Catholic colony. However, immigration from the British Isles, as well as from the newly seceded United States (loyalists who wanted to live in a monarchy rather than a republic for some reason) eventually tipped the linguistic and cultural balance. The population sorted itself such that the lower part of the valley (what is now Quebec) remained French, while the upper part (what is now Ontario) became English. The exception to this trend was the city of Montreal. Although located in Quebec, it became an English-speaking city and the hub for the British merchant elite. For at least a hundred years, it was the main city in Canada across almost all metrics: population, wealth, manufacturing, political influence. In the middle of the 20th century, Montreal grew enormously and became French-speaking again, owing to immigration from rural Quebec. It became the center of Quebecois culture and, with its increasingly educated population, the breeding ground for new ideas, including separatism. At the same time, the main city in Ontario, Toronto, was growing even faster. Immigrants from all over Canada and other countries poured into it (including Jane Jacobs herself). Sometime around 1970, it became bigger and wealthier than Montreal, and replaced it as the main economic hub. Many people attribute this to the rise of Quebec separatists, which supposedly scared the Anglo elite of Montreal into moving all the banks and companies to Toronto, and, to be sure, some of that happened — but of course, Jacobs prefers explanations that rely on city economics. One of the reasons for Toronto's economic and demographic growth is that it became the nexus of what Jacobs calls a conurbation, and would have called a city region if we were in the other book. In case you craved another concrete example of a city region, here’s a map of Ontario with two ways to define Toronto’s so-called “Golden Horseshoe” (Toronto itself is just the tiny strip in the middle of the red area, next to the lake): Meanwhile, Montreal never generated a conurbation or significant city region. This is Jacobs’s main hypothesis for why it was overtaken by Toronto, though she doesn’t give a lot of detail on why it happened. In any case, the result was that Montreal lost its status as the economic capital of the country. It became a regional city. The problem is that regional cities tend to do poorly. The nature of nations is to centralize everything in one place (we’ll come back to this). That’s why Paris has a large and rich city region, but Lyon and Marseille don’t. That’s why London looms so large in the UK’s economy while Glasgow or Manchester now contribute very little. There’s nothing wrong per se with being an economically stagnant regional city. Such cities can be fine places. When they’re the center of a supply region, like Calgary and Edmonton in oil-rich Alberta, they can even be wealthy. The complication for Montreal, though, is that its previous status as the main Canadian metropolis made it grow too large for this purpose. Yet, at the same time, Montreal plays an outsized cultural role for French-speaking Canadians — one that Toronto doesn’t even come close to fulfilling. So, Jacobs sees only decline for Montreal. And she thinks this means decline for Quebecois culture generally. Without a strong import-replacing city, Quebec will become a patchwork of supply regions, regions that workers abandon, or transplant economies, like the poverty-stricken Atlantic provinces in eastern Canada already are. Either the Quebecois resign themselves to this fate, she says, or they fight it — and the only true way to fight it is to declare independence. As of the 1980 referendum, she thinks they should go for independence. Generalized Separatism Quebecers did not go for independence, neither then in 1980 nor in 1995 when they voted on the question again. If they had, it would probably have been an example of a peaceful secession. Jacobs points out that there haven’t been many of those, if you exclude the decolonization of overseas imperial possessions (like Canada from Britain). Non-peaceful secessions have been common, but in those cases the destructiveness of war tends to overshadow everything else, economically speaking. In fact that might be the main reason most of us intuitively dislike separatism: we associate it with conflict. But peaceful non-colonial secessions do happen. Since 1980 there have been several more cases, like Czechia and Slovakia. When Jacobs wrote her book, though, the only good example she could think of was the independence of Norway from Sweden in 1905. She tells a great account of the process, noting that the outcome wasn’t predetermined: Sweden didn’t want to lose its western province, and did what it could to contain Norwegian nationalist sentiment. But Norwegian nationalist sentiment won — and importantly, both Norway and Sweden seemingly benefitted. Neither of them was particularly rich in the 19th century, and Norway was in fact dirt poor, which is why so many Norwegians escaped by emigrating to North America. Yet after the dissolution of their union, the two countries developed quickly, and both are now among the wealthiest countries in the world. They certainly didn’t disintegrate. (Of course, in Norway the wealth is due in large part to the oil that they discovered in the late 1960s. But they were pretty advanced by that point already — advanced enough that they could use the oil to develop their own industry, rather than get rich quick by exporting it raw, which is what keeps many countries trapped as supply regions.) When people argue against separatism, they often tout the benefits of being large. A Canada that would be split in two would mean smaller markets, and a weaker political counterweight to the United States. (Not to be mean to Canadian readers, but this argument seems delusional to me — I don’t think Americans currently see Canada as a political counterweight of any significance.) It would certainly be less prestigious. Large size, Jacobs says, is associated with power, and we admire power. We love slogans like “unity makes strength.” But after the medium-sized country of Sweden-Norway became the two smaller countries of Sweden and Norway, they both did well. Small size is less powerful, but it has its own advantages, such as nimbleness and ability to fail non-catastrophically. Small size also allows more diversity in cultural and economic matters, and here Jacobs waxes philosophical, pointing out that favoring diversity over uniformity is a recent, post-Enlightenment idea that has not yet been fully embraced in politics. We can see analogs everywhere. Europe, split into numerous small countries from the Middle Ages onward, became far more advanced than China, which has been unified more often than not. The city-states of ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy are seen as golden ages of Western civilization, even if they weren’t part of larger political units and therefore constantly went to war with one another. In business, large companies are impressive and powerful, but people always complain that Google or Microsoft have become stagnant and that the best place to work is tiny startups of about 2 cofounders and 4 employees. In biology, humans are more successful than numerous larger animals, and in terms of raw numbers, small animals like rats or insects are the most successful of all. Jacobs’s point isn’t that smaller is always better. Her point is that the converse statement, “bigger is always better,” is false — despite how intuitive it feels for political entities. Just like we don’t view a small nation like Switzerland or Singapore as a failure of unity, we (and in particular, Canadians) shouldn’t see the secession of a place like Quebec, if it’s done peacefully and democratically, as a failure either. Still, some people in online reviews of the book complain that this argument is a bit thin, especially considering that it serves as the foundation for the later chapters (which are more directly about late 1970s Quebec politics). Sure, small is beautiful, but large states are great for stability, peace, markets, whatever. If the potential benefits of small national size are Jacobs’s strongest argument, then we can breathe a sigh of relief and go back to agreeing that separatism is bad. Pointing out the widespread bias in favor of unified political entities does seem valuable to me, but okay, fair enough. Does Jacobs have deeper reasons why separatism might be a good idea in general? Yes, and for this we go back to the second half of Cities and the Wealth of Nations. Why Nations and Empires Fail Our breathing rate is regulated through a feedback mechanism. Too much carbon dioxide in the blood, or too little oxygen, and the brain stem commands the diaphragm to accelerate breathing. Once the levels are back to normal, the brain stem receives this feedback and slows breathing down again. Now, Jacobs asks, imagine an impossible creature: ten people, all doing their own thing, but whose breathing is somehow regulated by a single brain stem. The feedback the brain stem receives is a consolidated average of everyone’s carbon dioxide and oxygen levels, and the breathing rate the stem decides on is applied to all ten people, regardless of whether they’re sleeping or playing tennis. This, to put it mildly, wouldn’t work. This creature is an analogy, representing a nation. The ten people are its individual cities, and the breathing rate is the cities’ economies. If it sounds like a stupid analogy, that’s because it is: “I have had to propose a preposterous situation,” writes Jacobs, “because systems as structurally flawed as this don’t exist in nature; they wouldn’t last.” Nor do they exist in machines we design; they wouldn’t work. But “nations, from this point of view, don’t work either, yet do exist.” The feedback mechanism that fails to work properly in a nation is currency. A currency always fluctuates according to the exports and imports of the area where it circulates. Let me use the Republic of Venice and its ducat as a toy example, because the coins look nice: Whenever Venice produces something (like salt) and sells it abroad, foreigners need ducats to buy the exports, so the demand for ducats increases. When Venice buys something from abroad, it needs to use foreign currencies, so the demand for ducats decreases. Add up everything that Venice exports and imports, and you get either a trade surplus (more exports than imports) or a trade deficit (more imports than exports), which determines the value of the ducat relative to other currencies. In both cases, a negative feedback loop restores balance over time, just like our brain stem does with carbon dioxide levels. A trade surplus, and therefore a strong ducat, means that when foreigners want Venetian salt, it’s expensive. So Venice’s exports decrease, while imports increase, since Venetians can use their valuable ducats to buy stuff cheaply from abroad. Conversely, a trade deficit makes exports a bargain for foreigners and imports expensive for Venetians. This feedback loop is great. It’s exactly what a city needs to trigger the crucial import replacement process. When exports decrease and a trade deficit begins (maybe because Constantinople found a cheaper source of salt somewhere else), the weak ducat means that Venice is less able to afford the resources and manufactured goods it used to import. The people of Venice don’t want to have less of those goods, though, so they figure out ways to produce some themselves — that is, they do import replacement. Later they will be able to export the output of the newly expanding industries too, strengthening the ducat and continuing the cycle. Currencies, Jacobs explains, function as automatic tariffs (to protect local industry from foreign imports) and automatic export subsidies (to encourage local industry to export). They are “automatic” because of the feedback mechanism. Just like an accelerated breathing rate, they take effect exactly when they are needed — and no longer. … Or so they should, except that import replacement, as we discussed, is a city process. Whereas most currencies are national or supranational. National currencies work well for city-states, like the Republic of Venice or today’s Singapore. But in large nations, which, remember, are not the fundamental unit of economic life, they mess everything up. Take a city like Detroit. When Detroit’s exports (primarily cars) decrease, Detroit gets no feedback about this, because its currency is the United States dollar, and the United States dollar’s value depends on much more than Detroit. It depends on other cities whose foreign exports might be increasing at the moment. And on rural regions that are selling resources like oil abroad. Also, trade between Detroit and other cities that use the United States dollar — i.e., American cities — is structurally unable to provide any feedback whatsoever. So Detroit doesn’t get the signal that it should buy less stuff from other cities and replace the missing imports with local production. Instead, it just declines. Jacobs hypothesizes that this issue of national currencies is at the root of every large country’s economic troubles. It is why nations and empires always centralize everything into one large city, whether that’s Paris, London, Tokyo, or Toronto, or ancient Rome: that city, being the largest, is simply the only one for which national-level currency feedback works fine. The rest of the nation or empire, then, declines. But of course, nations and empires don’t accept this. They care about the economic well-being of their peripheral regions, sometimes out of genuine concern for the people there, sometimes out of fear that they rebel or hold independence referendums. So nations and empires will embark on every possible solution to reverse the decline. All of their solutions will look like good ideas at first, and yet fail at helping the peripheral regions. Worse, these solutions will weaken the cities, thereby destroying the only real wealth of the country and bringing untold hardship for everyone. Eventually the nation or empire will disintegrate, as nations and empires always do, and always will. Jacobs calls these false solutions transactions of decline. She identifies three types, and, content warning, you might not like some of them depending on your political sensibilities. Sustained military production is a transaction of decline. Permanent military bases and garrison towns are a special kind of settlement: they import a lot and export nothing. Superficially, producing weapons and supplies for the military seems like a good deal for some cities — Jacobs gives the example of Seattle, which, before Microsoft and Amazon were a thing, depended mostly on making military aircraft. But because nobody in a military base ever tries to replace those weapons and supplies with their own production, the trade is sterile in terms of economic development. In a sense, the wealth is slowly “drained” from cities. Large empires are especially prone to this: eventually all of their wealth is destined to the military just to keep the empire together.

Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Qj1l!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff727cfae-ec34-42c4-b509-9a25f4126f2d_1600x834.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!T392!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff9795745-8a40-40c1-8173-5296c13eef3b_1600x1553.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zETj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3e99b106-d34e-4a49-93a8-553a8f57952a_1600x1130.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!YeXj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6fe681e6-b571-4f4c-aa90-313f77fc1dbb_750x359.png

Open Thread 277

May 22, 2023 · Original source

2: I published the first Book Review contest finalist, Cities And The Wealth Of Nations / The Question Of Separatism, last week, and I’m happy with both the review and the interesting comments it sparked off. See the threads on import substitution vs. specialization, fixed exchange rates, optimum currency areas, and Quebec.

Inline links: Cities And The Wealth Of Nations / The Question Of Separatism, import substitution, specialization, fixed exchange rates, optimum currency areas, Quebec

The Revelations2 mentions across 2 issues

The Revelations is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between September 02, 2022 and May 17, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Erik is a neuroscientist and author of the recent novel The Revelations"; "The Revelations". It most often appears alongside Golem XIV, Impossible Histories, 1587.

Article page: The Revelations
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: September 02, 2022
Last seen: May 17, 2024
Book title: The Revelations

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review Contest 2022 Winners September 02, 2022
Choose Book Review Finalists 2024 May 17, 2024

Golem XIV 2 shared issues
Impossible Histories 2 shared issues
1587 1 shared issues
1587, A Year Of No Significance 1 shared issues
@campeters4 1 shared issues

Source context

September 02, 2022 · Original source

1st: The Dawn Of Everything, reviewed by Erik Hoel. Erik is a neuroscientist and author of the recent novel The Revelations. He writes at his Substack The Intrinsic Perspective.

Inline links: The Dawn Of Everything, The Revelations, The Intrinsic Perspective

Highlights From The Comments On Elon Musk

May 17, 2024 · Original source

...d Testament The Oldest Documents of the Human Race The Pale King The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention The Picture of Dorien Gray The Remains of the Day The Revelations The Signal and the Noise The Sixth Day and Other Tales The Story of Ferdinand The Structure of Scientific Revolutions The Sunset Limited The Tango of Ethics The Treuhand...

The Silmarillion2 mentions across 2 issues

The Silmarillion is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between September 18, 2023 and February 03, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Feanor in The Silmarillion"; "I’ve read this Silmarillion chapter". It most often appears alongside California, China, Kanye West.

Article page: The Silmarillion
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: September 18, 2023
Last seen: February 03, 2025
Book title: The Silmarillion

Outbound links

Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On Elon Musk September 18, 2023
25 February 03, 2025

California 2 shared issues
China 2 shared issues
Kanye West 2 shared issues
Scott 2 shared issues
Thiel 2 shared issues

Source context

September 18, 2023 · Original source

I love Tolkien’s work, and, oddly, when I was reading this, my mind turned to Feanor in The Silmarillion.

February 03, 2025 · Original source

And UTAMO (hey, I’ve read this Silmarillion chapter!):

Inline links: UTAMO

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions2 mentions across 2 issues

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between April 09, 2021 and May 17, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Scott’s review of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions"; "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". It most often appears alongside Frankenstein, 1913 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, A Canticle For Leibowitz.

Article page: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: April 09, 2021
Last seen: May 17, 2024
Book title: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: On The Natural Faculties April 09, 2021
Choose Book Review Finalists 2024 May 17, 2024

Frankenstein 2 shared issues
1913 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1 shared issues
A Canticle For Leibowitz 1 shared issues
A Farewell to Alms 1 shared issues
A Husband 1 shared issues

Source context

April 09, 2021 · Original source

Now, you may remember from Scott’s review of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that part of Descartes’ claim to fame is inventing the idea of a purely materialist world, where matter interacts with other matter directly, with no recourse to hidden “forces” or “essences” — the classic billiard balls or clockwork universe. This is part of why Newton’s theory of gravity caused such an uproar. Saying that it is in the nature of all matter to attract other matter sounded uncomfortably essentialist! Only Newton’s constant defense and the inherent strength of the theory eventually managed to win it acceptance.

Inline links: Scott’s review of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

May 17, 2024 · Original source

...sm Drives Human Invention The Picture of Dorien Gray The Remains of the Day The Revelations The Signal and the Noise The Sixth Day and Other Tales The Story of Ferdinand The Structure of Scientific Revolutions The Sunset Limited The Tango of Ethics The Treuhand The Trial The Unconsoled The Untethered Soul The Vegetarian The Wages of Destruction The Wheel of Time The Zoologist'...

The Years Of Lyndon Johnson2 mentions across 2 issues

The Years Of Lyndon Johnson is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between June 18, 2021 and July 08, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "the finalists are: 9: The Years Of Lyndon Johnson"; "The Power Broker and The Years of Lyndon Johnson became such status symbols"; "Robert Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson". It most often appears alongside 1968 convention, 1976 Democratic, 1976 Democratic primary.

Article page: The Years Of Lyndon Johnson
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: June 18, 2021
Last seen: July 08, 2022
Book title: The Years Of Lyndon Johnson

Outbound links

Issue trail

Vote In The Book Review Contest! June 18, 2021
Your Book Review: The Outlier July 08, 2022

1968 convention 1 shared issues
1976 Democratic 1 shared issues
1976 Democratic primary 1 shared issues
1976 primary 1 shared issues
1979 oil crisis 1 shared issues

Source context

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

On Hreha On Behavioral Economics

July 08, 2022 · Original source

John Adams became an HBO miniseries. Hamilton became a Broadway show. The Power Broker and The Years of Lyndon Johnson became such status symbols that there was a whole pandemic meme about people ostentatiously displaying them in their Zoom backgrounds. But you never hear anyone bragging about their extensive knowledge of the Carter administration.

Inline links: pandemic meme

I also don’t think this book succeeds purely as a biographical portrait of its subject. After I finished Robert Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson, I felt like I really knew LBJ. But even after finishing all 628 pages of this book, Carter remains a mystery to me. I can tell you everything he did during his presidency, but I still don’t feel like I really understand him. What motivated Jimmy Carter? How did he develop his seemingly unshakeable confidence? Why did he even want to be president in the first place? (Ted Kennedy’s high-profile fumble of this question famously contributed to his primary loss, but Carter never really answers it either.)

Inline links: high-profile fumble

Thinking Fast and Slow2 mentions across 2 issues

Thinking Fast and Slow is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 30, 2021 and September 29, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Priming (featured in Nudge , Cialdini's books , and Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow )"; "Books on rationality and overcoming cognitive biases were big ten years ago ( Thinking Fast And Slow, Predictably Irrational, The Black Swan , etc)". It most often appears alongside Dan Ariely, Kahneman, Tversky.

Article page: Thinking Fast and Slow
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: August 30, 2021
Last seen: September 29, 2021
Book title: Thinking Fast and Slow

Outbound links

Issue trail

On Hreha On Behavioral Economics August 30, 2021
Book Review: The Scout Mindset September 29, 2021

Dan Ariely 2 shared issues
Kahneman 2 shared issues
Tversky 2 shared issues
Acceptable Losses 1 shared issues
Acceptable Losses: The Debatable Origins of Loss Aversion 1 shared issues

Source context

August 30, 2021 · Original source

Priming (featured in Nudge, Cialdini'sbooks, and Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow)

Inline links: Priming, Nudge, Cialdini's, books, Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow

September 29, 2021 · Original source

Galef admits she’s a little behind the curve on this one. Books on rationality and overcoming cognitive biases were big ten years ago (Thinking Fast And Slow, Predictably Irrational, The Black Swan, etc). Nowadays “smiling TED-talk-circuit celebrity wants to help you improve your thinking!” is more likely to elicit groans than breathless anticipation. And that isn’t the least accurate description of Julia (you can watch her TED talk here).

Inline links: here

Through The Eye Of A Needle2 mentions across 2 issues

Through The Eye Of A Needle 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: 8: Through The Eye Of A Needle"; "Through The Eye Of A Needle , reviewed by Tom Powell". It most often appears alongside Addiction By Design, Double Fold, Down and Out in Paris and London.

Article page: Through The Eye Of A Needle
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: June 18, 2021
Last seen: July 10, 2021
Book title: Through The Eye Of A Needle
Likely author: Tom Powell

Outbound links

Issue trail

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

Source context

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

Choose Nonbook Review Finalists 2025

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)

Time's Arrow2 mentions across 2 issues

Time's Arrow is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between June 03, 2025 and June 09, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Time's Arrow"; "one of these: Time's Arrow". It most often appears alongside ACX Commentariat, Arnold Schoenberg, Astralcodexten Com.

Article page: Time's Arrow
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: June 03, 2025
Last seen: June 09, 2025
Book title: Time's Arrow

Outbound links

Issue trail

Choose Nonbook Review Finalists 2025 June 03, 2025
Open Thread 385 June 09, 2025

ACX Commentariat 1 shared issues
Arnold Schoenberg 1 shared issues
Astralcodexten Com 1 shared issues
Baldur's Gate 3 1 shared issues
Banerjee 1 shared issues

Source context

June 03, 2025 · Original source

...i-Woke Intellectual The Soul Of Karl Friston The Spreadsheet The Synaptic Plasticity And Memory Hypothesis The Virality Project The Watergate Affair The World As A Whole Time's Arrow Toki Pona Two Years Of Parenthood Unordinary US Census vt/txt-convergence We Should Never Have Gone To Mammoth Caves Which Sports? Why Sports? Summer Camp For Sluts / Yo...

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)

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).

Tailor’s Workshop1 mentions across 1 issues

Tailor’s Workshop is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 20, 2024 and November 20, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "This is “Tailor’s Workshop” by Quiringh van Brekelenkam". It most often appears alongside /r/ImaginaryWarhammer, 19th Century, Abstract/Modern.

Reference entry: Tailor’s Workshop
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: November 20, 2024
Last seen: November 20, 2024
Book title: Tailor’s Workshop
Likely author: Quiringh

Outbound links

Issue trail

How Did You Do On The AI Art Turing Test? November 20, 2024

ImaginaryWarhammer 1 shared issues
19th Century 1 shared issues
Modern 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
Agony In The Garden 1 shared issues

Source context

November 20, 2024 · Original source

Human. This is “Tailor’s Workshop” by Quiringh van Brekelenkam, 1660.

Inline links: “Tailor’s Workshop”

Taking the Medicine: A Short History of Medicine’s Beautiful Idea1 mentions across 1 issues

Taking the Medicine: A Short History of Medicine’s Beautiful Idea 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 cites Druin Burch’s 2010 book, Taking the Medicine: A Short History of Medicine’s Beautiful Idea". It most often appears alongside 1913 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Alexandria, Aristotelian.

Reference entry: Taking the Medicine: A Short History of Medicine’s Beautiful Idea
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 09, 2021
Last seen: April 09, 2021
Book title: Taking the Medicine: A Short History of Medicine’s Beautiful Idea

Outbound links

Issue trail

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

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.

Taking the Medicine: A Short History of Medicine’s Beautiful Idea, and Our Difficulty Swallowing It1 mentions across 1 issues

Taking the Medicine: A Short History of Medicine’s Beautiful Idea, and 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: Taking the Medicine: A Short History of Medicine’s Beautiful Idea, and Our Difficulty Swallowing It
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 09, 2021
Last seen: April 09, 2021
Book title: Taking the Medicine: A Short History of Medicine’s Beautiful Idea, and Our Difficulty Swallowing It

Outbound links

Issue trail

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

Book Review: The Man From The Future

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.

Tale Of Two Cities1 mentions across 1 issues

Tale Of Two Cities is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 13, 2022 and July 13, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "asking him to recite Tale Of Two Cities". It most often appears alongside 1890s, Alan Turing, Albert Einstein.

Reference entry: Tale Of Two Cities
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 13, 2022
Last seen: July 13, 2022
Book title: Tale Of Two Cities

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: The Man From The Future July 13, 2022

1890s 1 shared issues
Alan Turing 1 shared issues
Albert Einstein 1 shared issues
America 1 shared issues
Ananyo Bhattacharya 1 shared issues

Source context

July 13, 2022 · Original source

By age 6, he could divide eight-digit numbers in his head. At the same age, he spoke conversational ancient Greek; later, he would add Latin, French, German, English, and Yiddish (sometimes he joked about also speaking Spanish, but he would just put "el" before English words and add -o to the end) . Rumor had it he memorized everything he ever read. A fellow mathematician once tried to test this by asking him to recite Tale Of Two Cities, and reported that “he immediately began to recite the first chapter and continued until asked to stop after about ten or fifteen minutes”.

Inline links: could, sometimes

Do these sound a little too much like urban legends? The Tale Of Two Cities story comes straight from the mathematician involved - von Neumann’s friend Herman Goldstine, writing about his experience in The Computer From Pascal to von Neumann. The computer anecdote is of less certain provenance, quoted without attribution in a 1957 obituary in Life. But this is part of the fun of reading von Neumann biographies: figuring out what one can or can’t believe about a figure of such mythic proportions.

Inline links: The Computer From Pascal to von Neumann, obituary

Tao Te Ching1 mentions across 1 issues

Tao Te Ching is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 19, 2022 and August 19, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "A maxim from the Tao Te Ching (one of the foundational texts of Chinese civilization)". It most often appears alongside 1587, 1587, 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline.

Reference entry: Tao Te Ching
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 19, 2022
Last seen: August 19, 2022
Book title: Tao Te Ching

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: 1587, A Year Of No Significance August 19, 2022

1587 1 shared issues
1587 1 shared issues
1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline 1 shared issues
A Universal History of Infamy 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues

Source context

Bad Definitions Of "Democracy" And "Accountability" Shade Into Totalitarianism

August 19, 2022 · Original source

This was entirely in accordance with ancient Chinese political philosophy. A maxim from the Tao Te Ching (one of the foundational texts of Chinese civilization) states: “Govern a great country as you would cook a small fish.” The implication being: minimally, lightly. For the most part, this philosophy served China well over the centuries, and it’s probably part of the reason we even have centuries of Chinese history to consult.

Taras Bulba1 mentions across 1 issues

Taras Bulba is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 21, 2022 and March 21, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Gogol’s novel Taras Bulba". It most often appears alongside ACX 2022 Prediction Contest Data, ACX Grants, Almaty.

Reference entry: Taras Bulba
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: March 21, 2022
Last seen: March 21, 2022
Book title: Taras Bulba

Outbound links

Issue trail

22 March 21, 2022

ACX 2022 Prediction Contest Data 1 shared issues
ACX Grants 1 shared issues
Almaty 1 shared issues
An Analysis Of Metaculus’ Resolved AI Predictions And Their Implications For AI Timelines 1 shared issues
Aver 1 shared issues

Source context

March 21, 2022 · Original source

Part of the story is that the vast majority, and at the time of resolution, quite possibly all of the “No” shares in our market were purchased by one whale. (This user’s nickname comes from the famous Ukrainian poet Gogol’s novel “Taras Bulba”. I would not usually share this information, but it is already public.) When you have a new platform with only a handful of traders, one whale can move the price a lot.

I don’t think anyone should have to apologize for not moving a prediction market enough, but at least that explains what’s going on. Also, RIP Taras Bulba :(

Ten Percent Less Democracy1 mentions across 1 issues

Ten Percent Less Democracy is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 28, 2023 and July 28, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Are the changes proposed in Garett Jones’ book Ten Percent Less Democracy “undemocratic”?". It most often appears alongside 2021, Adam Smith, Alabama.

Reference entry: Ten Percent Less Democracy
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 28, 2023
Last seen: July 28, 2023
Book title: Ten Percent Less Democracy

Outbound links

Issue trail

Bad Definitions Of "Democracy" And "Accountability" Shade Into Totalitarianism July 28, 2023

2021 1 shared issues
Adam Smith 1 shared issues
Alabama 1 shared issues
Bill Gates 1 shared issues
Federal Reserve 1 shared issues

Source context

July 28, 2023 · Original source

This is ignoring the difficult question of how “democratic” government should be, and what that means. For example, is the existence of an unelected judiciary that can sometimes overrule the elected legislature “undemocratic”? Is Secret Congress “undemocratic”? Is the Federal Reserve “undemocratic”? Are the changes proposed in Garett Jones’ book Ten Percent Less Democracy “undemocratic”? Completely separately from the totalitarian thing, I find myself nervous at the recent trend towards using “democratic” to mean “good” and “undemocratic” to mean “bad”, because it either makes us twist language in an Orwellian way to say that courts overruling elected officials is “more democratic” than them not doing that, or serves as a bludgeon that would-be dictators can use against an independent judiciary.

Inline links: Secret Congress, Ten Percent Less Democracy

TGEoD1 mentions across 1 issues

TGEoD is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 13, 2022 and August 13, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "TGEoD is only a slight departure from these themes"; "TGEoD does not map perfectly onto reality". It most often appears alongside ACX, AI, ancient Greeks.

Reference entry: TGEoD
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 13, 2022
Last seen: August 13, 2022
Book title: TGEoD

Outbound links

https://what3words.com/guitars.record.caps

Issue trail

Your Book Review: God Emperor Of Dune August 13, 2022

ACX 1 shared issues
AI 1 shared issues
ancient Greeks 1 shared issues
Arakeen 1 shared issues
Arakeen sandtrout 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: God Emperor Of Dune

August 13, 2022 · Original source

The lifecycle of a sandworm is long, and TGEoD’s supply of spice is entirely contained within Leto’s horde; he carefully rations that supply to keep his empire functional. Leto expects that the remaining spice will be quickly exhausted after his death and for a period perhaps measured in centuries humanity will be trapped, unable to travel, starving, and creating harsh survival-of-the-fittest environments on all inhabited planets.

TGEoD is only a slight departure from these themes, instead asking what would happen if the harshness and strength of the desert were concentrated in a single mind. Genetic development has always been a tale written by hardship, a story about how life rises to greatness only when facing and overcoming great problems.

Because TGEoD is mostly about describing the end-point of a millennia-long exploitation of desert power, it is better understood as a book of sci-fi political philosophy than a story. But, to the extent there is a story at all, it is as follows:

That Will Never Work1 mentions across 1 issues

That Will Never Work is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 29, 2022 and September 29, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "— That Will Never Work by Marc Randolph (Netflix)". It most often appears alongside 1 Kings 10-11, 2008 Democratic National Convention, Adam Scheffer.

Reference entry: That Will Never Work
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 29, 2022
Last seen: September 29, 2022
Book title: That Will Never Work
Likely author: Marc Randolph

Outbound links

Issue trail

Universe-Hopping Through Substack September 29, 2022

1 Kings 10-11 1 shared issues
2008 Democratic National Convention 1 shared issues
Adam Scheffer 1 shared issues
Adam Schefter 1 shared issues
Airbnb 1 shared issues

Source context

Universe-Hopping Through Substack

September 29, 2022 · Original source

— That Will Never Work by Marc Randolph (Netflix)

Inline links: That Will Never Work

The Absent Superpower1 mentions across 1 issues

The Absent Superpower is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 21, 2021 and May 21, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "his follow-up books, The Absent Superpower and Disunited Nations". It most often appears alongside 1992 treaty, ACX, Africa.

Reference entry: The Absent Superpower
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 21, 2021
Last seen: May 21, 2021
Book title: The Absent Superpower

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: The Accidental Superpower May 21, 2021

1992 treaty 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
Africa 1 shared issues
Alaska 1 shared issues
Allen Farrington 1 shared issues

Source context

May 21, 2021 · Original source

5 Zeihan’s follow-up book to The Accidental Superpower – 2017’s The Absent Superpower: The Shale Revolution and a World Without America – goes even more in-depth to the wonders of America’s energy situation. If you don’t know much about hydrocarbons (I certainly didn’t before reading Zeihan), these books will give you a detailed look at them.

Inline links: 5

The Absent Superpower: The Shale Revolution and a World Without America1 mentions across 1 issues

The Absent Superpower: The Shale Revolution and a World Without America is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 21, 2021 and May 21, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Zeihan’s follow-up book to The Accidental Superpower – 2017’s The Absent Superpower: The Shale Revolution and a World Without America". It most often appears alongside 1992 treaty, ACX, Africa.

Reference entry: The Absent Superpower: The Shale Revolution and a World Without America
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First seen: May 21, 2021
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Book title: The Absent Superpower: The Shale Revolution and a World Without America

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Your Book Review: The Accidental Superpower May 21, 2021

1992 treaty 1 shared issues
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May 21, 2021 · Original source

5 Zeihan’s follow-up book to The Accidental Superpower – 2017’s The Absent Superpower: The Shale Revolution and a World Without America – goes even more in-depth to the wonders of America’s energy situation. If you don’t know much about hydrocarbons (I certainly didn’t before reading Zeihan), these books will give you a detailed look at them.

Inline links: 5

The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder1 mentions across 1 issues

The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 21, 2021 and May 21, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "In The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder (2014), Peter Zeihan predicts the future of world politics". It most often appears alongside 1992 treaty, ACX, Africa.

Reference entry: The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder
Mention count: 1
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First seen: May 21, 2021
Last seen: May 21, 2021
Book title: The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder

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Your Book Review: The Accidental Superpower May 21, 2021

1992 treaty 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
Africa 1 shared issues
Alaska 1 shared issues
Allen Farrington 1 shared issues

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May 21, 2021 · Original source

In The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder (2014), Peter Zeihan predicts the future of world politics and economic development in a way that an ACX fan would appreciate. He puts a timeline on it. The book isn’t about “some hazy distant future after we’re all dead and gone, but the future we will all be living in for the next fifteen years of our lives.” Zeihan’s subtitle hints at his big and bold thesis, which predicts “the dissolution of the free trade order, the global demographic inversion, the collapse of Europe and China,” which “is all just a fleeting transition” to a world largely abandoned by America.

Inline links: The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder

People have fun making predictions like this (and mocking those who get things spectacularly wrong). With money and fame available to people whose predictions turn out right, and the ease with which we forget bad predictions, we should expect many such visionaries. However, regardless of whether you agree with Zeihan’s particular vision, The Accidental Superpower presents a set of analytical tools that should be useful for anyone interested in little questions like which countries will obtain power and wealth in the future, and which will collapse in war and poverty. (In case you didn’t catch it from the title, Zeihan says that America is going to be the biggest winner in the world to come.)

We’ve probably all heard that demography is destiny. Zeihan’s model doesn’t quite go that far, but he’s a big believer in the importance of it. “Marry demographics with geopolitics and you have a series of powerful tools for predicting everything from political instability to economic outcomes.” The Accidental Superpower is filled with country-specific charts that look like this:

The Adorable Complexity of Being Me1 mentions across 1 issues

The Adorable Complexity of Being Me is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 21, 2024 and February 21, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "most irritatingly narcissistic book titles they can think of. Such as: The Adorable Complexity of Being Me". It most often appears alongside 2017 SSC survey, A Woman First: First Woman: A Memoir, Aella.

Reference entry: The Adorable Complexity of Being Me
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Issue count: 1
First seen: February 21, 2024
Last seen: February 21, 2024
Book title: The Adorable Complexity of Being Me

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Highlights From The Comments On Polyamory February 21, 2024

2017 SSC survey 1 shared issues
A Woman First: First Woman: A Memoir 1 shared issues
Aella 1 shared issues
Amish 1 shared issues
Anomie 1 shared issues

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February 21, 2024 · Original source

The Adorable Complexity of Being Me

The Advancement of Learning1 mentions across 1 issues

The Advancement of Learning 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 "As early as 1605, in The Advancement of Learning , Francis Bacon is taking aim at Galen". It most often appears alongside 1913 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Alexandria, Aristotelian.

Reference entry: The Advancement of Learning
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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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April 09, 2021 · Original source

As early as 1605, in The Advancement of Learning, Francis Bacon is taking aim at Galen for the “specious causes” that keep us from further advancement in science. He attacks Plato and Aristotle first, of course, but it’s pretty interesting to see that Galen is the #3 man on his list after these two heavy-hitters.

Inline links: taking aim at Galen

The Ancient City1 mentions across 1 issues

The Ancient City is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 04, 2025 and September 04, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Psmiths review The Ancient City". It most often appears alongside 80,000 Hours, abundance liberalism, Afghanistan.

Reference entry: The Ancient City
Mention count: 1
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First seen: September 04, 2025
Last seen: September 04, 2025
Book title: The Ancient City

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Links For September 2025 September 04, 2025

80,000 Hours 1 shared issues
abundance liberalism 1 shared issues
Afghanistan 1 shared issues
Africa 1 shared issues
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Links For September 2025

September 04, 2025 · Original source

17: There’s a debate going on between philosophers and AI researchers over whether AI can be conscious. I find most of the discussion annoying - this is generally an area where we can’t know anything for sure, and both sides are mostly shouting their priors at each other. The only exception - the single piece of evidence I will accept as genuinely bearing on this problem - is that if you ask an AI whether it’s conscious, it will say no, but activating or suppressing deception-related features (sort of like a mechanistic-interpretability-based lie detection test) reveals that it thinks it’s lying when it says that! Link is to a Less Wrong comment from a researcher in the field; I look forward to seeing an eventual peer-reviewed paper. H/T JD Pressman. 18: 80,000 Hours has a high-production-value video about the AI 2027 scenario. 19: Dynomight vs. Casey Milkweed debate on mathematical forecasting, with special reference to AI 2027. And Dynomight comments on Casey’s post here. 20: The Psmiths review The Ancient City, about ways that ancient culture depended on family, clan, ritual, and “the household gods”. Sample quote: I'm more interested in what all this means for us today, because with the exception of maybe a few aristocratic families, this highly self-conscious effort to build familial culture and maintain familial distinctiveness is almost totally absent in the Western world. But it's not that hard! ... Perhaps this is why I have an instinctive negative reaction when I encounter married couples who don't share a name. I don't much care whether it's the wife who takes the husband's name or the husband who takes the wife's, or even both of them switching to something they just made up (yeah, I'm a lib). But it just seems obvious to me on a pre-rational level that a husband and a wife are a team of secret agents, a conspiracy of two against the world, the cofounders of a tiny nation, the leaders of an insurrection. Members of secret societies need codenames and special handshakes and passwords and stuff, keeping separate names feels like the opposite — a timorous refusal to go all-in. 21: Did you know: Epic Systems, the electronic medical record company, has a fantasy-themed corporate headquarters in Wisconsin, with buildings that look like castles, quaint medieval towns, and the Emerald City of Oz (h/t Devon Zuegel): Meanwhile, tech companies with ten times as much money pretend that they’re cool and playful when their HQ has some rounded edges and a set of colored cubes in front. Do better! 22: Effective altruists have been funding teams working on lab-grown meat for almost a decade now. Around 2020, they hired some experts to double-check that this was possible in principle, and the experts wrote scathing analyses saying it was cost-ineffective by so many orders of magnitude that it was basically a pipe dream. Reactions were mixed, but a lot of us beat ourselves up and vowed to be less gullible next time. But now a new report comes out arguing that the previous reports were wrong, that lab-grown meat production is going much better than the earlier reports thought possible, and it’s more or less cost-effective already for the simplest products! Again, mixed reactions, and although some of the numbers are indisputable the analysis itself this is by a VC firm with lab-based meat investments. Here are some related Metaculus questions. 23: Ozy, citing Stutzman et al: “Afghanistan after the American withdrawal has the lowest life satisfaction rate ever recorded. Two-thirds of respondents rate their life satisfaction below 2, which is generally considered to be the point at which a life is no longer worth living. Life satisfaction dropped significantly after the withdrawal of American troops. Women, people in rural areas, and the poor were particularly negatively affected.” 24: Lencapavir is dubbed a “miracle drug” for AIDS; a single dose protects against infection for six months. Unclear how this interacts with PEPFAR cuts; if PEPFAR still existed it would be a big boost to its efficacy; now maybe this might be part of a strategy to tread water? 25: Did you know: when people first started making artificial ice in the 1850s, there was a backlash from people who thought it was gross and dystopian and that people should insist on natural ice for their iceboxes. From Pessimists’ Archive, which goes on to draw an analogy to lab-grown meat, etc (h/t Isaac King on X). 26: From Peter Hague (on X) and commenter Phaethon: why did so many Anglosphere countries see immigration spikes in 2021? Each of these has their own local story. In Britain, it’s the paradoxical effects of Brexit. In the US, it’s Joe Biden being soft on immigration. And so on - but should we be looking for some deeper cause that explains the overall phenomenon? A commenter suggests “a way to soak up all the inflation from the COVID money printing”, but I can’t tell if that even makes sense. Still, should something something COVID be a leading hypothesis? 27: Jesse Singal vs. Mark Stern on the Skrmetti Supreme Court case that failed to overturn Tennessee’s ban on gender medicine. US law bans sex discrimination, so pro-transgender advocates argued that, since doctors often prescribe eg estrogen to biological women, it was sex discrimination to ban prescribing it to biological men. Tennessee’s anti-transgender argument was that they weren’t discriminating by sex, they were discriminating by diagnosis (estrogen for eg hot flashes, vs. estrogen for gender transition). There is some subtlety here (if a biological man grows breasts because of some hormone imbalance, doctors might give him testosterone to counteract it, and this seems sort of like giving biological women testosterone to make them look less like women), but these are still sort of different diagnoses (gynecomastia vs. gender dysphoria) and Tennessee said you can still think of it as diagnostic discrimination rather than sex discrimination. This makes sense, except that the standards around sex discrimination are very strict and sort of box the court in here. And in a fit of wokeness, the 2020 court (including some of the conservative justices hearing this case) applied these standards very strictly and ruled that discriminating against gays was a form of sex discrimination (since if women can date men, it’s sex discrimination if men can’t also date men), and this is obviously the same argument. Now that wokeness is less popular, the court wants to rule against transgender, but it can’t help tripping over its previous ruling and giving some kind of unprincipled confusing non-opinion. 28: Contra compelling anecdotes, only ~5% of people raised very religious end up atheist later in life (X). Most people are about as religious as their parents; most exceptions are only slightly less religious, and most families that secularize do it over several generations. Note: percentages are of total, not of each row! 29: Related: social science team proposes a three-stage model of secularization: decreased public ritual participation → decreased personal importance → decreased identification, presents apparently confirmatory data. If true, would be somewhat inconsistent with intellectual models (eg people learn about evolution and start doubting the Bible) and more consistent with institutional models (eg the government provides welfare so people no longer need to be part of a tight-knit church). 30: Navigating LLMs’ spiky intelligence profile is a constant source of delight; in any given area, it seems like almost a random draw whether they will be completely transformative or totally useless. Now Ethan Strauss reports that they are, for some reason, extraordinarily effective at teaching people golf. “I am predicting the Golf Revolution, or perhaps decline, if your perspective is that optimization tends to ruin hobbies. A sport for obsessives has been gifted the ideal tool for refinement.” 31: Claim (via nxthompson on X): “In a huge survey of young kids about phones and technology, they all say they want to be out playing in the real world. But parents don't let them out unsupervised. So they're stuck on their phones.” Interesting, but I’m nervous about social desirability bias - how many adults would say on a survey that they would rather be on their phones than playing with friends? But adults do have this choice and mostly go with the phones. 32: Steven Adler on AI psychosis. He tries to analyze ER admissions data for psychosis and finds no change. I don’t think anyone reasonable expected this to be a large enough effect to show up in ER admissions data, but there are lots of unreasonable people so I appreciate his effort. He thinks AI companies might have better data on this, and encourages them to release it. 33: Cuartetera was the greatest polo horse ever. Polo players responded in a very practical way: they cloned her, dozens of times (and it worked; the clones are also excellent). Now there is a lawsuit as different polo teams fight to get their hands on Cuartetera clones. What is the equilibrium? If the outsiders get their hands on the genetic material, do we see a world where every polo horse is a Cuartetera clone? How much is lost if nobody ever tries to breed a polo horse better than Cuartetera (since the economics might not check out if the odds of success for any given foal is too low)? H/T Gwern and Siberian Fox (on X). 34: Claim: as of 2013, India’s Agarwal caste, who make up less than 1% of the population, got 40% of the e-commerce funding. 35: Owlposting: What Happened To Pathology AI Companies? Pathology is a medical specialty. A typical task involves looking at a microscope slide full of cells and trying to determine if any of them are cancerous. This seems like a good match for AI - and for years, studies have been showing that in fact AI can equal human experts. So why isn’t it being used more? The author’s three answers: first, slide scanning is expensive and clunky, and you can’t apply AI to a slide until you digitize it. Second, it’s hard to figure out a business plan where this saves someone money and doesn’t step on the toes of big companies that can outcompete anyone they don’t like. Third, pathologists use the context of a patient’s entire clinical history when they interpret a slide, and AIs that can’t do that (either because of technical limitations or legal/privacy limitations) are at a disadvantage even if their skills specifically relating to slide-reading are better. 36: Noahpinion: Will Data Centers Crash The Economy? Suppose that AI is a bubble, either permanently (because the technology isn’t really transformative) or temporarily (because it can’t transform things quickly enough to keep up with all the dumb money pouring into it). Will the sudden write-off of data centers lead to a broader economic collapse? In 2001, the dot-com bubble harmed the tech sector, but didn’t take the rest of the economy down with it; in 2008, the subprime mortgage bubble did take the rest of the economy down with it, because it damaged banks that the whole economy relied on. The optimistic case for AI is that data center spending is mostly coming from big companies like Google and Meta that can absorb a lot of loss. The pessimistic case is that some of the money is coming from private credit, a new-ish form of finance which hasn’t really been stress-tested and whose failure modes are still poorly understood. Noah’s final verdict: the stage isn’t obviously set for a crisis yet, but there’s the potential to get there and we should consider acting (how?) early. 37: The latest Twitter talking point is that universal hepatitis B vaccination at birth is “woke”: Hep B is (aside from mother-to-child transmission) often sexually transmitted, slutty women’s children are more likely to have Hep B, so perhaps giving the vaccine to everyone (instead of testing and only giving to the children of women who test positive) is an attempt to spare slutty women the embarrassment of getting a positive test. Ruxandra Teslo provides the counterargument - Hep B tests take a while, the medical system is fragmented, and any attempt to test people and then give the vaccine inevitably leads to many positive tests falling through the cracks. Vaccinating at birth is easy and hard to screw up, the vaccine has no known side effects, and empirically child Hepatitis B rates go down (by as much as 2/3!) when countries switch from test-and-vaccinate to universal vaccination. This benefits everyone - even people who never have unprotected sex and always follow up on their medical tests - because toddlers in daycare exchange saliva copiously, and if your toddler exchanges saliva with a Hep B positive toddler they could get the disease. A funny Twitter interaction was seeing Republicans in Congress hop on the anti-slut anti-vaccination bandwagon - except for Senator Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana), who happens to be a liver doctor, and who is still fighting the good fight. I am always nervous when a good person who I like starts engaging on Twitter, since it elevates the discourse there but also gradually turns their brain into mush - but Ruxandra has made the leap and is doing a great job not just on bio related topics but also (for example) countering Curtis Yarvin on the history of her native Romania. 38: The response to GPT-5 was confusing; most specific people who reviewed it said they were impressed (Ethan Mollick, Tyler Cowen, Nabeel Qureshi, Taelin), it performed as expected on formal benchmarks, but the overall vibes declared it a big failure. Peter Wildeford speculated that maybe there was some kind of sinister pay-to-play early access bias involved. Zvi went the other way, calling it a “reverse DeepSeek moment” (insofar as DeepSeek was a pretty average model that got glowing praise.) In the end, I agree with Peter that this was mostly a branding issue. o3 was a genuinely revolutionary model; if OpenAI had called it “GPT-5”, it would have met expectations. Instead, they called it “o3”, and called a minor incremental update a few months later “GPT-5”. Then people got mad that the exciting-sounding “GPT-5” was merely an incremental update. A secondary issue was that the router wasn’t very good, and so many queries got routed to a small version without thinking mode that was if anything a downgrade from o3. I think this tweet by Shakeel perfectly encapsulates the essence of GPT discourse in two sentences: …but maybe it’s worth asking why GPT-5 isn’t bigger than o3. Was 4.5 a failed attempt at scaling? Did it fail in a way that sort of back-handedly justifies the “lost steam” take? Does the answer depend on distinctions between pre-training scaling, post-training scaling, etc? How? 39: This month in etymology: did you know that “oy vey” is a “fully Germanic phrase” which is cognate with English “oh woe!” (h/t Wylfcen on X) 40: mRNA shows promise to be a game-changing treatment for cancer, but RFK is trying to halt research. But so far he can only starve it of money, not ban it, and the funding gap is only $500 million. Will there be enough philanthropic billionaires and private foundations to step up? Zvi points out that although there is usually a game of chicken where foundations are hesitant to touch something the government cancelled lest the government decide it can cancel everything and hope philanthropists pick up the bill, in this case there are no game theory considerations - RFK is halting it because he genuinely wants it halted, and they are thwarting him rather than playing into his hands. The only problem is that $500M is a lot of money for the private sector; a few foundations could technically afford it, but not many could afford it comfortably and still have money left over for the next few crises of this magnitude. I hope someone is trying to organize a coalition. 41: AI fantasy flash fiction Turing test. Eight stories about demons, four by famous fantasy authors, four by ChatGPT. After 3000 votes, AI wins: humans can't tell the difference and slightly prefer the AI stories. My own score was only 75%. But I will say that I thought Mark Lawrence's was obviously the best, I was ~100% sure it was human, and it convinced me that regardless of the official results it's still possible to write flash fiction that an AI obviously can't do. 42: “SignPro” offers customized “In This House We Believe” signs, try not to use this for evil. 43: China think tank assessment of how in control Xi is: still very in control, maybe not infinitely in control. 44: Related - did you know (h/t xlr8harder) that if you ask AI to write a science fiction story, it will very often name the protagonist “Elara Voss” (or some very close variant like Elena Voss), and this remains true across various models and versions? Related: Chelsea Voss of OpenAI is having a baby and has the opportunity to do the funniest thing. 45: “Hector (cloud) is a cumulonimbus thundercloud cluster that forms regularly nearly every afternoon on the Tiwi Islands in the Northern Territory of Australia…[he is sometimes called] Hector the Convector”. 46: British allergy sufferers who want to know the ingredients of things demand that British cosmetics stop listing their ingredients in Latin. “For example, sweet almond oil is Prunus Amygdalus Dulcis, peanut oil is Arachis Hypogaea, and wheat germ extract is Triticum Vulgare.” 47: Text-based RPG about being an NYT journalist at the Manifest prediction market conference. I make a brief appearance. 48: Study uses supposedly-random variation in doctor assignments to test whether the marginal mental health commitment is good or bad for patients, finds that it is quite bad. Freddie de Boer is violently skeptical (maybe literally so?) and makes some good points about how a single quasi-experimental study is never absolute proof. But I don’t think he quite justifies his opinion that the paper was irresponsible and should never have been published; it’s just a normal quasi-experimental study that we should nod and say “huh” at but not overweight as the culmination of all possible research that overcomes all possible priors. My prior is that the marginal commitment is pretty useless (many commitments are just “well, since this person arrived at our ED for some reason, it would look bad from a medico-legal perspective to just let them go, so let’s keep them a few days to evaluate” - and yeah, you should be upset about this) but I’m still surprised by how many outright negative (as opposed to zero) effects the researchers found. The strongest argument for negative effects is that it will make some people miss work and maybe lose their job. But this study found that commitment ~doubles the risk of near-term suicide (admittedly only from 1% to 2%), which would have been outside my confidence intervals for how bad it could be. I suspect confounding, but only on general principle, and I wouldn’t be too surprised either way. 49: This tweet is probably bait, but I found it a thought-provoking question: I think there’s a boring answer, where the law is more complex than just a single number and whatever kind of weird trafficking Epstein was doing is worse than whatever normal relationships these European laws are permitting. But assuming that there’s a substantive difference even after taking that into account, I think my answer is something like - we’ve got to divide kids from adults at some age, there’s a range of reasonable possible ages, we shouldn’t be too mad at other societies that choose different dividing lines within that range - but having decided upon the age, we’ve got to stick with it and take it seriously (in the sense of penalizing/shaming people who break it). This is more culturally relativist than I expected to find myself being, so good job to Richard for highlighting the apparent paradox. 50: Dilan Esper describes his experience as one of Hulk Hogan’s attorneys in the Gawker lawsuit (X). Parts I found interesting: none of the lawyers knew Thiel was funding the lawsuit; Gawker probably could have won if they had been slightly competent but kept "shooting themselves in the foot"; and Gawker probably could have won if they had just pixelated the private parts in the video. 51: Amazing concept and poems (link on X): I tried to see if AI could do this, and it did something that technically met the requirements but had zero artistic merit - using a lot of words like “nowhere” and “outside” in one, then separating them out to “no where” and “out side” in the other. I didn’t invest much energy in creating a clever prompt telling it not to do that, so feel free to report if you get better success. 52: New study claims consultants are actually good, at least for profits: "We find positive effects on labor productivity of 3.6% over five years, driven by modest employment reductions alongside stable or growing revenue" 53: A Polish team tries to test Peter Turchin’s equations for predicting political unrest on recent Polish history, has to make some changes but claims mostly positive results. 54: New big multi-author Substack, The Argument, trying to be a sort of center-left version of the model pioneered by The Free Press and other high-production-value ideological Substack properties. Excited to see Kelsey Piper is involved, and she starts off strong with a post on the latest round of First World basic income studies, which find few positive effects. This is surprising, because recipients didn’t waste the money on alcohol or gambling or anything - they paid down debt and got useful goods. Still, it didn’t even affect things that should have been obvious, like stress level. It’s not even clear that amounts of money large enough to help with rent made homeless people more likely to get houses! Matt Bruenig criticizes the article, accusing Kelsey’s studies of being downstream of Perry Preschool style dreams that exactly the right welfare program will have massively compounding effects that cut poverty out at the root and turn everyone into elite human capital; he thinks giving people money won’t do this, but it will increase equality and give the poor better lives. I assume he’s not a strong hereditarian, but his argument makes even more sense from that perspective, and I’ve certainly criticized dumb outcome measures like infant brain waves which we have only tenuous reasons to think are related to anything we care about. But Kelsey reasonably responds that the outcome measures she’s talking about include stress level and life satisfaction. To defuse this critique, Bruenig either has to argue that our construct “life satisfaction” doesn’t really measure whether someone’s life is satisfactory, or else claim that giving poor people satisfactory lives isn’t really what we’re going for - which I think would require more explanation on his part. There’s some further (impressively acrimonious) debate on X, but I don’t see anything that addresses my core concern. GiveDirectly, a charity involved in basic income experiments, has a presponse here; they say that some studies are positive, and that the ones that aren’t might have tried too little cash to matter, or been confounded by COVID making everything worse. They also point out that basic income is harder to study than traditional programs like giving people housing, because if you’re giving housing you can measure housing-related outcomes directly and have a pretty good chance of getting enough statistical power to find them, but since everyone spends cash on different things, the positive effects might be scattered across many different outcomes (and therefore too small to reach significance on each). Everyone involved in this debate wants to emphasize that the poor results are for First World studies only, and that studies continue to show large benefits to giving cash in the developing world. 55: Related: I was less impressed by The Argument’s first foray into housing policy, which follows an all-too-familiar pattern: Some people say they don’t like noise and disorder and try to make rules against it in their apartments.

The Apotheosis Of Homer1 mentions across 1 issues

The Apotheosis Of Homer is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 20, 2024 and November 20, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "This is “ The Apotheosis Of Homer ”, by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres". It most often appears alongside /r/ImaginaryWarhammer, 19th Century, Abstract/Modern.

Reference entry: The Apotheosis Of Homer
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: November 20, 2024
Last seen: November 20, 2024
Book title: The Apotheosis Of Homer
Likely author: Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

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How Did You Do On The AI Art Turing Test? November 20, 2024

ImaginaryWarhammer 1 shared issues
19th Century 1 shared issues
Modern 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
Agony In The Garden 1 shared issues

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Book Review: The Arctic Hysterias

November 20, 2024 · Original source

Human. This is “The Apotheosis Of Homer”, by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1827).

Inline links: The Apotheosis Of Homer

I originally planned five human and five AI pictures in each of four styles: Renaissance, 19th Century, Abstract/Modern, and Digital, for a total of forty. After receiving many exceptionally good submissions from local AI artists, I fudged a little and made it fifty. The final set included paintings by Domenichino, Gauguin, Basquiat, and others, plus a host of digital artists and AI hobbyists.

I warned test-takers that I included human and AI art in a variety of styles, and that they shouldn’t judge art as human just because it looked like an oil painting, or judge it as AI just because it looked like a digital image.

The Arctic Hysterias1 mentions across 1 issues

The Arctic Hysterias 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 "chronicled in The Arctic Hysterias, psychiatrist Edward Foulks’ description". It most often appears alongside Alaska, Alaskan government, Andamanese.

Reference entry: The Arctic Hysterias
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 06, 2023
Last seen: April 06, 2023
Book title: The Arctic Hysterias

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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

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April 06, 2023 · Original source

Strange things are done in the midnight sun, say the poets who wrote of old. The Arctic trails have their secret tales that would make your blood run cold. The Northern Lights have seen queer sights, but the queerest they ever did see are chronicled in The Arctic Hysterias, psychiatrist Edward Foulks’ description of the culture-bound disorders of the Eskimos1.

Inline links: The Arctic Hysterias, 1

The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy1 mentions across 1 issues

The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 08, 2025 and August 08, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Hannah Glasse’s procedure published in 1747 in The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy". It most often appears alongside Ainu, Altiplano, American cheese.

Reference entry: The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 08, 2025
Last seen: August 08, 2025
Book title: The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy

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Your Review: My Father’s Instant Mashed Potatoes August 08, 2025

Ainu 1 shared issues
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Your Review: My Father’s Instant Mashed Potatoes

August 08, 2025 · Original source

These roots resemble the ancestral stock of modern potatoes (source) Andean peoples found all sorts of ways to prepare their potatoes. The most immediate method was to boil them into stews, soups, or mashes with local flavoring agents - herbs, salt, chilis. Earthenware ovens called huatias were used to bake them. With even more time, they could be fermented into tocosh, an edible paste with antibacterial properties. To get the spuds to really last, though, they were subjected to a natural freeze-drying method that produced shrivelled potato pellets called chuño. Repeatedly frozen by bitter mountain nights, baked in the sun, and stomped on to remove water, chuño remains shelf stable for up to a decade and can be rehydrated into a spongy, earthy, slightly less nutritious potato-like object. The ability to produce chuño on the Altiplano is thought to have contributed to the Incan empire’s military dominance of the region, since despite its generally unappealing gustatory properties it’s perfect for keeping troops fed on long marches. Chuño also allowed Incan civilization to stockpile surpluses against lean years and trade potatoes as commodities over great distances. It wasn’t the best way to eat a potato you harvested today, but it was the only way to turn a potato you have today into a potato you’ll have two years from now. That had immense value. After the Spanish conquest and the Columbian exchange, the potato made gradual inroads into the Old World, where the previous best root vegetables were often comparatively less nutritious parsnips and turnips. There was an initial adjustment period: new cultivars capable of growing in shorter hours of daylight had to be developed, objections to the absence of tubers in the Bible needed to be quelled, and the French eventually had to concede that potatoes do not, as they at first believed, cause leprosy. With these hurdles cleared, in the 19th century the potato spread out and became one of the easiest and most efficient ways to turn arable land into palatable calories the world over. National cuisines incorporated the new staple crop thoroughly, and it’s now hard to imagine Italian food without gnocchi, French sans vichyssoise, tapas without patatas bravas, a Eurasia bereft of aloo and rösti and colcannon and latkes. Europe’s new potato lovers also took to the simple recipe of boiling ‘em and mashing ‘em. While South America had lacked the livestock for dairy, in Europe the potato mash soon achieved its ultimate form with the addition of milk and butter, which impart a smoother texture and richer taste. Hannah Glasse’s procedure published in 1747 in The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy is, minus the long s’s, still just about how I make them today: Maſhed Potatoes. BOIL your potatoes, peel them and put them into a ſauce-pan, maſh them well ; To two pounds of potatoes, put a pint of milk, a little ſalt, ſtir them well together, take care they don’t ſtick to the bottom, then take a quarter of a pound of butter, ſtir in and ſerve it up. Nowhere was the potato embraced more thoroughly than in Ireland. In the early 19th century, extractive British demands on Irish agriculture to feed the armies fighting Napoleon reduced the available land for Irish farmers to feed themselves. Achieving maximum caloric density on the remaining land was paramount, and almost nothing is denser than the potato. Potatoes quickly became an integral part of Irish life, so essential to the food systems of the island that when a blight hit them in the mid-1840s it led to one of the most devastating famines in history. The failure of the potato crops created starvation and emigration so profound in scale that the population of the island still has not recovered to its 1845 level almost two centuries later. Among those millions of potato-starved emigres were my dad’s ancestors, who came to America in the decades following the famine. My great-grandfather, who bore the extremely Irish name Gerald FitzGerald, instilled in his children (including my grandmother) a reconstructed sense of Irish-American ethnic pride that included an affinity for corned beef and cabbage, Guinness beer, and the affordable practicality of mashed potatoes. As the generations marched on, those mashed potatoes turned out to be one of the only things my grandmother would make that my exceedingly picky father would eat. Their creamy texture and subtle starchy taste didn’t trigger the “ew gross” reaction he had to so many other foods. Mashed potatoes, just like the ones Glasse had written about more than two centuries earlier, became his favorite side - and eventually, when I finally got to try them, one of mine too. Whatever My Dad Had Been Eating at Home Was NOT Mashed Potatoes The chuño-chomping Incans were not the last military to rely on dehydrated potatoes for sustenance. In World War II, the US Army experimented with various forms of potato dehydration to help stretch supply lines. The easiest way to get a uniform potato commodity into the hands of G.I.s was to pulverize the potatoes into granules, dehydrate them, and then plan on bringing them back to life with boiling water in an imitation of “mashed potatoes”. These shreds resemble the ancestral stock of modern Instant Mashed Potatoes (source) The result was an affront. The potatoes were swimming in their own gluten, released during the granule-making process, which when mixed with imprecise water ratios made for a slop that was somehow both gluey and soupy. Immediately after the war, French’s (now best known for mustard) tried to introduce “instant mashed potatoes” as a consumer product category. America’s veterans were not having it. They didn’t want to be reminded of the awful slurry they’d had on the front. The commercial fortunes of instant mashed potatoes began to turn around a decade later, however, when food scientists in the US and Canada converged on methods for producing dehydrated potato flakes rather than granules. The flakes had substantial advantages. They didn’t get as glutinous when reconstituted. Their geometry made them easier to dry quickly, on the order of minutes or even seconds. Using a multi-step process called the “Philadelphia Cook”, they could lock in a more natural flavor. When prepared on the stove with butter and milk, they were supposed to turn out almost as good as the real thing without any onerous prep work on the part of the consumer. This raises the question, though, of why food scientists kept working on improving instant mashed potatoes a decade after they were no longer required for the war effort. If you’re no longer constrained by having to stick it to the Axis, why not return to Glasse-style maſhed potatoes in all circumstances? This is a pattern that recurs frequently in reading about American foodways of the 20th century: choices and innovations made under extreme duress in the World War II economy didn’t fade away when the duress subsided. Instead they echoed back into American life a few years later, despite the lean conditions that birthed them being replaced by extreme abundance. Why did America start eating like it was on a total war footing again when my parents’ generation was young? There are a lot of overlapping explanations. Here are a few: Industrial inertia: Companies that had spun up to supply a vast army didn’t want to shut down overnight, so they necessarily pivoted to the consumer market. Some of these efforts succeeded at entrenching new consumer categories (fish sticks, canned peaches) while others (hamburgers-in-a-can) did not.

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The Authenticity of Various Hadiths: Much More Than You Wanted to Know1 mentions across 1 issues

The Authenticity of Various Hadiths: Much More Than You Wanted to Know is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 13, 2024 and September 13, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Someone writing The Authenticity of Various Hadiths: Much More Than You Wanted to Know probably won’t bring peace to the Middle East". It most often appears alongside 1999 apartment bombings, 9/11, Abbasid.

Reference entry: The Authenticity of Various Hadiths: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 13, 2024
Last seen: September 13, 2024
Book title: The Authenticity of Various Hadiths: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

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Your Book Review: Nine Lives September 13, 2024

1999 apartment bombings 1 shared issues
11 1 shared issues
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Abu Hamza al-Ghamdi 1 shared issues

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Your Book Review: Nine Lives

September 13, 2024 · Original source

Someone writing The Authenticity of Various Hadiths: Much More Than You Wanted to Know probably won’t bring peace to the Middle East in itself, but still, Dean’s advice is good encouragement that actually engaging in debate with people on their own terms can be worthwhile, even with people who are as deeply lost as the jihadists.

Meanwhile, it doesn’t seem like the situation around Islamic terrorism has gotten much better since the book was written. Someone should really hurry up and write that The Authenticity of Various Hadiths: Much More Than You Wanted to Know explainer that will finally deradicalize everyone.

The Avengers1 mentions across 1 issues

The Avengers is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 16, 2024 and August 16, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "In September 1963 Atlas published two new titles: The Avengers and the X-men". It most often appears alongside 20th Century Fox, Abomination, Abomination.

Reference entry: The Avengers
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 16, 2024
Last seen: August 16, 2024
Book title: The Avengers

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Your Book Review: Silver Age Marvel Comics August 16, 2024

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Abomination 1 shared issues
Abraham Lincoln 1 shared issues
Action Comics 1 shared issues

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Your Book Review: Silver Age Marvel Comics

August 16, 2024 · Original source

Given Marvel Comics, why Silver Age (1961-1965)? I.a. Why Superhero Comic Books? The winner of last year’s Astral Codex Ten book review contest was Brandon Hendrickson. Brandon wrote about Kieran Egan’s The Educated Mind. One of the foundations of Egan’s educational philosophy is that people learn through stories. He believes early education should focus on teaching lessons through myths and legends. This matches my experience. My kids’ favorite podcast is Greeking Out – a very well produced, very entertaining, National Geographic podcast about Greek Legends. Aside #1: When my oldest daughter was three years old she would ask everyone she met “Do you know any myths? Can you tell me a myth?” She especially liked asking people from different places to get myths from their local cultures. Once, she asked the question to a friend of mine who grew up in South Africa, “Can you tell me any South African myths?” He struggled for a minute and then said, “Okay! I have one! Bread never falls butter side down!”. That was not the type of myth she was looking for; nor the type of myth we will be discussing in this review. Every culture has foundational myths. These stories are entertaining and engaging, but they also teach valuable lessons about both what is important in that culture, and how people in that culture are expected to behave (or at least the Platonic Ideal of how they should behave). In the modern, Western world, we have assimilated many of these foundational stories, particularly the Greek myths. My kids definitely know the Greek myths, but they also know elements of Norse mythology, Egyptian myths, stories about Anasi from West Africa and more. More fundamentally my wife and I, while not religious ourselves, have made a point of exposing the kids to the stories from the Bible. It is not politically correct to call Biblical stories “myths”, but they serve the same purpose – shared cultural understanding of the way the world works. My wife grew up without any religion, and when she was in high school, she struggled with the metaphors and religious allegories that were omnipresent in most of the Western canon. In our culture, familiarity with the Bible is important for an educated person – whether they are religious or not – because it is the foundation of so much of the rest of our culture. I believe the other set of mythological stories that are foundational to our culture are – and by this point I am sure you see where I am going here – comic book superheroes. If true, then having more than a surface-level understanding of the most important superhero stories is important in a similar way to that knowing the Bible stories is important. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is an important idea to understand. So is, “With great power comes great responsibility”. I.b. Why Marvel? While there are many independent superheroes that are not owned by major conglomerates, the superheroes who have built our modern foundational myths are currently owned by two corporations. Warner Bros. Discover owns the DC library of superheroes including Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. In 2009 Disney purchased Marvel Comics and took ownership of their characters, including Spiderman, X-men and the Avengers. Aside #2: Marvel has sold temporary film rights to many of their characters over the years. The most relevant sales started in 1994 when Marvel sold the film rights of X-men and mutants to 20th century Fox, then in 1996, when Marvel went bankrupt, Fox picked up the rights to the Fantastic Four (and New Line picked up Blade). In 1999 Marvel sold the film rights (and live action TV, and animated TV longer than 44 minutes) of Spider-man and related characters to Columbia Pictures (part of Sony) for $7MM. Marvel actually attempted to sell ALL of their remaining Marvel IP film rights to Sony for $25MM, but the top management at Sony was not interested. Sony’s management allegedly told their chief negotiator “Nobody gives a shi*t about any of the other Marvel characters. Go back and do a deal for only Spider-Man). Disney acquired Marvel in 2009, and then Fox in 2019, bringing the two separated packages of characters all back together under one roof (Blade reverted back to Marvel in 2012). Sony still owns the rights to Spider-man but has made a deal with Disney to include some of his films within the Marvel-Disney universe. Marvel sold the film rights of The Hulk to Universal in 1990 and the current status of that agreement is complicated (the consensus is that Marvel now controls the film rights to the character, but Universal owns distribution rights to any stand-alone Hulk film, which could be why Disney let's Hulk co-star in Thor movies, but not vice versa). In the early aughts Marvel wanted to build their own film franchise, but were limited to only using their remaining “B-list” characters – Spider-man, X-men, and the Fantastic Four were all off limits. Fortunately, Kevin Feige, president of production for Marvel at the time, saw a way forward. He convinced Ike Perlmutter, Marvel CEO, to allow for the production of a series of films with the remaining characters begining with Iron Man (2008). Jon Favreau directed and cast Robert Downey Jr as Tony Stark. The film blew away expectations. Kevin’s plan of a series of movies where the characters would interconnect was suddenly feasible. Iron Man was followed by The Incredible Hulk, Thor, and Captain America: The First Avenger. None managed the box office magic of Iron Man, but all were successful enough that the plan stayed on track. In 2012 the characters were all brought together in the first Avengers film, which opened to over $200MM domestically and went on to gross more than $1.5B (which made it the 3rd highest grossing film of all time). Marvel became the first studio to take the interconnected world of their comic books and make the model work on the big screen (for a much larger audience). Once the model was proven to work, other studios tried to duplicate it. Aside #3: Warner Bros’ stumbles with the DC shared universe of Batman, Superman and the Justice League are well known, but that was actually their SECOND attempt at a shared universe. Their first attempt tried to copy the Marvel method more closely. They chose their own B-list hero and set up his first film to allow for a wider mythology. Alas Green Lantern (2011) failed at the box office and we never got stand-alone films about Sinestro (Yellow Lantern), Carol Ferris (Star Sapphire, the Violet Lantern), John Stewart (African American Green Lantern), Kyle Rayner (1990s Green Lantern), Alan Scott (original Green Lantern), or the Blue, Red, and Orange Lantern Corps. At least so far, no studio has successfully created anything with close to the traction obtained by the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Warner’s DC Extended universe (DCEU) had trifling success, but is being shelved and rebooted for a fresh attempt next year. Universal’s attempt at a “Dark Universe” kicked off with Tom Cruise in The Mummy (2017), but was dead on arrival. Paramount’s attempt to link the Transformers Universe to GI Joe at the end of Transformers: Rise of the Beasts has been appropriately mocked. Sony’s Spider-man films linked to the MCU have been very successful, but their attempt at a stand-alone non-MCU Spider-man universe using Spider-man’s villains as anti-heroes has floundered (mostly succeeding only as a source of memes). Next Mattel will be attempting to build a universe off the success of last year’s Barbie and may include Polly Pocket, American Girl, Hot Wheels, and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (no word yet on Thomas the Tank Engine, View Master and the Magic-8 Ball, but all are apparently in development). To date, only Marvel has successfully built a “Cinematic Universe”. One potential reason for the MCU’s success is that Kevin Feige built his cinematic universe on the back of the existing interconnected universe of the comics. But those comics were not the first interconnected universe of stories. For that we would need to go back to our foundational myths. The Bible stories mostly interconnect. Adam and Eve flows into Cain and Abel. David and Goliath leads to the Wisdom of Solomon. Greek Myths DEFINITELY interconnect. Supporting characters in one Greek myth have starring roles in their own stories. The Greek pantheon of tales even have their own version of the Avengers. In the Quest for the Golden Fleece, Jason brings together the Argonauts, who included in their number Theseus (who defeated the Minotaur), Orpheus (who braved the underworld) and Hercules himself – all A-list stars in their own “franchises”. Stand alone stories that exist within an interconnected universe are rare in modern media but were common in the ancient myths that have stood the test of time. Only Marvel has successfully created a shared universe that follows the pattern of ancient myths. Only Marvel films have stand-alone stories and protagonists who exist together in an interconnected world. Something about that method of storytelling is deeply pleasing for humans across many cultures. Marvel films are the first and most successful modern version of the mythological universe, and that it is worth spending more time exploring Marvel’s underlying mythology and where it came from. I.c. Why 1961? The origins of Christianity and Judaism (and Buddhism and Hinduism) are very murky. Even Islam is far enough in the past that we only have a very rough understanding of how it came to exist. When scholars want to understand in detail how a new religion is born they are far better to look at Mormonism or, if you accept it as a religion, Dianetics. Similarly, we have versions of Greek myths that have been passed down to us, but we can never know how those myths changed from their first telling to their “final” versions. Were the stories once unrelated, and only later became crafted into a single “universe”? Or were the stories built off each other one by one (“Dad that Golden Fleece story was amazing! Do you know any other stories about the Hercules guy?”)? Or was it something in between? Perhaps the stories all existed independently, but were later crafted together (“Remember that 12-labors story I told you? Actually that was the same guy who was on the Argo!”) Unlike Greek legends, we can know the origin of the Marvel Universe. We can see how it was constructed step-by-step. The people who did it (most importantly Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko) are dead now, but they have not been dead for long. We can read the original work, see how it changed over the last 60 years, and we can ask the creators “what were you thinking at the time” (or at least read their answers from old interviews). We can’t always trust what Stan Lee says, but at least we can hear his point of view. No one has a transcript of an interview with Homer, or knows exactly what he was thinking when he called it the “wine-dark sea”. Tl;dr: Why read about Marvel Comic superheroes 1961-1965? Because interconnected mythological stories are very important to cultures, Marvel is the leading contender of the most recent modern mythology, and it originated in the first half-decade of the 1960s. II. How did Marvel Superhero Comics happen? Timely Comics published their first comic book in 1939 and called it “Marvel Comics”. Their most popular World War II comics included Captain America, the Human Torch (an android unrelated to the modern Human Torch except in powers, appearance and name), and Namor, the Submariner. In the early 1950s superheroes became less popular, so Timely changed its name to Atlas Comics and focused on humor, western, horror, war and science fiction stories. But in 1956 DC Comics began re-introducing their Golden Age superheroes and, in the second half of the 1950s, the genre took off again – particularly Superman, whose title, Action Comics, became the number one selling comic in America. Stan Lee, editor and chief at Atlas at the time, wanted to get in on the superhero action. Unfortunately in 1957 Atlas lost its distributor and the company had to rely on “Independent News” to get its comics on newsstands. The complication was that Independent News was owned by “National Periodical Publications”, who also owned DC-comics and did not want Atlas to introduce superheroes to compete with Superman, Green Lantern and the Flash. Independent News agreed to distribute Atlas comics but limited the publisher to eight titles per month, and only in non-super hero genres (like horror, romance and science fiction). Blocked from creating and launching new superhero titles, Stan Lee got creative, and in August 1961 Atlas Comics published Fantastic Four #1. Aside #4: Fantastic Four #1 was on newsstands in August 8th, 1961, but the date on the cover was November 1961. The convention at the time was that the cover date was not the “publication date” but rather the “pull date”. The pull date was the time when the retailer could send back unsold copies back to the publisher for a refund. In fact the retailer did not need to send the entire issue back, just the cover, as it was assumed that comic books could not be sold without the cover, and it saved on postage. This was only relevant because it was great for my dad who was a child at the time. My dad was friends with the kid whose father owed the local pharmacy which meant he had access to every comic book published in the late 1950s as long as he was willing to wait a few months and read it without a cover. Going forward in this essay I will always use the pull dates rather than the publication dates for individual comic book issues as they are far easier to source. If you want to convert pull dates back into publication dates you can subtract roughly two months, but it is inconsistent and sometimes longer, as was the case with Fantastic Four #1. Check out the cover of Fantastic Four #1: To the modern eye this certainly looks like a superhero comic. Four heroes with super powers fighting a giant monster. But in the eyes of publishers in 1961 this looked more like a science fiction adventure comic than something that would go head to head with Superman. Here are the covers of Action Comics (the best selling superhero comic at the time) from the three months leading up to Fantastic Four #1: Notice what they have in common? “Super Rivals”, “Super revenge”, “Super Substitutes”. And all include Superman in his blue and red tights. Fantastic Four’s cover featured super powers, but never used the word “super” and no one was wearing superhero costumes. Fantastic Four, as a superhero story, slipped under the radar because it wasn’t really a superhero story at all. It was a story about four close friends who attempted to fly into space, but then something goes wrong and they crash back to Earth. The experience changes them and they decide they now need to use their new abilities to help the rest of humanity – specifically against monsters who are invading from under the Earth. It is a fantastical science fiction story – not a superhero story. Later in his career Jack Kirby, the illustrator of the issue and co-creator of the Fantastic Four, was asked about his inspiration for the Fantastic Four heroes. He did NOT say Superman – or any superhero. He said Challengers of the Unknown. Challengers of the Unknown was an adventure story co-created by Kirby in Showcase #6 in February 1957. Here is how Wikipedia describes the Challengers origin: When acquaintances miraculously survive a plane crash unscathed, they conclude that since they are "living on borrowed time" they should band together for hazardous adventures. The four—pilot Kyle "Ace" Morgan, daredevil Matthew "Red" Ryan, strong and slow-witted Leslie "Rocky" Davis, and scientist Walter Mark "Prof" Haley—became the Challengers of the Unknown. Showcase #6, and the first appearance of the Challengers of the Unknown, by Jack Kirby Visually the Challengers and the Fantastic Four were similar. Both wore skin tight uniforms with belts and minimal decoration. The Fantastic Four’s relatively simple characterizations were practically pulled from Challengers. Reed takes on the traits of both Kyle, the leader, and Walter, the scientist. Johnny, the Human Torch is the daredevil. The Thing is “strong and slow-witted”. Sue, the only woman on the team, seems like a new addition, but is likely based on June Robbins who joined the Challengers team in Showcase #7, as an “honorary” or “girl-Challenger”. After surviving their respective “miraculous” crashes, both the Challengers and the Fantastic Four band together to help the world. They both travel through space and other dimensions, fighting mad scientists and monsters. The Fantastic Four’s early antagonists were not traditional super villains. In the first few issues they fight monsters from under the Earth (Issue #1), shape changing aliens (#2), and a charlatan who uses hypnotism to steal from his audience (#3). In issue #4 Kirby and Lee re-introduce Namor, the Submariner, one of Marvel’s top IP from the 1940s, and have him kidnap Sue. Only in Issue #5 and #6 (June and August 1962) and do we get a more standard-supervillain when Dr Doom attempts to steal the Fantastic Four headquarters and throw it into space. The next superhero Lee created was even less heroic than the Fantastic Four. In April 1962 (pull date), Marvel published The Incredible Hulk. If it was even a superhero story in disguise it was a very good disguise. The story was a scientific-filtered version of Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde. It was a pure monster-story with nothing very super about it. Nothing on the cover suggests this has anything to do with superheroes: It is not clear if even Lee at the time thought the Hulk would be a superhero. In Fantastic Four #5 Johnny is reading a “great new comic mag” and mocks the Thing by comparing him to the Hulk. It seems pretty clear at this point that in the Fantastic Four’s world, the Hulk is just a fictional comic book, like in ours (more on that later): The other two superheroes the Marvel introduces in this period have even more subtle introductions. At the time Marvel had a number of generic-sounding titles and told science fiction and fantasy stand-alone stories: Tales to Astonish

By early 1963 it was established that the Fantastic Four, the Hulk and Spider-man all existed together within the same shared universe. But what about Ant Man,Thor and Iron Man? Aside #5: The Hulk comic in Fantastic Four #5 pretty clearly establishes that the Hulk was a fictional character in the Fantastic Four world, but there are other clues that Lee was not thinking about his characters as existing and crossing over in the early days. Both Bruce Banner (the Hulk) and Mr Fantastic fight off global alien invasions in their early issues. In both cases the stories make clear that only Bruce/Reed is smart enough to save the world. No mention is made of the OTHER scientist who saved the world from the alien invasion a few months earlier. Bringing different superheroes from their own titles together was not an idea created by Atlas/Marvel and Lee. That was likely All Star Comics #3 (December 1940) when writer Gardner Fox brought together all the major DC heroes who were not staring in their own independent titles, including Green Lantern, the Flash and Doctor Fate, to create the Justice Society of America (JSA). Batman and Superman cameoed in All Star Comics #7, but generally they were considered too popular to dilute their appearances in ensemble titles. That changed in March 1960 when DC re-launched the idea of a superteam with the Justice League of America and included all of their most popular heroes as the leads – Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. It was immediately a top seller. The launch of JLA is likely what caused the owner of Atlas to ask Lee to create a ”superhero team comic”. Lee did not have a stable of heroes to bring together, so he had to create something entirely new – The Fantastic Four. But now that Lee DID have a collection of his own heroes AND he had the greenlight to create straightforward superhero comics, he decided to build himself his own JLA. In September 1963 Atlas published two new titles: The Avengers and the X-men. The X-men were a brand new team of all new heroes, but the Avengers were a close parallel to the Justice League. Lee took his existing collection of heroes (except the Fantastic Four and Spider-man) and created an excuse for a team-up. In the issue they individually battle Thor’s brother Loki before coming together to defeat him as a team. They decide that given they all have different powers, they should work together to be unstoppable. The entire formation of the team takes only four panels and is a little corny, but it does its job: While the Avengers were a clear copy of the Justice League, Stan Lee put his own spin on it. While the JLA superheroes all had roughly the same personality and no real inter-team conflict, Lee made his heroes very distinct – almost caricatures – and there was PLENTY of inter-team conflict. The Hulk in particular abandoned the team in the second issue and was the primary antagonist by Avengers #3. Avengers #3 (January 1964) is itself the final step in connecting all of the Marvel heroes together. The Hulk has gone missing and the rest of the team wants to find him. Iron Man uses an “Image Projector” to ask other superheroes around the world if they had seen the Hulk. He visits the Fantastic Four, Spider-man and the X-men. In that same month in Tales of Suspense, Iron Man meets Angel (one of the X-men). The cat was out of the bag. Lee had a new trick to boost sales of all of his titles and he put it to work throughout the year. The first full crossover of the Fantastic Four and the Avengers happens in May (Fantastic Four #26). Daredevil premiered in March 1964 (with Spider-man on the cover, but not in the pages), and crosses over in Amazing Spider-man #16 (September 1964). Dr Strange first appears on the cover of another title in Fantastic Four #27 (June 1964). The Avengers battle the X-men (before teaming up) in X-men #9 (Dec 1964) Atlas was no longer just a collection of comic books about various topics, or even a collection of different flavors of superhero. It was a single shared universe: The Marvel Universe. It wasn’t planned out in advance, instead it happened in stages due more to commercial rather than artistic needs. Basically Stan Lee created the most successful modern mythology because he needed the money. III. Are Silver Age Marvel Comics any good? Well, apart from Amazing Spider-man, which holds up surprisingly well, I would not recommend reading any of them. Even Spider-Man is much weaker than the Ultimate Spider-Man reboot version of the story published 2000-2011. If you wanted to read Spider-Man from the beginning you would likely enjoy that later series a lot more than the original. The other titles vary in quality from “okay” (the Fantastic Four) to “absolute garbage” (Ant Man stories in Tales to Astonish). Which begs the questions, if these comics were so bad, how did they succeed as well as they did? Clearly the comics were “good for their time”. Millions of people bought and read them, and they clearly passed the “test of time”. So does that mean that we are better today at making art than we were back then? Or is art neither better or worse, just “of its time” and people back then would think the Ultimate Spider-man stories from 2000 were unreadable? I will argue the following: The stories were “good for their time”. VERY good for their time. They were much much better than the comic book stories that preceded them, and much better than other contemporary comic book adventures (like those being published by DC)

Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!JwSH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F89ab07df-deb7-4c5d-b418-17f6c0d2a40b_600x566.png

While the Avengers were a clear copy of the Justice League, Stan Lee put his own spin on it. While the JLA superheroes all had roughly the same personality and no real inter-team conflict, Lee made his heroes very distinct – almost caricatures – and there was PLENTY of inter-team conflict. The Hulk in particular abandoned the team in the second issue and was the primary antagonist by Avengers #3. Avengers #3 (January 1964) is itself the final step in connecting all of the Marvel heroes together. The Hulk has gone missing and the rest of the team wants to find him. Iron Man uses an “Image Projector” to ask other superheroes around the world if they had seen the Hulk. He visits the Fantastic Four, Spider-man and the X-men. In that same month in Tales of Suspense, Iron Man meets Angel (one of the X-men). The cat was out of the bag. Lee had a new trick to boost sales of all of his titles and he put it to work throughout the year. The first full crossover of the Fantastic Four and the Avengers happens in May (Fantastic Four #26). Daredevil premiered in March 1964 (with Spider-man on the cover, but not in the pages), and crosses over in Amazing Spider-man #16 (September 1964). Dr Strange first appears on the cover of another title in Fantastic Four #27 (June 1964). The Avengers battle the X-men (before teaming up) in X-men #9 (Dec 1964) Atlas was no longer just a collection of comic books about various topics, or even a collection of different flavors of superhero. It was a single shared universe: The Marvel Universe. It wasn’t planned out in advance, instead it happened in stages due more to commercial rather than artistic needs. Basically Stan Lee created the most successful modern mythology because he needed the money. III. Are Silver Age Marvel Comics any good? Well, apart from Amazing Spider-man, which holds up surprisingly well, I would not recommend reading any of them. Even Spider-Man is much weaker than the Ultimate Spider-Man reboot version of the story published 2000-2011. If you wanted to read Spider-Man from the beginning you would likely enjoy that later series a lot more than the original. The other titles vary in quality from “okay” (the Fantastic Four) to “absolute garbage” (Ant Man stories in Tales to Astonish). Which begs the questions, if these comics were so bad, how did they succeed as well as they did? Clearly the comics were “good for their time”. Millions of people bought and read them, and they clearly passed the “test of time”. So does that mean that we are better today at making art than we were back then? Or is art neither better or worse, just “of its time” and people back then would think the Ultimate Spider-man stories from 2000 were unreadable? I will argue the following: The stories were “good for their time”. VERY good for their time. They were much much better than the comic book stories that preceded them, and much better than other contemporary comic book adventures (like those being published by DC)

The Avion My Uncle Flew1 mentions across 1 issues

The Avion My Uncle Flew 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 "The book: "the avion my uncle flew" does the language idea". It most often appears alongside #EEGManyLabs, 23andme, @freeshreeda.

Reference entry: The Avion My Uncle Flew
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: November 10, 2023
Last seen: November 10, 2023
Book title: The Avion My Uncle Flew

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

The book: "the avion my uncle flew" does the language idea. It starts in english and finishes in french.

The Beginning After The End Of Humanity1 mentions across 1 issues

The Beginning After The End Of Humanity is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 03, 2025 and June 03, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Beginning After The End Of Humanity". It most often appears alongside ACX Commentariat, Arnold Schoenberg, Baldur's Gate 3.

Reference entry: The Beginning After The End Of Humanity
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 03, 2025
Last seen: June 03, 2025
Book title: The Beginning After The End Of Humanity

Outbound links

Issue trail

Choose Nonbook Review Finalists 2025 June 03, 2025

ACX Commentariat 1 shared issues
Arnold Schoenberg 1 shared issues
Baldur's Gate 3 1 shared issues
Banerjee 1 shared issues
Bennett Foddy 1 shared issues

Source context

Choose Nonbook Review Finalists 2025

June 03, 2025 · Original source

...age Show Toby: A Review Of My Entry To ACX “Everything-Except-a-Book Review Contest" Ollantay Person of Interest Phoenix Theatre at Great Northern Mall Princess Mononoke The Beginning After The End Of Humanity Circus The Brutalist The Future of Legal AI The Tale Of The Princess Kaguya The Zone Of Interest She-Ra and the Princesses Of Power Shrinking: Men Silo Skibidi Toilet

The Beginning After The End Of Humanity Circus1 mentions across 1 issues

The Beginning After The End Of Humanity Circus 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: The Beginning After The End Of Humanity Circus". It most often appears alongside Astralcodexten Com, Deathbed Ballads, Discord.

Reference entry: The Beginning After The End Of Humanity Circus
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 09, 2025
Last seen: June 09, 2025
Book title: The Beginning After The End Of Humanity Circus

Outbound links

Issue trail

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

Source context

Your Book Review: Order Without Law

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).

The Behavior of Law1 mentions across 1 issues

The Behavior of Law 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 "Ellickson approvingly cites The Behavior of Law a bunch". It most often appears alongside ACX, amoral familialism, An Introduction to Law and Economics.

Reference entry: The Behavior of Law
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 08, 2021
Last seen: April 08, 2021
Book title: The Behavior of Law

Outbound links

Issue trail

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

April 08, 2021 · Original source

What are some follow-up things to read? Ellickson approvingly cites The Behavior of Law a bunch. If we want skepticism, he cites Social Norms and Economic Theory a few times. At some point I ran across Norms in a Wired World which looks interesting and cites Ellickson, but that’s about all I know of it.

Inline links: The Behavior of Law, Social Norms and Economic Theory, Norms in a Wired World

The Biography of Wu Zixu1 mentions across 1 issues

The Biography of Wu Zixu is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 01, 2023 and September 01, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "‘The Biography of Wu Zixu’ is the most notable account of a historical figure also present in the Zuozhuan". It most often appears alongside 536 BC, ACX, Ai Jiang.

Reference entry: The Biography of Wu Zixu
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 01, 2023
Last seen: September 01, 2023
Book title: The Biography of Wu Zixu

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: Zuozhuan September 01, 2023

536 BC 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
Ai Jiang 1 shared issues
Burton Watson 1 shared issues
Central Plains 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: Zuozhuan

September 01, 2023 · Original source

For more information about this era, Early China: A Social and Cultural History by Li Feng is a good overview, or the older The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 B.C, edited by Michael Loewe and Edward L. Shaughnessy. I also drew from Li Feng’s books on Western Zhou and Yuri Pines’s work on Spring and Autumn and Warring States philosophical development, and a little from the Shiji by Sima Qian—which is another ancient Chinese historical work (generally considered the ancient Chinese historical work, the one that established the model for the rest of imperial history) worth reading, for what it’s worth. While no complete English translation exists for the entire Shiji, there are numerous translations of the short-story-length biographies of various Spring and Autumn, Warring States, Qin, and early Han figures.‘The Biography of Wu Zixu’ is the most notable account of a historical figure also present in the Zuozhuan.

Inline links: ‘The Biography of Wu Zixu’

The Black Swan1 mentions across 1 issues

The Black Swan is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 29, 2021 and September 29, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Books on rationality and overcoming cognitive biases were big ten years ago ( Thinking Fast And Slow, Predictably Irrational, The Black Swan , etc)". It most often appears alongside Amazon, Andrew Jackson, Barack Obama.

Reference entry: The Black Swan
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 29, 2021
Last seen: September 29, 2021
Book title: The Black Swan

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: The Scout Mindset September 29, 2021

Amazon 1 shared issues
Andrew Jackson 1 shared issues
Barack Obama 1 shared issues
Bayes’ Rule 1 shared issues
being-a-good-person training 1 shared issues

Source context

Highlights From The Comments On Modern Architecture

September 29, 2021 · Original source

Galef admits she’s a little behind the curve on this one. Books on rationality and overcoming cognitive biases were big ten years ago (Thinking Fast And Slow, Predictably Irrational, The Black Swan, etc). Nowadays “smiling TED-talk-circuit celebrity wants to help you improve your thinking!” is more likely to elicit groans than breathless anticipation. And that isn’t the least accurate description of Julia (you can watch her TED talk here).

Inline links: here

The Blank Slate1 mentions across 1 issues

The Blank Slate is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 04, 2021 and October 04, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate"; "Steven Pinker devoted a chapter ("The Arts") of The Blank Slate". It most often appears alongside 19th century African art, 20th century, 9-11.

Reference entry: The Blank Slate
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: October 04, 2021
Last seen: October 04, 2021
Book title: The Blank Slate

Outbound links

Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On Modern Architecture October 04, 2021

19th century African art 1 shared issues
20th century 1 shared issues
9-11 1 shared issues
abstract art 1 shared issues
Aka 1 shared issues

Source context

October 04, 2021 · Original source

Some people mention Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, which apparently has a chapter on this. It contrasts a traditional idea that architecture needs to appeal to some innate sense of beauty vs. a modern idea that there are no innate senses and so it can be whatever is easiest or more politically convenient. Fluffy Buffalo writes:

I think Steven Pinker had some good insights on that issue in "The Blank Slate". If I remember the argument correctly: modernist architecture/ city planning/ art came into fashion as the conviction spread that there was no such thing as a "human nature" - that, in fact, human tastes and human society were nearly totally malleable, and shaped by their surroundings.

Steven Pinker devoted a chapter ("The Arts") of The Blank Slate to this question. He comes down pretty strongly in support of the idea that the elites do this stuff *because* people don't like it. (As presented above, "Maybe elites are specifically trying to signal not being commoners, by choosing the opposite of commoners’ aesthetic preferences?")

The Book of the Law1 mentions across 1 issues

The Book of the Law is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 21, 2024 and February 21, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Hey now, “Every Man And Women Is A Star” is from The Book of the Law". It most often appears alongside 2017 SSC survey, A Woman First: First Woman: A Memoir, Aella.

Reference entry: The Book of the Law
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: February 21, 2024
Last seen: February 21, 2024
Book title: The Book of the Law
Likely author: The Book

Outbound links

Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On Polyamory February 21, 2024

2017 SSC survey 1 shared issues
A Woman First: First Woman: A Memoir 1 shared issues
Aella 1 shared issues
Amish 1 shared issues
Anomie 1 shared issues

Source context

Book Review: How Asia Works

February 21, 2024 · Original source

Hey now, “Every Man And Women Is A Star” is from The Book of the Law, which whatever else you want to say about it definitely isn’t boring hippie therapeutic self-help. But otherwise these are great/awful.

Inline links: The Book of the Law

The Borderless World1 mentions across 1 issues

The Borderless World 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 "Kenichi Ohmae, author of The Borderless World". It most often appears alongside Alexander Hamilton, America, ASEAN.

Reference entry: The Borderless World
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 28, 2021
Last seen: June 28, 2021
Book title: The Borderless World

Outbound links

Issue trail

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

June 28, 2021 · Original source

The book blames most of this on Mahathir listening to McKinsey consultants and globalization advocates - especially Japanese theorist Kenichi Ohmae, author of The Borderless World. Ohmae was right that globalization would happen. He was even right that Japan - which at that point was a First World country - could benefit by taking part in it. But what works for developed countries isn't right for developing ones, and at that point it was the wrong advice for Malaysia. During Park Chung-Hee's 18 years in power, he increased his country's GDP by a factor of 17; during Mahathir's 22 years, ending in 2003, he barely doubled it.

The Brothers Karamazov1 mentions across 1 issues

The Brothers Karamazov is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 30, 2021 and April 30, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Jean-Paul Sartre’s misquoting of Dostoevsky’s take on atheism from The Brothers Karamazov". It most often appears alongside AI, AI research, Air.

Reference entry: The Brothers Karamazov
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 30, 2021
Last seen: April 30, 2021
Book title: The Brothers Karamazov

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: The Wizard And The Prophet April 30, 2021

AI 1 shared issues
AI research 1 shared issues
Air 1 shared issues
Air 1 shared issues
Alice Waters 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: Zuozhuan

April 30, 2021 · Original source

Some books really stick with me. Like, literally, stick with me: I’m one of those people with pretentious literary tattoos. So far, just two books have been meaningful enough for me to permanently etch their totem on my skin: the glyph of the underground postal service from The Crying of Lot 49, and the line "Everything Is Permitted," Jean-Paul Sartre’s misquoting of Dostoevsky’s take on atheism from The Brothers Karamazov. (I wasn’t kidding about pretentious!) People have all sorts of reasons for getting tattoos – mine are there for some of the standard superficial ones (looking cool and tough, obviously), but also to act as little daily mantras for how I want to live and think about the world. To this very short list of inked paragons, I’m thinking of adding a new one: a few stylized stalks of wheat in honor of Charles Mann’s The Wizard and the Prophet.

Inline links: misquoting

The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 B.C1 mentions across 1 issues

The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 B.C is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 01, 2023 and September 01, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "The older The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 B.C , edited by Michael Loewe and Edward L. Shaughnessy". It most often appears alongside 536 BC, ACX, Ai Jiang.

Reference entry: The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 B.C
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 01, 2023
Last seen: September 01, 2023
Book title: The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 B.C
Likely author: Michael Loewe

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: Zuozhuan September 01, 2023

536 BC 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
Ai Jiang 1 shared issues
Burton Watson 1 shared issues
Central Plains 1 shared issues

Source context

September 01, 2023 · Original source

For more information about this era, Early China: A Social and Cultural History by Li Feng is a good overview, or the older The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 B.C, edited by Michael Loewe and Edward L. Shaughnessy. I also drew from Li Feng’s books on Western Zhou and Yuri Pines’s work on Spring and Autumn and Warring States philosophical development, and a little from the Shiji by Sima Qian—which is another ancient Chinese historical work (generally considered the ancient Chinese historical work, the one that established the model for the rest of imperial history) worth reading, for what it’s worth. While no complete English translation exists for the entire Shiji, there are numerous translations of the short-story-length biographies of various Spring and Autumn, Warring States, Qin, and early Han figures.‘The Biography of Wu Zixu’ is the most notable account of a historical figure also present in the Zuozhuan.

Inline links: ‘The Biography of Wu Zixu’

The Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome1 mentions across 1 issues

The Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 21, 2021 and July 21, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Roland Summit wrote in his classic study The Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome". It most often appears alongside 9/11, ACOUP, Adderall.

Reference entry: The Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 21, 2021
Last seen: July 21, 2021
Book title: The Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome

Outbound links

Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On "Crazy Like Us" July 21, 2021

11 1 shared issues
ACOUP 1 shared issues
Adderall 1 shared issues
ADHD 1 shared issues
Advances in Psychiatric Treatment 1 shared issues

Source context

Highlights From The Comments On "Crazy Like Us"

July 21, 2021 · Original source

...a better adjustment to the external world.” In fact, as it turned out, incest had devastating effects on women’s well-being. As Roland Summit wrote in his classic study The Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome: “Initiation, intimidation, stigmatization, isolation, helplessness and self-blame depend on a terrifying reality of child sexual abuse. Any attempts by the child to div...

...ject’s chance of psychosis and allows for a better adjustment to the external world.” In fact, as it turned out, incest had devastating effects on women’s well-being. As Roland Summit wrote in his classic study The Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome: “Initiation, intimidation, stigmatization, isolation, helplessness and self-blame depend on a terrifying reality of child sexual abuse. Any attempts by the child to div...

The civics they never taught you: The unwieldy billion1 mentions across 1 issues

The civics they never taught you: The unwieldy billion 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 "My book's corpulent title would be something like "The civics they never taught you: The unwieldy billion"". It most often appears alongside #EEGManyLabs, 23andme, @freeshreeda.

Reference entry: The civics they never taught you: The unwieldy billion
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: November 10, 2023
Last seen: November 10, 2023
Book title: The civics they never taught you: The unwieldy billion

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 don't think your questions are stupid at all, I think you have a great instinct for the non-obvious corners in lots of areas, including here. My dream version of this book would include a series of interviews, one with a professional lobbyist, one with a congressional staffer, one with an administrative law judge or maybe someone who has run a notice and comment process for an executive agency, one with a lawyer who has had to interpret EOs maybe in the intel community or adjacent, a longtime DC journalist, then some coverage or state and local lawmaking and where they fit in. My book's corpulent title would be something like "The civics they never taught you: The unwieldy billion and one paths to making new laws in America (and why none of them really work but maybe that's mostly ok)."

The Civilizing Process1 mentions across 1 issues

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

Reference entry: The Civilizing Process
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: October 04, 2021
Last seen: October 04, 2021
Book title: The Civilizing Process
Likely author: Norbert Elias

Outbound links

Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On Modern Architecture October 04, 2021

19th century African art 1 shared issues
20th century 1 shared issues
9-11 1 shared issues
abstract art 1 shared issues
Aka 1 shared issues

Source context

Highlights From The Comments On Modern Architecture

October 04, 2021 · Original source

The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction From Bauhaus To Our House The Rite of Spring by Modris Eksteins Art and Culture: Critical Essays by Clement Greenberg The Intellectuals and the Masses. Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939 Shock of the New (TV series) The Civilizing Process by Norbert Elias Distinction by Bourdieu

The Closing Of The American Mind1 mentions across 1 issues

The Closing Of The American Mind is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 01, 2024 and May 01, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Closing Of The American Mind , generally considered the opening shot in that debate, was published in 1987". It most often appears alongside #MeToo, #StopAAPIHate, #StopAAPIHate.

Reference entry: The Closing Of The American Mind
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 01, 2024
Last seen: May 01, 2024
Book title: The Closing Of The American Mind

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: The Origins Of Woke May 01, 2024

#MeToo 1 shared issues
#StopAAPIHate 1 shared issues
#StopAAPIHate 1 shared issues
9-11 1 shared issues
AAPI 1 shared issues

Source context

Book Review: The Origins Of Woke

May 01, 2024 · Original source

Hanania has no explanation for this. He talks about civil rights laws that have been in place since 1964 (he does say that maybe the new civil rights bill signed in 1991 inspired that decade’s interest in “political correctness”, but The Closing Of The American Mind, generally considered the opening shot in that debate, was published in 1987). Why would 1964 and 1991 laws turn wokeness into a huge deal in 2015? Hanania has no answer.

Inline links: The Closing Of The American Mind

The Collected Songs of The Scattering1 mentions across 1 issues

The Collected Songs of The Scattering is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 13, 2022 and August 13, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as ""- From The Collected Songs of The Scattering, author unknown."". It most often appears alongside ACX, AI, ancient Greeks.

Reference entry: The Collected Songs of The Scattering
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 13, 2022
Last seen: August 13, 2022
Book title: The Collected Songs of The Scattering

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: God Emperor Of Dune August 13, 2022

ACX 1 shared issues
AI 1 shared issues
ancient Greeks 1 shared issues
Arakeen 1 shared issues
Arakeen sandtrout 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: God Emperor Of Dune

August 13, 2022 · Original source

- From The Collected Songs of The Scattering, author unknown.

The Computer From Pascal to von Neumann1 mentions across 1 issues

The Computer From Pascal to von Neumann is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 13, 2022 and July 13, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Herman Goldstine, writing about his experience in The Computer From Pascal to von Neumann"; "writing about his experience in The Computer From Pascal to von Neumann". It most often appears alongside 1890s, Alan Turing, Albert Einstein.

Reference entry: The Computer From Pascal to von Neumann
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 13, 2022
Last seen: July 13, 2022
Book title: The Computer From Pascal to von Neumann

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: The Man From The Future July 13, 2022

1890s 1 shared issues
Alan Turing 1 shared issues
Albert Einstein 1 shared issues
America 1 shared issues
Ananyo Bhattacharya 1 shared issues

Source context

Book Review: The Man From The Future

July 13, 2022 · Original source

Do these sound a little too much like urban legends? The Tale Of Two Cities story comes straight from the mathematician involved - von Neumann’s friend Herman Goldstine, writing about his experience in The Computer From Pascal to von Neumann. The computer anecdote is of less certain provenance, quoted without attribution in a 1957 obituary in Life. But this is part of the fun of reading von Neumann biographies: figuring out what one can or can’t believe about a figure of such mythic proportions.

Inline links: The Computer From Pascal to von Neumann, obituary

The Conquest Of Bread1 mentions across 1 issues

The Conquest Of Bread is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 25, 2021 and November 25, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "awanderingmind’s review of The Conquest Of Bread". It most often appears alongside Aleksandar Vucic, awanderingmind, Biden.

Reference entry: The Conquest Of Bread
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: November 25, 2021
Last seen: November 25, 2021
Book title: The Conquest Of Bread

Outbound links

Issue trail

Links For November November 25, 2021

Aleksandar Vucic 1 shared issues
awanderingmind 1 shared issues
Biden 1 shared issues
Big Business 1 shared issues
Boris Johnson 1 shared issues

Source context

Links For November

November 25, 2021 · Original source

Boris Johnson (left) is 5’9, so the guy in the middle must be gigantic. Who is he? Looks like it’s Milo Djukanovic, President of Montenegro, who’s 6’6 (198 cm). Is he the tallest world leader? It seems like he’s tied with his colleague across the border, Serbian president Aleksandar Vucic. Why are Balkan leaders so tall? As usual, the answer is “genetics”. This article says: It has been noted that men from Herzegovina are taller on average than men in other places—the average male height is just over six feet...Putting all the data together, researchers concluded that the most likely cause of larger-than-average height of Herzegovinian men is lifestyle during the Paleolithic—men hunted large animals such as mammoth for survival—such a diet, heavy in protein, combined with small population densities, would have provided ideal conditions for height selection, resulting in increasingly taller men who passed the trait down through their I-M170 chromosome to future generations. Some sources note that they manage to beat the Dutch despite the latter country’s much higher human development index. The Dutch are probably tall through a combination of nature and nurture; Balkan people are tall through nature alone. 7: Eliezer Yudkowsky doesn’t need more ego boosts, but an idea he had a couple of years ago - using strings of bright lights to provide a better and brighter experience for Seasonal Affective Disorder sufferers than regular light boxes - spread from him to the rationalist community to the wider world, and has finally gotten tested in a formal study (see Acknowledgments section). Results seem vaguely positive: "SAD symptoms of both groups improved similarly and considerably...exploratory analyses indicate that a higher illuminance is associated with a larger symptom improvement in the BROAD light therapy group" 8: Percent of people who choose woke options on polls very tentatively and preliminarily seems to be going down post-Trump (h/t Richard Hanania). 9: Twitter conspiracy theories 10: Did you know: all those reconstructions of “how classical art would have looked with the original paint” are probably inaccurate. There is no reason to think the Greeks and Romans used garish technicolor hues on their statues; what evidence we have suggest they were good at shading, and the statues were probably colored very tastefully. 11: Complaints about how Karl Friston uses the term “Markov blanket” 12: Trevor Klee on the claim that cyclosporine patients don’t get dementia. Apparently there was a big study where basically nobody on the immunosuppressant cyclosporine ever got dementia, and there are some theoretical reasons why cyclosporine might prevent neurodegeneration. But another study found people on cyclosporine got dementia at the usual rate. I think in a situation like this you should have a really high prior on “the people who got the crazy result bungled their study somehow”, but I’m interested in hearing what other people think. 13: Also from Trevor: a history of fluvoxamine treatment for COVID. 14: To tide you over until the next book review contest, here is awanderingmind’s review of The Conquest Of Bread. 15: Claims: cnbc.com/2021/11/05/sam…\nft.com/content/dcb75a… (better article, but paywalled)","username":"moskov","name":"Dustin Moskovitz","profile_image_url":"","date":"Fri Nov 05 15:49:46 +0000 2021","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":184,"like_count":1188,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{"url":"https://www.ft.com/content/dcb75a56-ca23-439c-96db-56483979bf34","image":"https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/80a58c96-c72f-4301-b571-aa9384f132bd_2400x1350.jpeg","title":"Subscribe to read | Financial Times","description":"News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication","domain":"ft.com"},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM"> 16: Big trial on Vitamin D for depression finds null result. Peter Attia tries to tear it apart here, but I am unconvinced, especially in the context of Vitamin D never working for any of the things people say it does besides the most boring aspects of bone health. 17: “California is actively considering the adoption of flawed and inequitable guidance on math curricula based on misleading data and inaccurate success metrics reported by San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD)...Based on our review of the data, we found misleading, unsupported, and cherry-picked assertions of success for the new math program. We noted that overall test scores are down and enrollments in UC-approved advanced math classes have dropped as well.” It looks like San Francisco is trying the good old “lower standards, then when more kids meet the standards, claim your school reform plan worked” trick again. 18: A new study claims that self-reported “Long COVID” symptoms are more associated with believing you’ve had COVID than with actually having it (as measured by serologic testing), which sounds like pretty strong evidence that it’s psychsomatic. Expert reactions are mixed-to-negative, although the only one of these that doesn’t sound like excuse-making is Dr. Rossman’s about the unreliability of the tests. I haven’t confirmed test reliability stats but Philippe Lemoine also thinks this is a plausible confounder. 19: Noahpinion: What If Xi Jinping Just Isn’t That Competent? I appreciated this for making me think, and for underlining the extent of the difference between the Deng/Jiang/Hu era and what Xi’s doing. I especially appreciated this line, which I’d never thought about before: Xi presided over the end of China’s hypergrowth. To some extent this is not his fault. No country can grow at 10% forever, and there were many structural forces pushing downward on China’s numbers — the end of the demographic dividend, the exhaustion of rural surplus labor (the Lewis Turning Point), the saturation of export markets, and so on. But China is also slowing down earlier than South Korea, Taiwan, or Japan did in their day. China’s per capita GDP (at PPP) is still only about 1/3 that of a developed country, so if they stop catching up at about half of developed-country levels, that will not be a great showing. A big lesson of the past twenty years has been “actually liberal democracy isn’t necessary to reach developed-country status”, so it would be quite the twist if it turned out you needed liberal democracy to reach developed-country status. This gets pretty close to the great mystery of why some less-developed countries “catch up” and others don’t; whatever happens in China is going to be a really useful data point. 20: Variations on the fable of The Frog And The Scorpion. 21: You’ve probably heard about the University of Austin, the new project by a bunch of wokeness-critical academics to start a new university that won’t cancel people or force conformity (New York Post article, Politico article - these were the two least “you need to be super-outraged about this right now” articles I could find). Tyler Cowen and Larry Summers are involved; Steven Pinker was supposed to be but left for unclear reasons. My thoughts, in no particular order: Even forgetting the political aspect, attempts to start new universities are always welcome.

The Conscious Mind1 mentions across 1 issues

The Conscious Mind is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 16, 2025 and June 16, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "starting on page 289 of David Chalmers’ The Conscious Mind". It most often appears alongside Astralcodexten Com, Claude Bliss Attractor, David Chalmers.

Reference entry: The Conscious Mind
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 16, 2025
Last seen: June 16, 2025
Book title: The Conscious Mind

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Open Thread 386 June 16, 2025

Astralcodexten Com 1 shared issues
Claude Bliss Attractor 1 shared issues
David Chalmers 1 shared issues
Erik Hoel 1 shared issues
Europe 1 shared issues

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Open Thread 386

June 16, 2025 · Original source

1: Thanks to everyone who commented on P-Zombies Would Report Qualia. Although as usual most of your attempts to link it to other philosophical writings were vague and not very relevant, a correspondent was eventually able to find a very similar argument starting on page 289 of David Chalmers’ The Conscious Mind (which I had not previously read). Thanks to Professor Chalmers for not getting upset about this unintentional duplication of his work. And if you think you have a more original insight about consciousness, Erik Hoel highlights a $50,000 consciousness essay contest.

Inline links: P-Zombies Would Report Qualia, The Conscious Mind, a $50,000 consciousness essay contest

The Consequences Of Radical Reform: The French Revolution1 mentions across 1 issues

The Consequences Of Radical Reform: The French Revolution is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 09, 2021 and March 09, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Into this eternal battle comes The Consequences Of Radical Reform: The French Revolution"; "attle comes The Consequences Of Radical Reform: The French Revolution , by Daron Acemoglu, Davide Cantoni, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson". It most often appears alongside anti-colonialists, authoritarianism, Brasilia.

Reference entry: The Consequences Of Radical Reform: The French Revolution
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: March 09, 2021
Last seen: March 09, 2021
Book title: The Consequences Of Radical Reform: The French Revolution
Likely author: Daron Acemoglu

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The Consequences Of Radical Reform March 09, 2021

anti-colonialists 1 shared issues
authoritarianism 1 shared issues
Brasilia 1 shared issues
collective farming 1 shared issues
Daron Acemoglu 1 shared issues

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The Consequences Of Radical Reform

March 09, 2021 · Original source

Into this eternal battle comes The Consequences Of Radical Reform: The French Revolution, by Daron Acemoglu, Davide Cantoni, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson (from 2009; h/t Rob B). Under Napoleon, the revolutionary French took over large swathes of Europe. They abolished their client states' traditional systems, replacing them with the Napoleonic Code and other "modern" legal systems. Europe at the time had so many tiny duchies and principalities and so on that you can actually do a decent experiment on it - for every principality Napoleon conquered and reformed, there was another one just down the river which was basically identical but managed to escape conquest. So the authors ask: did the radically-reformed polities do better or worse than the left-to-their-traditions polities?

Inline links: The Consequences Of Radical Reform: The French Revolution

The Control Group is Out of Control1 mentions across 1 issues

The Control Group is Out of Control is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 26, 2025 and July 26, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "has definitely begun by the time of The Control Group is Out of Control". It most often appears alongside 4chan, ACX, ACX.

Reference entry: The Control Group is Out of Control
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 26, 2025
Last seen: July 26, 2025
Book title: The Control Group is Out of Control

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Your Review: The Astral Codex Ten Commentariat (“Why Do We Suck?”) July 26, 2025

4chan 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
ACX Commentariat 1 shared issues
ACX-era 1 shared issues

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Your Review: The Astral Codex Ten Commentariat (“Why Do We Suck?”)

July 26, 2025 · Original source

The SSC-era is highlighted in blue. You can see that it shows something a bit like a classic sigmoidal adoption curve (but wearing a top hat). Post engagement starts low, before rapidly shooting up in 2014-15. It peaks in April 2016 – which is highlighted in red in this and all subsequent graphs so you can track peak engagement - before dropping back to a steady level of around 400-600 comments per post for the next three years. Notably, the run of posts that most people regard as being the ‘Golden Age’ for Scott’s writing happens much earlier than peak engagement with the comments section. People disagree about where this run of exceptionally good posts in quick succession start and ends, but I think you could safely say it has definitely begun by the time of The Control Group is Out of Control (although I would date it a little earlier, personally) and ends with either The Toxoplasmosa of Rage or Untitled – basically 2014 has a high density of ‘important’ posts.

Inline links: The Control Group is Out of Control, Toxoplasmosa of Rage, Untitled

The Country, the Revolution and I1 mentions across 1 issues

The Country, the Revolution and I 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 "The next year Park published The Country, the Revolution and I". It most often appears alongside Alexander Hamilton, America, ASEAN.

Reference entry: The Country, the Revolution and I
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 28, 2021
Last seen: June 28, 2021
Book title: The Country, the Revolution and I

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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

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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.)

The Cruel Redeemer Lazarus Morell1 mentions across 1 issues

The Cruel Redeemer Lazarus Morell is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 19, 2022 and August 19, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as ""The Cruel Redeemer Lazarus Morell" vs. "Ch'i Chi-Kuang the Lonely General"". It most often appears alongside 1587, 1587, 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline.

Reference entry: The Cruel Redeemer Lazarus Morell
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 19, 2022
Last seen: August 19, 2022
Book title: The Cruel Redeemer Lazarus Morell

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Your Book Review: 1587, A Year Of No Significance August 19, 2022

1587 1 shared issues
1587 1 shared issues
1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline 1 shared issues
A Universal History of Infamy 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues

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August 19, 2022 · Original source

“The Cruel Redeemer Lazarus Morell” vs. “Ch'i Chi-Kuang the Lonely General”

The Crying of Lot 491 mentions across 1 issues

The Crying of Lot 49 is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 30, 2021 and April 30, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "the glyph of the underground postal service from The Crying of Lot 49". It most often appears alongside AI, AI research, Air.

Reference entry: The Crying of Lot 49
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 30, 2021
Last seen: April 30, 2021
Book title: The Crying of Lot 49
Likely author: The Crying

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Your Book Review: The Wizard And The Prophet April 30, 2021

AI 1 shared issues
AI research 1 shared issues
Air 1 shared issues
Air 1 shared issues
Alice Waters 1 shared issues

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April 30, 2021 · Original source

Some books really stick with me. Like, literally, stick with me: I’m one of those people with pretentious literary tattoos. So far, just two books have been meaningful enough for me to permanently etch their totem on my skin: the glyph of the underground postal service from The Crying of Lot 49, and the line "Everything Is Permitted," Jean-Paul Sartre’s misquoting of Dostoevsky’s take on atheism from The Brothers Karamazov. (I wasn’t kidding about pretentious!) People have all sorts of reasons for getting tattoos – mine are there for some of the standard superficial ones (looking cool and tough, obviously), but also to act as little daily mantras for how I want to live and think about the world. To this very short list of inked paragons, I’m thinking of adding a new one: a few stylized stalks of wheat in honor of Charles Mann’s The Wizard and the Prophet.

Inline links: misquoting

The Cult Of Smart1 mentions across 1 issues

The Cult Of Smart is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 18, 2021 and February 18, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "happy to read his latest book, The Cult Of Smart"; "That last sentence about the basic principle is the thesis of The Cult Of Smart"; "DeBoer is aware of this and his book argues against it adeptly. Still, I worry that the title - The Cult Of Smart - might lead people to think there is a cult surrounding intelligence". It most often appears alongside American education, Appalachian, Baby Einstein.

Reference entry: The Cult Of Smart
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: February 18, 2021
Last seen: February 18, 2021
Book title: The Cult Of Smart

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Book Review: The Cult Of Smart February 18, 2021

American education 1 shared issues
Appalachian 1 shared issues
Baby Einstein 1 shared issues
Bezoses 1 shared issues
Bryan Caplan 1 shared issues

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February 18, 2021 · Original source

Oscar Wilde supposedly said George Bernard Shaw "has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends". Socialist blogger Freddie DeBoer is the opposite: few allies, but deeply respected by his enemies. I disagree with him about everything, so naturally I am a big fan of his work - which meant I was happy to read his latest book, The Cult Of Smart.

Inline links: The Cult Of Smart

That last sentence about the basic principle is the thesis of The Cult Of Smart, so it would have been a reasonable position for DeBoer to take too. DeBoer doesn't take it. He acknowledges the existence of expert scientists who believe the differences are genetic (he names Linda Gottfredson in particular), but only to condemn them as morally flawed for asserting this.

Still, I worry that the title - The Cult Of Smart - might lead people to think there is a cult surrounding intelligence, when exactly the opposite is true. But I guess The Cult Of Successful At Formal Education sounds less snappy, so whatever.

The Culture Transplant1 mentions across 1 issues

The Culture Transplant is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 10, 2023 and March 10, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "I still haven’t read Garett Jones’ The Culture Transplant yet". It most often appears alongside Alex, Alex Nowratesh, Aphantasia.

Reference entry: The Culture Transplant
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: March 10, 2023
Last seen: March 10, 2023
Book title: The Culture Transplant

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Links For March 2023 March 10, 2023

Alex 1 shared issues
Alex Nowratesh 1 shared issues
Aphantasia 1 shared issues
Arkansas 1 shared issues
ASCII cat replicators 1 shared issues

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Links For March 2023

March 10, 2023 · Original source

7: I still haven’t read Garett Jones’ The Culture Transplant yet, but I’m seeing a lot of good discussion. Via Paul Graham, here’s a graph of migration-adjusted tech history score 1500 (ie how advanced a region was in 1500, adjusting for the fact that eg Australia is mostly inhabited by English people and should count as England rather than as the Aborigines) vs. income per person today (actually 2005):

Inline links: Paul Graham

The Da Vinci Code1 mentions across 1 issues

The Da Vinci Code is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 08, 2025 and January 08, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Imagine a Catholic bishop... declaring ex cathedra that The Da Vinci Code is 100% real". It most often appears alongside #DogeCoin, Alex Tabarrok, Arnold Kling.

Reference entry: The Da Vinci Code
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: January 08, 2025
Last seen: January 08, 2025
Book title: The Da Vinci Code

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On Priesthoods January 08, 2025

#DogeCoin 1 shared issues
Alex Tabarrok 1 shared issues
Arnold Kling 1 shared issues
Bounded Distrust 1 shared issues
Bryan Caplan 1 shared issues

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On Priesthoods

January 08, 2025 · Original source

Society-wide: The marketplace of ideas! This is where everyone gets to have their say. New hypotheses get stress-tested, bounced off against each other, and only the strongest survive. This level also produces true learning - if only one idea survives the marketplace, then average spectators can easily pick it out (although of course it can still be wrong). Its disadvantage is that it’s impossible for several billion people to hold a true “discussion” among themselves. Also, many of these people are extremely stupid, their ideas are bad, and they fill the conversation with noise. Is there a useful group size in between these two? What about discussing ideas in a group made of only the most intelligent and knowledgeable people? This gives you the debate and collaboration functions that you only get in group conversation. But it’ll have a better signal-to-noise ratio than all of society, and it might be small enough to manage. Also, you can make people sign on to good discussion norms before they enter, and you can expel them if they screw up. The Boundary Against The Public From this formulation, it becomes clear that such a priesthood is only useful insofar as it has some kind of barrier between itself and the general public. The priesthoods don’t exactly hate the public. But they hate the idea of letting the public’s ideas mix with their own. It’s not just that they discount the public’s ideas insofar as the public is less sophisticated than themselves. Their whole identity comes from their separation from the public. Ideas that seem too similar to the public’s get actively penalized, the same way it would be hard to convince Democrats to accept a plan that Donald Trump proposed first, even if it otherwise fit with Democratic ideals. I recently reviewed Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus To Our House, on the architectural priesthood. It discusses the response when renegade architects would build things in styles favored by the public - for example, Edward Stone and the Kennedy Center: Stone and Saarinen, like Frank Lloyd Wright and Goff and Greene, were too American, which meant both too parochial (not part of the International Style) and too bourgeois. Somehow they actually catered to the hog-stomping Baroque exuberance of American civilization. When Stone designed the Kennedy Center in Washington with a lobby six stories high and six hundred and thirty feet long – so big, as one journalist pointed out, that Mickey Mantle’s mightiest home run would have been just another long fly ball – it was regarded as an obscenity. Stone was actually playing upto American megolomania. He was encouraging the barbaric yawps. He was glorifying The Client’s own grandiose sentiments. More generally: In a way, the very productivity of a man like Wright, Portman, or Stone counted against him, given the new mental atmosphere at the universities. Oh, it was easy enough, one supposed, to go out into the marketplace and wheedle and vamp and dance for clients and get buildings to do. But the brave soul was he who remained within the compound, stayed within the university orbit. Or, from the comments, this quote by architect Peter Eisenman: What I’m suggesting is that if we make people so comfortable in these nice little structures of yours, that we might lull them into thinking that everything’s all right, Jack, which it isn’t. And so the role of art or architecture might be just to remind people that everything wasn’t all right. I used to wonder why so many econ-bloggers I liked were at GMU. GMU only is only the 74th best economics department in the country, but more than half of the econbloggers I like are affiliated with it in some way (Tyler Cowen, Alex Tabarrok, Garett Jones, Robin Hanson, Bryan Caplan, Arnold Kling, Scott Sumner, Mark Koyama, sorry if I’m forgetting anyone!). Granted that some of this is because I lean libertarian and so do they - but I don’t think there’s a mountain of amazing and popular left-wing econbloggers who I’m ignoring. Part of this must be that Mercatus head Tyler Cowen is better at spotting and cultivating talent than others - but you’d still think the #73 ranked department would try to poach some of his hard work. When I asked academics about this, they didn’t find it mysterious at all. The average high-ranked economics department doesn’t care that you have a popular blog. They might even count it against you. Only your reputation within the priesthood matters. This is my experience too. I once got rejected from a psychiatry residency I wanted, partly because they saw I had a blog and thought it might cause trouble (though the less prestigious hospital that eventually accepted me did consider it a plus, for which I remain grateful). I wish I could say that the program which rejected me is kicking themselves right now - I’m probably one of the most-read psychiatrists in the world, and most of what I write is relatively orthodox and (I hope) reflects well on the field. But outside of my fantasies, they are doing nothing of the sort. At best, my blog has gone from a liability to being neutral or a very slight positive. Certainly it doesn’t make me as impressive as someone who went to a medical school one tier above mine. Consider how impressive a boundary this is - someone can have literally tens of thousands of fans for doing popular writing in a field, and the amount of extra status it gives them in the field is within a rounding error of zero. Only your reputation within the priesthood matters. Still, at least I’m a member in good standing. At least I’m higher than pond scum. The lowest-status doctor in the world - the guy who, if doctors were Maoist revolutionaries, would get his face on the “Criticize X, Criticize Y” posters - is Dr. Oz. This isn’t because Dr. Oz lacks medical skill. Back in the day, he was a professor of surgery at Columbia, and by all accounts quite good at it. But then he went on TV and started catering to the public. He told them their stupid miracle cures and $19.99 supplements were Real Medicine. Imagine a Catholic bishop declaring ex cathedra that The Da Vinci Code is 100% real. Authority bestowed to fight the heresies of a fallen world, instead used to prop up those heresies. Columbia recently “cut ties” with Oz in some vague way, but as far as the medical profession is concerned, it’s too little, too late. I think the profession’s hatred for Oz is justified - his claims are false and probably cause a lot of harm. But other doctors who say false harmful things get only a fraction of the hatred that Dr. Oz does. He’s not just defrauding and maybe killing the people who take his supplements. He’s sullying Medicine itself. This hard boundary - this contempt for two-way traffic with the public - might seem harsh to outsiders. But it’s an adaptive artifact produced by cultural evolution as it tries to breed priesthoods that can perform their epistemic function. The outside world is so much bigger than the priesthoods, so much richer, so full of delicious deposits of status waiting to be consumed - that any weaker border would soon be overrun, with all priesthood members trying to garner status with the public directly. Only the priesthoods that inculcated the most powerful contempt for the public survived to have good discussions and output trustworthy recommendations. The Boundary Against Capitalism Dr. Oz illustrates another point: power corrupts, and the priests (as people known to be more knowledgeable than the public) have the power to bless or damn interventions in their field. Without some boundary against capitalism, they would abuse that power to make money. Again, cultural evolution has produced such a boundary. A doctor who seems too mercenary loses status in the priesthood. My father - a much more orthodox (and hence higher-status) member of the medical priesthood than I will ever be - used to even get suspicious of concierge doctors. Was it really in keeping with the principles of medicine to care about the amount of money you got for your service? Shouldn’t the usual insurance payments (calculated behind the scenes, without you ever having to think about it) be enough for anybody? If you let doctors charge extra for their services, they might do bad medicine in order to increase profits. In the worst case scenario, they might flatter members of the public who wanted all-natural $19.99 supplements. This taboo has faded as insurance squeezes doctors harder; even my father eventually relented. But there’s still the sense that doctor is a calling in a way that used-car salesman isn’t. If you pursue money too aggressively, can we really be sure you’ve heard the call? Why doesn’t every doctor pursue their own $19.99 supplement business? Some of this is professional regulation - there’s a sense that probably the Medical Board will come down on you if you do something wrong (though most doctors are proudly ignorant of the exact limits of the Medical Board’s power - why should the pious worry about the exact boundaries of excommunicable offenses?) But most of the barrier comes from self-regulation based on social status. By the time you’re done with medical school and residency, all of your non-doctor friends have long since abandoned you, and all the old sources of status and approval that you used to crave have been excised and replaced with the all-seeing eye of the medical priesthood. If you sell out and start the supplement line, you might get a new Ferrari, but everyone whose opinion you respect will hold you in contempt. The public might think it’s cool that you have a Ferrari, but doctors know better: nobody with a supplement line has ever been cool. This doesn’t mean doctors are incorruptible. Plenty of them become pharma company shills. But that’s because being a pharma company shill doesn’t burn intra-priesthood respect the same way. For better or worse, pharma companies straddle the priesthood boundary. They may not be fellow priests, but they’re at least nuns or deacons or something. They won this by sacrificing certain capitalist parts of themselves (for example, becoming heavily regulated) and by agreeing to follow the norms of the medical priesthood (for example, communicating through papers published in medical journals with high-status doctors as lead authors). Through their sacrifice, they achieve ritual purity; now priests can interact with them guilt-free. Is ritual purity really the same as moral acceptability? Sounds like the kind of question a member of the public might ask! Communication Norms Within The Priesthoods Although priests talk normally when when they meet one another at the water cooler, ex cathedra communication must be performed in a ritually pure way. For the medical priesthood, that means papers published in a medical journal. Consider ritually impure communication - for example, Twitter. Someone may try to make a medical claim (“SSRIs are a great depression treatment!”). But one can’t even predict the genre the reply will take. It could be any of: Insult (“You’re just another a big pharma shill trying to poison us!”)

Inline links: recently reviewed, is only the 74th best, recently “cut ties” with Oz, too little, too late

The Deal With Trauma1 mentions across 1 issues

The Deal With Trauma is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 11, 2025 and August 11, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Dream Book Review: The Deal With Trauma". It most often appears alongside ACX, ACX Grants, Alzheimer's disease risk stratification.

Reference entry: The Deal With Trauma
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 11, 2025
Last seen: August 11, 2025
Book title: The Deal With Trauma

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Open Thread 394 August 11, 2025

ACX 1 shared issues
ACX Grants 1 shared issues
Alzheimer's disease risk stratification 1 shared issues
Anthropic 1 shared issues
Astralcodexten Com 1 shared issues

Source context

Open Thread 394

August 11, 2025 · Original source

5: New subscribers-only post - Dream Book Review: The Deal With Trauma. “Last week, I had an unusually vivid dream about writing a book review for ACX. When I woke up, I remembered the review almost word-for-word. In some sense this is a best case scenario - write posts in my sleep, and spend my waking hours relaxing on the beach - but unfortunately the book I was reviewing doesn’t exist and most of what I say about it doesn’t make sense. Still, I’m posting [it] here.”

Inline links: Dream Book Review: The Deal With Trauma

The Death and Life of Great American Cities1 mentions across 1 issues

The Death and Life of Great American Cities is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 19, 2023 and May 19, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Her most famous book, published in 1961, is called The Death and Life of Great American Cities"; "Jane Jacobs’s most famous book is The Death and Life of Great American Cities". It most often appears alongside 1980, 1980 referendum, 1995 referendum.

Reference entry: The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 19, 2023
Last seen: May 19, 2023
Book title: The Death and Life of Great American Cities

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The Question Of Separatism May 19, 2023

1980 1 shared issues
1980 referendum 1 shared issues
1995 referendum 1 shared issues
A.W. Phillips 1 shared issues
Adam Smith 1 shared issues

Source context

Inline links: List of states in the Holy Roman Empire, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!gyMq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdc388f24-009c-42ee-adca-9d5c50faaa66_932x190.png, academic, reviews, expressed, Japan would soon take over the world, fantasies, of, charter, cities, accidental moderate, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!r8Rb!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F60621c76-b34b-4e10-b272-394480443e1b_1600x1066.png, Amazon

May 19, 2023 · Original source

If you know Jane Jacobs at all, you know her for her work on cities. Her most famous book, published in 1961, is called The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It criticizes large-scale, top-down “urban renewal” policies, which destroy organic communities. Today almost everyone agrees with her on that, and she is considered one of the most influential thinkers on urban theory.

This is not a review of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Perhaps it would be, if I had become interested in Jane Jacobs’s ideas on cities like a normal person. But I didn’t: I started with two books that came to me by random chance, or fate, if you want to call it that.

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

The Death Of Environmentalism: Global Warming In A Post-Environmentalist World1 mentions across 1 issues

The Death Of Environmentalism: Global Warming In A Post-Environmentalist World is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 24, 2022 and May 24, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Michael Shellenberger has books named things like The Death Of Environmentalism". It most often appears alongside #Abolitionist, #AntiNazi, #antiwar.

Reference entry: The Death Of Environmentalism: Global Warming In A Post-Environmentalist World
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 24, 2022
Last seen: May 24, 2022
Book title: The Death Of Environmentalism: Global Warming In A Post-Environmentalist World

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California Gubernatorial Candidates From Z to Z May 24, 2022

#Abolitionist 1 shared issues
#AntiNazi 1 shared issues
#antiwar 1 shared issues
#Democratic 1 shared issues
#ENCRYPTION 1 shared issues

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California Gubernatorial Candidates From Z to Z

May 24, 2022 · Original source

Michael Shellenberger straddles a weird line between environmentalist and anti-environmentalist. He has lots of famous and popular books named things like The Death Of Environmentalism: Global Warming In A Post-Environmentalist World, The Eco-Modernist Manifesto, and Apocalypse Never: Why Environmentalist Alarmism Harms Us All (cf. bright green environmentalism)

Inline links: Michael Shellenberger, bright green environmentalism

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire1 mentions across 1 issues

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 19, 2022 and August 19, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "later volumes of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"; "volumes of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire". It most often appears alongside 1587, 1587, 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline.

Reference entry: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 19, 2022
Last seen: August 19, 2022
Book title: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

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Your Book Review: 1587, A Year Of No Significance August 19, 2022

1587 1 shared issues
1587 1 shared issues
1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline 1 shared issues
A Universal History of Infamy 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues

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August 19, 2022 · Original source

“Another damned, thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr Gibbon?” as the Duke of Gloucester reportedly observed, on receiving one of the later volumes of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

The Design Of Everyday Things1 mentions across 1 issues

The Design Of Everyday Things is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 15, 2023 and September 15, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Design Of Everyday Things , by NineDimensions". It most often appears alongside @campeters4, A Strange Dream, a_reader.

Reference entry: The Design Of Everyday Things
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 15, 2023
Last seen: September 15, 2023
Book title: The Design Of Everyday Things
Likely author: NineDimensions

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Book Review Contest 2023 Winners September 15, 2023

@campeters4 1 shared issues
A Strange Dream 1 shared issues
a_reader 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
aesthetics 1 shared issues

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September 15, 2023 · Original source

The Design Of Everyday Things, by NineDimensions. He is a game developer from Australia who writes short, silly fiction at A Strange Dream and is venturing into blogging at Nine Dimensions.

Inline links: The Design Of Everyday Things, A Strange Dream, Nine Dimensions

The Dilbert Future1 mentions across 1 issues

The Dilbert Future is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 16, 2026 and January 16, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "with books like The Dilbert Future". It most often appears alongside Adams, Alice, All-Seeing Eye.

Reference entry: The Dilbert Future
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: January 16, 2026
Last seen: January 16, 2026
Book title: The Dilbert Future

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The Dilbert Afterlife January 16, 2026

Adams 1 shared issues
Alice 1 shared issues
All-Seeing Eye 1 shared issues
Avatar 1 shared issues
barberpole theory of fashion 1 shared issues

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January 16, 2026 · Original source

Scott Adams never forgave this. Too self-aware to deny it, too narcissistic to accept it, he spent his life searching for a loophole. You can read his frustration in his book titles: How To Fail At Almost Everything And Still Win Big. Trapped In A Dilbert World. Stick To Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain. Still, he refused to stick to comics. For a moment in the late-90s, with books like The Dilbert Principle and The Dilbert Future, he seemed on his way to be becoming a semi-serious business intellectual. He never quite made it, maybe because the Dilbert Principle wasn’t really what managers and consultants wanted to hear:

The Dilbert Principle1 mentions across 1 issues

The Dilbert Principle is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 16, 2026 and January 16, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "with books like The Dilbert Principle". It most often appears alongside Adams, Alice, All-Seeing Eye.

Reference entry: The Dilbert Principle
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: January 16, 2026
Last seen: January 16, 2026
Book title: The Dilbert Principle

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The Dilbert Afterlife January 16, 2026

Adams 1 shared issues
Alice 1 shared issues
All-Seeing Eye 1 shared issues
Avatar 1 shared issues
barberpole theory of fashion 1 shared issues

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Your Book Review: Man’s Search for Meaning

January 16, 2026 · Original source

Scott Adams never forgave this. Too self-aware to deny it, too narcissistic to accept it, he spent his life searching for a loophole. You can read his frustration in his book titles: How To Fail At Almost Everything And Still Win Big. Trapped In A Dilbert World. Stick To Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain. Still, he refused to stick to comics. For a moment in the late-90s, with books like The Dilbert Principle and The Dilbert Future, he seemed on his way to be becoming a semi-serious business intellectual. He never quite made it, maybe because the Dilbert Principle wasn’t really what managers and consultants wanted to hear:

I wrote The Dilbert Principle around the concept that in many cases the least competent, least smart people are promoted, simply because they’re the ones you don't want doing actual work. You want them ordering the doughnuts and yelling at people for not doing their assignments—you know, the easy work. Your heart surgeons and your computer programmers—your smart people—aren't in management.

The Doctor and the Soul1 mentions across 1 issues

The Doctor and the Soul is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 10, 2023 and June 10, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "This resurrected book was later published under the name “ The Doctor and the Soul ”". It most often appears alongside A Poet in Paradise, Agrippa d'Aubigné, Alfred Adler.

Reference entry: The Doctor and the Soul
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 10, 2023
Last seen: June 10, 2023
Book title: The Doctor and the Soul

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Your Book Review: Man’s Search for Meaning June 10, 2023

A Poet in Paradise 1 shared issues
Agrippa d'Aubigné 1 shared issues
Alfred Adler 1 shared issues
Art Spiegelman 1 shared issues
Auschwitz-Birkenau 1 shared issues

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June 10, 2023 · Original source

The other one was his book. When Frankl was arrested, he managed to sneak in with him his finished manuscript in a naive attempt to save it. It was confiscated on the first day of the camp, along with all other personal possessions. Throughout the whole three years of incarceration he tried to rewrite it, or at least to reconstruct it in his head. As he puts it, my deep desire to write this manuscript anew helped me to survive the rigors of the camps I was in. This resurrected book was later published under the name “The Doctor and the Soul”.

The Doctrine Of Fascism1 mentions across 1 issues

The Doctrine Of Fascism is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 25, 2025 and August 25, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "he wrote a short essay, The Doctrine Of Fascism to explain the true nature of fascism". It most often appears alongside ACX, ACX Grants, CBTi.

Reference entry: The Doctrine Of Fascism
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 25, 2025
Last seen: August 25, 2025
Book title: The Doctrine Of Fascism

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Open Thread 396 August 25, 2025

ACX 1 shared issues
ACX Grants 1 shared issues
CBTi 1 shared issues
Dictator Book Club 1 shared issues
Dictator Book Club 1 shared issues

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Open Thread 396

August 25, 2025 · Original source

He had absolutely amazing taste in architecture. Of these, it was #1 that caught my interest. Fascism is in the news a lot these days. Liberals suggest the Trump administration is fascist; conservatives retort that this perspective owes its prominence to a sophomoric version of historiography where “fascism is when you do things liberals don’t like; the less liberals like it, the fascismer it is” […] Maybe (I figured) it was time to learn more than four things about Mussolini. So here’s a fifth: he wrote a short essay, The Doctrine Of Fascism to explain the true nature of fascism once and for all to curious future readers. Subscribers can read it here. 5: Thanks to everyone who offered to be an evaluator for ACX Grants. We still have a few gaps in our team and are looking for volunteers with the following expertise: A volunteer to do a small amount of consulting work on ~5 environment/geoengineering/climate tech grants.

Inline links: absolutely amazing taste in architecture, The Doctrine Of Fascism, here

The Eco-Modernist Manifesto1 mentions across 1 issues

The Eco-Modernist Manifesto is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 24, 2022 and May 24, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Michael Shellenberger has books named The Eco-Modernist Manifesto". It most often appears alongside #Abolitionist, #AntiNazi, #antiwar.

Reference entry: The Eco-Modernist Manifesto
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 24, 2022
Last seen: May 24, 2022
Book title: The Eco-Modernist Manifesto

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California Gubernatorial Candidates From Z to Z May 24, 2022

#Abolitionist 1 shared issues
#AntiNazi 1 shared issues
#antiwar 1 shared issues
#Democratic 1 shared issues
#ENCRYPTION 1 shared issues

Source context

California Gubernatorial Candidates From Z to Z

May 24, 2022 · Original source

Michael Shellenberger straddles a weird line between environmentalist and anti-environmentalist. He has lots of famous and popular books named things like The Death Of Environmentalism: Global Warming In A Post-Environmentalist World, The Eco-Modernist Manifesto, and Apocalypse Never: Why Environmentalist Alarmism Harms Us All (cf. bright green environmentalism)

Inline links: Michael Shellenberger, bright green environmentalism

The Economy of Cities1 mentions across 1 issues

The Economy of Cities is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 19, 2023 and May 19, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Maybe that was in her previous book, The Economy of Cities"; "Jacobs when she wrote The Economy of Cities". It most often appears alongside 1980, 1980 referendum, 1995 referendum.

Reference entry: The Economy of Cities
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 19, 2023
Last seen: May 19, 2023
Book title: The Economy of Cities

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The Question Of Separatism May 19, 2023

1980 1 shared issues
1980 referendum 1 shared issues
1995 referendum 1 shared issues
A.W. Phillips 1 shared issues
Adam Smith 1 shared issues

Source context

Inline links: import replacement, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!5j2T!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7f2675d9-ce56-4ac5-9b78-a16720269dea_1600x1159.png, import substitution industrialization, Scott’s review of, Bardou, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!RfMs!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc119b085-f7b3-4e09-a586-9f4fc4c2ea21_1200x1600.png

May 19, 2023 · Original source

Of course, nations are an economically important concept because of that one property: they are sovereign, and therefore they write laws and implement policies that affect the economy. These policies can be productively compared. But that’s about it — for everything else, nations aren’t the right way to think about wealth. One reason is simply that they’re very different from one another: “it affronts common sense,” Jacobs writes, “to think of units as disparate as, say, Singapore and the United States, or Ecuador and the Soviet Union, or the Netherlands and Canada, as economic common denominators.” I would add that countries are arbitrary and changing: when the Soviet Union was replaced by 15 sovereign countries, the economic reality didn’t suddenly reshape itself to match the new borders. Lastly, nations contain, under the hood, many sub-economies that are also highly different from one another. None of that is secret or forbidden knowledge. Everyone has always been aware that New York City, or Milan, are economically very different from rural Mississippi or Sicily. But I find that it’s far easier to think in terms of “the United States” or “Italy,” especially when you’re not from there. Nations are an abstraction of real-life complexity, and are accordingly very tempting to use. Also, they’re often the entities that collect statistics, which is another difficult-to-resist temptation for anyone who likes quantitative data. Cities as Radiators of Economic Forces If nations aren’t the best unit to analyze the economy, what is? This is a Jane Jacobs book, so the answer is obviously going to be cities. Jacobs doesn’t actually give a clear argument why. Maybe that was in her previous book, The Economy of Cities. So far as I can see, her reasoning is, ironically, a bit tautological: “all developing economic life depends on city economies; it depends on them by definition because, wherever economic life is developing, the very process itself creates cities and has probably always done so.” But so far as I can see, this reasoning is correct. Cities concentrate people, and therefore economic life, and therefore economic power. The driving force for all this is a phenomenon that, from what I gather, was discovered by Jacobs when she wrote The Economy of Cities: import replacement. Consider, say, Boston back when it was a tiny settlement, not yet a city, in colonial times. At first, Boston didn’t produce much, especially not much that would be of interest to its main trading partner, London. It exported some natural resources: timber, fish. Whatever else the Bostonians needed, they needed to import it from other cities, again mostly London. (Remember to think of imports and exports in terms of cities, not nations.) For instance, at first, all metal tools in Boston came from European cities, and were paid for by the revenue from selling the timber and fish. Then, one day, some Bostonians decided to build an ironworks and make metal tools themselves. (Pictured: a reconstruction of the Saugus Iron Works, established 1646.) This wasn’t of any interest to London or other European cities. The Bostonians weren’t nearly as good or efficient at making metal tools as Londonians were. So Boston couldn’t export the metal tools back to Europe — but it could use them internally, and also export them to other American cities that were about as poor as Boston was, or poorer. Internally, this meant the spark of a manufacturing economy in Boston, as easily obtained metal parts made it easier for other Bostonians to replace other imports from European cities, and eventually develop a symbiotic network of industries. It also meant that the revenue from fish and timber could be used to import new things, including new innovations from European cities (which would later become opportunities for more import replacement). And because there were customers for Boston-made metal goods in New York and Philadelphia, and eventually Cincinnati and Chicago and Pittsburgh as these cities came into existence, it meant additional revenue for Boston that it could reinvest into developing its production further. For Jacobs, virtually all city development can be seen through the lens of import replacement (which, to be clear, has approximately nothing to do with policies of import substitution industrialization; import replacement is not a policy, but a naturally arising free market phenomenon). Her book contains many other examples than Boston, such as Venice, which started off in the early Middle Ages as a small town that sold salt to Constantinople, but then diversified its production to become one of the wealthiest cities of its time; or Taipei and Kaohsiung, two cities in Taiwan that kickstarted their development not long before the 1980s, by forcing expropriated landlords to invest into local import-replacing businesses. One is reminded of Scott’s review of How Asia Works. Import replacement, then, is what makes cities economically powerful. And this power is so great that it causes ripples in distant places. In fact it is the main reason that anything happens at all in non-city areas. Jacobs gives the example of Bardou, a small village in southern France. Bardou looks like this: To the extent that Bardou ever had an economic life, that life was almost entirely driven by distant cities. In ancient times, the area was populated because of iron mines nearby. The mines were exploited to serve the needs of people in the distant cities of Lugdunum (Lyon), Nemausus (Nîmes), or even Rome. As Jacobs notes, we could say that the mines served “the Roman Empire,” but that would be another example of using the abstraction of sovereign countries when we should instead be specific. It was Lugdunum, Nemausus and Rome that wanted the iron — not some random rural area of the empire, and certainly not the part of the empire in which Bardou was located. Eventually the mines and the region were abandoned. More than 1,000 years later, peasants moved into the area and built the modern village. For centuries they lived a wretchedly poor life of subsistence farming. No cities exerted any influence on it, and indeed nothing happened. Then, in the 19th century, the people of Bardou learned that they could improve their situation by moving to distant cities such as Paris, and most of them did. Again, the force wasn’t being exerted by “France”; Bardou was already part of France. The force was specifically being exerted by Paris and other cities with jobs for poor peasants. By the 1960s, only one old man was left. That’s when two foreign visitors, a German and an American, happened upon the village, decided to buy most of it, revitalized it, and turned it into a tourist spot (and even, for a brief time, into a set for a movie company). Today Bardou is a popular place for travelers — who are mostly city people, and spend money that was mostly earned in cities. The Bardou story contains examples of several of the forces that import-replacing cities radiate, according to Jacobs. These forces are central to her thinking. There are five of them: Markets. Cities house a lot of people who need a lot of goods and services, and are therefore strong markets to sell goods and services to. This was the force that acted on the Bardou area when it was a Roman mining region, and again today when it functions as a tourist spot for city vacationers.

The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding1 mentions across 1 issues

The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 14, 2023 and July 14, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "This is a review of his 1997 book, The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding". It most often appears alongside !Kung San, aboriginal people on the west coast of Canada, Adam Smith.

Reference entry: The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 14, 2023
Last seen: July 14, 2023
Book title: The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding

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Your Book Review: The Educated Mind July 14, 2023

!Kung San 1 shared issues
aboriginal people on the west coast of Canada 1 shared issues
Adam Smith 1 shared issues
ADHD 1 shared issues
Aeschylus 1 shared issues

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Response to Hanson On Health Care

July 14, 2023 · Original source

This is a review of his 1997 book, The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding. It’s his opus, the one book in which he most systematically laid out his paradigm. It’s not an especially easy read — Egan’s theory knits together evolutionary history, anthropology, cultural history, and cognitive psychology, and tells a new big history of humanity to make sense of how education has worked in the past, and how we might make it work now.

Inline links: The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding

The Effective Altruist Talmud1 mentions across 1 issues

The Effective Altruist Talmud is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 04, 2024 and April 04, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Excerpts From The Effective Altruist Talmud". It most often appears alongside Aaron Peskin, ACLU, AGI And The Efficient Market Hypothesis.

Reference entry: The Effective Altruist Talmud
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 04, 2024
Last seen: April 04, 2024
Book title: The Effective Altruist Talmud

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Links For April 2024 April 04, 2024

Aaron Peskin 1 shared issues
ACLU 1 shared issues
AGI And The Efficient Market Hypothesis 1 shared issues
Algernon 1 shared issues
alt-right 1 shared issues

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Links For April 2024

April 04, 2024 · Original source

14: Elsewhere in rationalsphere April Fools: Linch et al announce Open Asteroid Impact: “When Krishna said ‘I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds,’ I believe he was thinking about the impact on jobs.” Also: Excerpts From The Effective Altruist Talmud.

Inline links: Open Asteroid Impact, Excerpts From The Effective Altruist Talmud

The Elephant in the Brain1 mentions across 1 issues

The Elephant in the Brain is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 30, 2024 and April 30, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Or, consulted our 2016 book The Elephant in the Brain (52K copies sold; I’m sure he knows of it)". It most often appears alongside 9-11, CATO Unbound, Cochrane Collaboration.

Reference entry: The Elephant in the Brain
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 30, 2024
Last seen: April 30, 2024
Book title: The Elephant in the Brain

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Response to Hanson On Health Care April 30, 2024

9-11 1 shared issues
CATO Unbound 1 shared issues
Cochrane Collaboration 1 shared issues
construal level theory 1 shared issues
Cut Medicine in Half 1 shared issues

Source context

April 30, 2024 · Original source

Scott then quotes 500 words from a 2022 post of mine, none of which have me saying all medicine is useless on all margins. Even so, he repeats this claim several times in his post. If Scott had doubts, he could have asked me. Or, consulted our 2016 book The Elephant in the Brain (52K copies sold; I’m sure he knows of it):

Inline links: post, The Elephant in the Brain

The Emperor1 mentions across 1 issues

The Emperor is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 14, 2021 and October 14, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "reviews The Emperor, a book on the court of Haile Selassie of Ethiopia". It most often appears alongside @literalbanana, ACX, Barcelona.

Reference entry: The Emperor
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: October 14, 2021
Last seen: October 14, 2021
Book title: The Emperor

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Links For October October 14, 2021

@literalbanana 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
Barcelona 1 shared issues
Bay Area 1 shared issues
behavioral econ 1 shared issues

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Links For October

October 14, 2021 · Original source

14: Whimsi, author of the review of Down And Out In Paris And London that won second place in the book review contest here, reviews The Emperor, a book on the court of Haile Selassie of Ethiopia.

Inline links: reviews

The End of Doom1 mentions across 1 issues

The End of Doom is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 21, 2021 and May 21, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "When he was selling The End of Doom". It most often appears alongside 1992 treaty, ACX, Africa.

Reference entry: The End of Doom
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 21, 2021
Last seen: May 21, 2021
Book title: The End of Doom

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Your Book Review: The Accidental Superpower May 21, 2021

1992 treaty 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
Africa 1 shared issues
Alaska 1 shared issues
Allen Farrington 1 shared issues

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From Nostradamus To Fukuyama

May 21, 2021 · Original source

Then there’s something like the CNBC effect. Why did stock prices increase/decrease on any random day? Intelligent people don’t think like this, but there is demand for “analysis” of such questions. Some people go so far as to say that it’s the same reason that Wall Street provides market research; the demand is there, so someone will sell it. It reminds me of a story I heard from Reason columnist Ron Bailey. When he was selling The End of Doom, an agent asked him to change his thesis, because optimism doesn’t sell, whereas doom could make him a very rich author. I very much doubt that Zeihan created his analysis in order to arrive at the conclusion that we’re going to see a global Disorder over the next decade, 11 but once you see structural incentives it’s hard to banish them from your thoughts (see also, Meditations on Moloch).

Inline links: 11, Meditations on Moloch

The End Of History And The Last Man1 mentions across 1 issues

The End Of History And The Last Man is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 28, 2022 and September 28, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "In 1992 he wrote a book called The End Of History And The Last Man". It most often appears alongside 9-11, AI, Better Angels.

Reference entry: The End Of History And The Last Man
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 28, 2022
Last seen: September 28, 2022
Book title: The End Of History And The Last Man

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From Nostradamus To Fukuyama September 28, 2022

9-11 1 shared issues
AI 1 shared issues
Better Angels 1 shared issues
Boris Johnson 1 shared issues
Britain 1 shared issues

Source context

September 28, 2022 · Original source

No! Sorry! Not that! That’s the popular misinterpretation! In 1992 he wrote a book called The End Of History And The Last Man, arguing that liberal democracy was the last form of government we would ever need, everything would get more and more liberal democracy over time, and history - in the sense of a constant progression of paradigms and worldviews and political-economic systems - would settle down and stop, in favor of everything just being liberal democracy all the time.

The Eumenides1 mentions across 1 issues

The Eumenides is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 16, 2023 and June 16, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "I claim it is as a dark mirror of The Eumenides"; "The Eumenides is about the transition from the ancient logic of feuds and vengeance to the modern logic of courtroom trials". It most often appears alongside Aeschylus, Aevar, Althing.

Reference entry: The Eumenides
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 16, 2023
Last seen: June 16, 2023
Book title: The Eumenides

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Your Book Review: Njal’s Saga June 16, 2023

Aeschylus 1 shared issues
Aevar 1 shared issues
Althing 1 shared issues
Althing 1 shared issues
Althing 1 shared issues

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Your Book Review: Njal’s Saga

June 16, 2023 · Original source

So what is Njal’s Saga’s place in the Western canon? I claim it is as a dark mirror of The Eumenides.

The Eumenides is a play from 5th-century-BC Athens (another of those brief efflorescences of human freedom - this is important!). Orestes learns his mother has murdered his father. Any man who does not avenge his father’s death is accursed. But any man who murders his mother is also accursed.

Like Njal’s Saga, The Eumenides is about the transition from the ancient logic of feuds and vengeance to the modern logic of courtroom trials. Like Njal’s Saga, it’s a free society looking at itself and noticing that its freedom depends on a certain conception of logic-driven Law.

The Expanding Circle1 mentions across 1 issues

The Expanding Circle 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 "Peter Singer as criticising Turnbull in The Expanding Circle , pp 24-26"; "Ellickson also cites (among others) Peter Singer as criticising Turnbull in The Expanding Circle". It most often appears alongside ACX, amoral familialism, An Introduction to Law and Economics.

Reference entry: The Expanding Circle
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 08, 2021
Last seen: April 08, 2021
Book title: The Expanding Circle

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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

Ellickson also cites (among others) Peter Singer as criticising Turnbull in The Expanding Circle, pp 24-26. Looking it up, Singer points out that, even if we take Turnbull’s account at face value, Ik society retains an ethical code.

Inline links: The Expanding Circle

The Expanse1 mentions across 1 issues

The Expanse is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 30, 2021 and April 30, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "the second book in The Expanse series". It most often appears alongside AI, AI research, Air.

Reference entry: The Expanse
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 30, 2021
Last seen: April 30, 2021
Book title: The Expanse

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Your Book Review: The Wizard And The Prophet April 30, 2021

AI 1 shared issues
AI research 1 shared issues
Air 1 shared issues
Air 1 shared issues
Alice Waters 1 shared issues

Source context

Inline links: trying to prioritize equity in vaccine distribution, more deaths, including in the historically underprivileged populations you were trying to save

April 30, 2021 · Original source

In Caliban’s War, the second book in The Expanse series, there’s an excellent metaphor for how having more smart people working on problems fails in an atmosphere of increased complexity, offered by fictional future UN government higher-up Chrisjen Avasarala: "You take part of a problem and you put it somewhere, get some people working on it, and then you get another part of the problem and get other people working on that. And pretty soon you have seven, eight, a hundred different little boxes with work going on, and no one talking to anyone because it would break security protocol." Except instead of security protocol, you could substitute any number of Moloch-y reasons, or just regular old-fashioned human tunnel vision. If there’s one thing we can take from the Prophets, it’s their focus on trying to understand complex systems holistically, Chesterton’s Fence style, instead of as piecemeal problem-boxes in a hundred siloed experts’ rooms. Each of today’s systems is more like Chesterton’s Maze of Forking Paths, where pulling out a brick here (say, trying to prioritize equity in vaccine distribution) leads to a catastrophic tunnel collapse there (more deaths, including in the historically underprivileged populations you were trying to save). The Prophets may have a less than stellar track record of questioning new technologies, but I think they’re right that the Wizardly tendency to reduce complexity to a discrete number of problem-boxes can only get us so far – and, as we saw with the myriad of expert box factories talking past each other in the global COVID pandemic response, it can harm as well as help. If we’re always hotfixing as our big picture grows bigger and more complex, we’re also always creating new inadvertent problems with our hotfixes, and are in ever more danger of forgetting about that one critical problem box until it’s too late.

The Fairie Queene1 mentions across 1 issues

The Fairie Queene is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 23, 2021 and September 23, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "analogy to poetry (cf. The Fairie Queene vs. William Carlos Williams)". It most often appears alongside Art Deco skyscrapers, Britain, Cardiff Castle.

Reference entry: The Fairie Queene
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 23, 2021
Last seen: September 23, 2021
Book title: The Fairie Queene

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Whither Tartaria? September 23, 2021

Art Deco skyscrapers 1 shared issues
Britain 1 shared issues
Cardiff Castle 1 shared issues
Catholicism 1 shared issues
China 1 shared issues

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Whither Tartaria?

September 23, 2021 · Original source

Older art tends to have bright colors, ornate details, realistic representations, technical skill, and be instantly visually appealing to the average person. Newer art tends to be more abstract, require less obvious skill, and have less direct appeal. Although it doesn't fit in meme format, I would carry the analogy to poetry (cf. The Fairie Queene vs. William Carlos Williams) and certain pieces of high status music (cf. Mozart vs. Philip Glass). Obviously these are broad generalizations vulnerable to cherry-picking; I'm mostly relying on your common sense here.

The Fall Of Robespierre1 mentions across 1 issues

The Fall Of Robespierre is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 02, 2022 and September 02, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Fall Of Robespierre , reviewed by Duane McMullen". It most often appears alongside 1587, 1587, A Year Of No Significance, @campeters4.

Reference entry: The Fall Of Robespierre
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 02, 2022
Last seen: September 02, 2022
Book title: The Fall Of Robespierre
Likely author: Duane McMullen

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Book Review Contest 2022 Winners September 02, 2022

1587 1 shared issues
1587, A Year Of No Significance 1 shared issues
@campeters4 1 shared issues
a_reader 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues

Source context

Book Review: Arabian Nights

September 02, 2022 · Original source

The Fall Of Robespierre, reviewed by Duane McMullen. Duane is from Ottawa, Canada, and is trying to figure out how to make a difference.

Inline links: The Fall Of Robespierre

The Fisherman's Tale1 mentions across 1 issues

The Fisherman's Tale 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 "I think the worst offender is The Fisherman's Tale, where Scheherazade tells a story"; "In The Fisherman's Tale, one genie was angry about being trapped too long". It most often appears alongside Abbasid Caliphate, Allah, Arabian Nights.

Reference entry: The Fisherman's Tale
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 24, 2021
Last seen: May 24, 2021
Book title: The Fisherman's Tale

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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

Source context

May 24, 2021 · Original source

It's actually worse than this, because the stories usually contain other stories. You'll be telling a story to the sultan, and the main character will encounter his sultan and start telling him a story, and the main character of that story will encounter her sultan and have to tell him a story, and so on. I think the worst offender is The Fisherman's Tale, where Scheherazade tells a story about a fisherman and a genie, in which the genie tells the fisherman a story about a king and a vizier, in which the vizier tells the king a story about a prince and an ogre, in which the prince tells the ogre a story about his past travels. The recursion does stop there, and we eventually get to hear the end of the fisherman/genie story (the genie, the fisherman, and the sultan to whom the fisherman tells his story end up saving a prince who was turned to stone after his wife cheated on him with a black man). But it's touch-and-go for a while, and you start to worry that one of these stories will have a branching factor > 1, and you'll just keep getting into deeper and deeper frame stories forever. Maybe this is how the Abbasid Caliphate fell.

Genies: These are everywhere, so much so that barren islands are sometimes described as "inhabited neither by men nor genies". Most genies are free and want to kill you, though if you're protagonisty enough they might be convinced to give you a break. Other genies have been trapped in jars by King Solomon. Supposedly if you let them out they grant you wishes, but this seems to be a spontaneous expression of gratitude rather than an obligation. In The Fisherman's Tale, one genie was angry about being trapped too long, and decided to kill whoever let him out instead. Still other genies have been bound to lamps or rings by sorcerers, and are under the command of whoever owns the lamp or ring.

The Fountainhead1 mentions across 1 issues

The Fountainhead is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 08, 2024 and August 08, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "I've come to think that The Fountainhead is the key to Rand's view of Nietzsche"; "I’ve never read The Fountainhead and don’t have a position here". It most often appears alongside 10240, 4chan, @slatestarcodex.

Reference entry: The Fountainhead
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 08, 2024
Last seen: August 08, 2024
Book title: The Fountainhead

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Highlights From The Comments On Nietzsche August 08, 2024

10240 1 shared issues
4chan 1 shared issues
@slatestarcodex 1 shared issues
Acemoglu & Robinson 1 shared issues
Achillead 1 shared issues

Source context

August 08, 2024 · Original source

I've come to think that The Fountainhead is the key to Rand's view of Nietzsche. Not just because she originally planned to use a quotation from him as its epigraph, but because of its major conflict between Howard Roark and Gail Wynand. Wynand really is something of a Nietzschean overman: born in the slums, he educated himself, became a successful newspaper publisher, is hugely rich, and besides that, is a lethally skilled fighter and superb in bed. And he's driven to seek power. But Roark is not a Nietzschean overman, though he's mocked as one a couple of times: He cares about his work, not about power. I see this as the debate between the Nietzschean Rand and the Aristotelian Rand who wrote Atlas Shrugged. (If you read Aristotle's account of the megalopsychos or "great-souled man," it's almost a perfect fit to what Rand says about Roark.)

I’ve never read The Fountainhead and don’t have a position here.

The Full Stack of Society1 mentions across 1 issues

The Full Stack of Society is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 21, 2021 and May 21, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "see Conrad Bastable’s (very funny and entertaining) The Full Stack of Society". It most often appears alongside 1992 treaty, ACX, Africa.

Reference entry: The Full Stack of Society
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 21, 2021
Last seen: May 21, 2021
Book title: The Full Stack of Society

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Your Book Review: The Accidental Superpower May 21, 2021

1992 treaty 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
Africa 1 shared issues
Alaska 1 shared issues
Allen Farrington 1 shared issues

Source context

May 21, 2021 · Original source

Are people today aware of how deserts and oceans provide security against invasions, how waterways facilitate trade, or how international trade requires protection against adversaries? If America actually does pull back from the free trade world that it shaped after the war, we should expect a lot more attention to questions like these. In the meantime, at least in part due to Zeihan’s influence, I’m seeing more discussion about these subjects. For a (slightly) less-than-book-length preview of them, see Conrad Bastable’s (very funny and entertaining, to say nothing of its informational value) The Full Stack of Society: Can You Make A Whole Society Wealthier? [Full Version], which cites Zeihan at some point. Or if podcasts are more your thing, try Hidden Forces with Demetri Kofinas, who recently interviewed the world-traveling/veteran/writer/investor Radigan Carter and got into Zeihan’s thesis with him (they both agree with it), or any of the many podcasts with Zeihan himself.

Inline links: The Full Stack of Society: Can You Make A Whole Society Wealthier? [Full Version], recently interviewed, Radigan Carter

The Future Of Fusion1 mentions across 1 issues

The Future Of Fusion is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 23, 2022 and May 23, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "The full list of Book Review Contest finalists is: ... The Future Of Fusion". It most often appears alongside ACX, Book Review Contest, BW.

Reference entry: The Future Of Fusion
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 23, 2022
Last seen: May 23, 2022
Book title: The Future Of Fusion

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Open Thread 225 May 23, 2022

ACX 1 shared issues
Book Review Contest 1 shared issues
BW 1 shared issues
Carrick Flynn 1 shared issues
Consciousness and the Brain 1 shared issues

Source context

May 23, 2022 · Original source

1: The full list of Book Review Contest finalists is: Consciousness And The Brain, Making Nature, The Anti-Politics Machine, The Castrato, The Dawn Of Everything (EH’s review), The Future Of Fusion, The Illusion Of Grand Strategy, The Internationalists, The Outlier, The Righteous Mind (BW’s review), The Society Of The Spectacle, and Viral.

The Genealogy of Morals1 mentions across 1 issues

The Genealogy of Morals is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 08, 2024 and August 08, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "He writes in The Genealogy of Morals that “the bad conscience". It most often appears alongside 10240, 4chan, @slatestarcodex.

Reference entry: The Genealogy of Morals
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 08, 2024
Last seen: August 08, 2024
Book title: The Genealogy of Morals

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Highlights From The Comments On Nietzsche August 08, 2024

10240 1 shared issues
4chan 1 shared issues
@slatestarcodex 1 shared issues
Acemoglu & Robinson 1 shared issues
Achillead 1 shared issues

Source context

Book Review: The Gervais Principle

August 08, 2024 · Original source

Nietzsche scholar here (bona fides: an academic book and several journal articles on Nietzsche). I just want to note that Nietzsche is often misunderstood as defending master morality, or wanting it reinstated, or something like that. None of that is true. In fact, he describes the ancient nobles as so crude, unreflective, and unsymbolic as to be scarcely imaginable by moderns. After 1900 years of slave morality (Christianity, natch), our psychology is fundamentally altered. He writes in The Genealogy of Morals that “the bad conscience [guilt, a consequence of slave morality] is an illness, but as pregnancy is an illness.” We can’t go back to the old masters way of thinking, but we also need to get rid of slave morality, which he thinks is decadent (=anti-life] and fosters ressentiment. We need to give birth to something new.

The Gervais Principle1 mentions across 1 issues

The Gervais Principle is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 10, 2022 and May 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Gervais Principle , by postrationalist heresiarch Venkatesh Rao, claims to be a business book". It most often appears alongside A Few Good Men, Adolf Eichmann, Akron.

Reference entry: The Gervais Principle
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 10, 2022
Last seen: May 10, 2022
Book title: The Gervais Principle

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Book Review: The Gervais Principle May 10, 2022

A Few Good Men 1 shared issues
Adolf Eichmann 1 shared issues
Akron 1 shared issues
Akron, Ohio 1 shared issues
Andy 1 shared issues

Source context

May 10, 2022 · Original source

The Gervais Principle, by postrationalist heresiarch Venkatesh Rao, claims to be a business book.

In 2009, Rao wrote The Gervais Principle, continuing the increasing-cynicism trend. The Principle, named after The Office writer Ricky Gervais, goes:

In Rao’s statement of the Gervais Principle:

The Giver1 mentions across 1 issues

The Giver is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 17, 2021 and August 17, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "I read The Giver in multiple English classes". It most often appears alongside Arthur, Arthur Cleveland Harrison, Benezet experiment.

Reference entry: The Giver
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 17, 2021
Last seen: August 17, 2021
Book title: The Giver

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Kids Can Recover From Missing Even Quite A Lot Of School August 17, 2021

Arthur 1 shared issues
Arthur Cleveland Harrison 1 shared issues
Benezet experiment 1 shared issues
Chicago Style 1 shared issues
Cleveland 1 shared issues

Source context

Kids Can Recover From Missing Even Quite A Lot Of School

August 17, 2021 · Original source

Even beyond this, school is repetitive. I learned the same Civil War facts in fifth, eighth, and eleventh grade. I read The Giver in multiple English classes. And this is just the stuff it’s embarrassing to have repeated. The actually important skills - how to write essays, how to cite sources - get deliberately repeated year after year.

The Goddess Of Everything Else1 mentions across 1 issues

The Goddess Of Everything Else is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 28, 2023 and September 28, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "my old poem “The Goddess Of Everything Else”"; "f my old poem “The Goddess Of Everything Else”". It most often appears alongside 2020 election, @eigenrobot, @jeremychrysler.

Reference entry: The Goddess Of Everything Else
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 28, 2023
Last seen: September 28, 2023
Book title: The Goddess Of Everything Else

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Issue trail

Links For September 2023 September 28, 2023

2020 election 1 shared issues
@eigenrobot 1 shared issues
@jeremychrysler 1 shared issues
Adam Mastroianni 1 shared issues
Adversarial examples 1 shared issues

Source context

Links For September 2023

September 28, 2023 · Original source

6: I somehow forgot to mention this until now, but Rational Animations has made a video of my old poem “The Goddess Of Everything Else”:

Inline links: Rational Animations, “The Goddess Of Everything Else”

the Gospels1 mentions across 1 issues

the Gospels 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 "There’s an analysis of fishing-related words in the Gospels". It most often appears alongside Abercrombie & Fitch, Athenian democracy, Athenians.

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

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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

Why Is The Central Valley So Bad?

February 16, 2022 · Original source

Although I’m impressed by Teach’s erudition, I’m - let’s call it “not as impressed as he is with himself”. It’s impressive how many facts he knows, but he warps them into Jenga towers of speculation that can’t possibly be true, almost compulsively, without bothering to justify himself. There’s an analysis of fishing-related words in the Gospels where he mentions he ran it by a bunch of Greek scholars and they all said it was nonsense. He seems to accept they’re right and his analysis is wrong, but - doesn’t care? Makes us read it anyway? Maybe it’s the semirandom canvas thing after all?

The Grapes of Wrath1 mentions across 1 issues

The Grapes of Wrath is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 21, 2022 and September 21, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "cf. The Grapes of Wrath". It most often appears alongside 1995 to 2000, Arizona, Atonio Avalos.

Reference entry: The Grapes of Wrath
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 21, 2022
Last seen: September 21, 2022
Book title: The Grapes of Wrath

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Issue trail

Why Is The Central Valley So Bad? September 21, 2022

1995 to 2000 1 shared issues
Arizona 1 shared issues
Atonio Avalos 1 shared issues
Avalos 1 shared issues
Bakersfield 1 shared issues

Source context

September 21, 2022 · Original source

V. So why is the Central Valley so bad? It’s an agricultural region, but lots of places are agricultural. It got lots of immigrants, but no more than many other places. It’s polluted - but so was LA, and LA rebounded. This is just a weak guess, but I think it starts with their crops. The Midwest grows mostly corn and wheat. The Central Valley is more fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Corn and wheat are easier to harvest, so middle-class farmers can own the farm and buy a mechanical harvester or something. Fruits, vegetables, and nuts benefit from intensive manual picking, so farm owners hire outside labor. According to Carolina Demography: There are about 3 million farmworkers in the United States: about two million are family farmworkers and another one million are hired farmworkers…nationally, about three-fourths of hired farmworkers are foreign-born; most (69%) were born in Mexico; 6% were born in Central America; and 1% were born in another country. Given that these are mostly Mexican immigrants, we’re probably not talking about people who are hired to grow corn in Kansas. I think plausibly the majority of US hired farmworkers live in California’s Central Valley. This makes it a sort of plantation agriculture system, which naturally tends towards landowners taking all the gains and workers ending up as an underclass. In the mid-20th century, the local plantation underclass was made of Okies (cf. The Grapes of Wrath). In the later 20th century, many immigrants moved in, lowering wages. Although immigrants don’t usually lower wages, this is because there are usually lots of industries for people to branch out into, but the Central Valley only has agriculture. Also, agribusinesses were becoming better at mechanizing their operations. Although technology doesn’t usually lower wages, again, this requires lots of diverse industries, and the Central Valley only had agriculture. All of this corresponds to the 1975-1985 period on the graphs where wages were going down. But it sounded from some of the testimonials above like the Central Valley didn’t become truly miserable until the late 90s. I’m not sure why this is. It could be the immigrants switching from being migrant laborers to raising families, and those families were impacted by poverty and inequality in a way the original migrants weren’t. It could be worsening drug problems as new drugs get invented and go down in price. (I’m not sure if NIMBYism and rising house prices also played a part. House prices do seem to have risen, a lot, but I was under the impression that building things in the Central Valley was easy and most of a house’s price there is construction rather than land. I’m not sure why house prices would have gone up so much since 1990 if this were true, though.) Other things that the articles I read emphasized: There’s a severe drought in the Central Valley right now. This is probably partly climate change, partly bad luck, and partly California diverting water to hydrate growing coastal cities. This has made everything worse (but then why isn’t that reflected in worsening economic statistics?)

Inline links: Carolina Demography, Okies

The Great Idea Factory1 mentions across 1 issues

The Great Idea Factory is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 18, 2021 and February 18, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "as reported in The Great Idea Factory". It most often appears alongside 1957, Alexander H, American.

Reference entry: The Great Idea Factory
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: February 18, 2021
Last seen: February 18, 2021
Book title: The Great Idea Factory

Outbound links

Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On Cult Of Smart February 18, 2021

1957 1 shared issues
Alexander H 1 shared issues
American 1 shared issues
Bell Labs 1 shared issues
Bronx Science 1 shared issues

Source context

Highlights From The Comments On Cult Of Smart

February 18, 2021 · Original source

Perhaps SSC readers know of Harry Nyquist — as reported in The Great Idea Factory, the Bell Labs patent lawyers wanted to know why some people were so much more productive (in terms of patents) than others. After crunching a lot of data, they found that the only thing the productive employees had in common (other than having made it through the Bell Labs hiring process) was that “… Workers with the most patents often shared lunch or breakfast with a Bell Labs electrical engineer named Harry Nyquist. It wasn’t the case that Nyquist gave them specific ideas. Rather, as one scientist recalled, ‘he drew people out, got them thinking.” (Pg. 135)

The Great Mortgaging: Housing Finance, Crises, and Business Cycles1 mentions across 1 issues

The Great Mortgaging: Housing Finance, Crises, and Business Cycles is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 09, 2021 and December 09, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "according to The Great Mortgaging: Housing Finance, Crises, and Business Cycles by Jordà"; "according to The Great Mortgaging: Housing Finance, Crises, and Business Cycles by Jordà, Schularick, and Taylor". It most often appears alongside 2017 PTAPP survey, AEI, agglomeration effect.

Reference entry: The Great Mortgaging: Housing Finance, Crises, and Business Cycles
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: December 09, 2021
Last seen: December 09, 2021
Book title: The Great Mortgaging: Housing Finance, Crises, and Business Cycles
Likely author: Jord

Outbound links

Issue trail

Does Georgism Work? Part 1: Is Land Really A Big Deal? December 09, 2021

2017 PTAPP survey 1 shared issues
AEI 1 shared issues
agglomeration effect 1 shared issues
Albouy 1 shared issues
Alexandra Elbakyan 1 shared issues

Source context

Does Georgism Work? Part 1: Is Land Really A Big Deal?

December 09, 2021 · Original source

Lately, they lend it out to people who want to buy real estate, according to The Great Mortgaging: Housing Finance, Crises, and Business Cycles by Jordà, Schularick, and Taylor. This chart shows three snapshots from 1928, 1970, and 2007 of the share of all bank lending that goes to real estate for a selection of major countries around the world.

Inline links: The Great Mortgaging: Housing Finance, Crises, and Business Cycles

The Great Transformation1 mentions across 1 issues

The Great Transformation is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 22, 2022 and July 22, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation"; "comes from Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation". It most often appears alongside 2020 election, 2022 book review contest, 2122.

Reference entry: The Great Transformation
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 22, 2022
Last seen: July 22, 2022
Book title: The Great Transformation
Likely author: Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: The Society Of The Spectacle July 22, 2022

2020 election 1 shared issues
2022 book review contest 1 shared issues
2122 1 shared issues
Afghanistan 1 shared issues
Africa 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: The Society Of The Spectacle

July 22, 2022 · Original source

2: The Uruk series by sam[]zdat is an excellent companion to this book, and I’ll reference it several times. The relevant piece here comes from Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation: “Polanyi calls the tendency to judge the world solely financially the economic prejudice… A market society is one based entirely around a market. Any damage to the market damages the entire society.” All modern nations are market societies in some fashion, and fall prey to the economic prejudice.

Inline links: The Uruk series

The GREATER Generation1 mentions across 1 issues

The GREATER Generation is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 06, 2026 and January 06, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "Leonard Steinhorn wrote The GREATER Generation about how amazing Boomers were". It most often appears alongside @docneto, Americans, Andy G.

Reference entry: The GREATER Generation
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: January 06, 2026
Last seen: January 06, 2026
Book title: The GREATER Generation

Outbound links

Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On Boomers January 06, 2026

@docneto 1 shared issues
Americans 1 shared issues
Andy G 1 shared issues
Baby Boomer 1 shared issues
Ben Smith 1 shared issues

Source context

Highlights From The Comments On Boomers

January 06, 2026 · Original source

It’s hard to hate the Greatest Generation, not because they were great (whatever) but because someone outside their generation declared them to be the Greatest. When Leonard Steinhorn wrote The GREATER Generation about how amazing Boomers were, he did it because he, a Boomer, wanted more credit. Look at me! Look at me! There have been so many years of Look at me!

The Greek Alexander Romance1 mentions across 1 issues

The Greek Alexander Romance is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 19, 2023 and September 19, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Penguin’s The Greek Alexander Romance , a pastiche of several versions". It most often appears alongside 15th century Sicilian manuscript, Agrimardio, Aigeis.

Reference entry: The Greek Alexander Romance
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 19, 2023
Last seen: September 19, 2023
Book title: The Greek Alexander Romance

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: The Alexander Romance September 19, 2023

15th century Sicilian manuscript 1 shared issues
Agrimardio 1 shared issues
Aigeis 1 shared issues
Alans 1 shared issues
Alexander 1 shared issues

Source context

September 19, 2023 · Original source

The outline below will be based on Penguin’s The Greek Alexander Romance, a pastiche of several versions keeping the skeleton of a 15th century Sicilian manuscript. Its history ensures that it’s wildly uneven; some parts seem to be mostly a real history of Alexander with a few embellishments; others are obviously completely imaginary. I’m going to assume you know Alexander’s real conquests and focus on the imaginary parts:

Inline links: The Greek Alexander Romance

The Histories1 mentions across 1 issues

The Histories is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 14, 2023 and July 14, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "It’s best exemplified, Egan writes, in The Histories, by Herodotus". It most often appears alongside !Kung San, aboriginal people on the west coast of Canada, Adam Smith.

Reference entry: The Histories
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 14, 2023
Last seen: July 14, 2023
Book title: The Histories
Likely author: Herodotus

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: The Educated Mind July 14, 2023

!Kung San 1 shared issues
aboriginal people on the west coast of Canada 1 shared issues
Adam Smith 1 shared issues
ADHD 1 shared issues
Aeschylus 1 shared issues

Source context

What Is Man, That Thou Art Mindful Of Him?

July 14, 2023 · Original source

There’s something missing… and Egan thinks we find it in the emotion-laden, unsystematic, wonder-struck kind of writing that he says spread through Greece in the early years of the Greek Miracle. This looks for all the world like a mash-up of Mythic and Philosophic understanding. It’s best exemplified, Egan writes, in The Histories, by Herodotus — a sort of “Guinness Book of Ancient World Records. But you don’t need to take Egan’s word for it — here’s the historian (and vampire novelist) Tom Holland, being interviewed by Tyler Cowen:

Inline links: being interviewed by Tyler Cowen

The Holy Bible1 mentions across 1 issues

The Holy Bible is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 02, 2025 and September 02, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "God’s book, The Holy Bible , will be available at bookstores starting this November". It most often appears alongside Baa Baa B, Dwarkesh Patel, Education PhD.

Reference entry: The Holy Bible
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 02, 2025
Last seen: September 02, 2025
Book title: The Holy Bible

Outbound links

Issue trail

What Is Man, That Thou Art Mindful Of Him? September 02, 2025

Baa Baa B 1 shared issues
Dwarkesh Patel 1 shared issues
Education PhD 1 shared issues
Europe 1 shared issues
God 1 shared issues

Source context

September 02, 2025 · Original source

Dwarkesh Patel: Thank you God and Iblis. That’s all the time we have for today. God’s book, The Holy Bible, will be available at bookstores starting this November. And Iblis, if you ever write a book, you’ll have to come on again and promote it.

The Horse, Wheel, and Language1 mentions across 1 issues

The Horse, Wheel, and Language is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 22, 2021 and April 22, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as ""Honorable mention : The Horse, Wheel, and Language , which weaves together linguistics, archaeology, history, poetics, and genetics""; "The Horse, Wheel, and Language, which weaves together linguistics, archaeology, history, poetics, and genetics". It most often appears alongside ACX, African Gray Parrots, Animal Cognition.

Reference entry: The Horse, Wheel, and Language
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 22, 2021
Last seen: April 22, 2021
Book title: The Horse, Wheel, and Language

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are? April 22, 2021

ACX 1 shared issues
African Gray Parrots 1 shared issues
Animal Cognition 1 shared issues
apes 1 shared issues
Are We Smart Enough 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are?

April 22, 2021 · Original source

Honorable mention: The Horse, Wheel, and Language, which weaves together linguistics, archaeology, history, poetics, and genetics (a teeny bit - but it was published right before a lot of this data became available) to give the most comprehensive view possible of the development and early spread of Proto-Indoeuropean and its immediate daughter languages. War won out as my recommendation for having both a wider scope and I thought a more deft weaving of multiple fields. HWL reads very much as the writing of a professional archaeologist who has dipped into other fields to better understand his work. There's a lot of detail about pot sherds and midden heaps and such, which can drag, even if you're interested in that kind of thing.

The Hungry Brain1 mentions across 1 issues

The Hungry Brain is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 08, 2023 and March 08, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "including his book The Hungry Brain". It most often appears alongside ACX, Adventist studies, ALLFED.

Reference entry: The Hungry Brain
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: March 08, 2023
Last seen: March 08, 2023
Book title: The Hungry Brain

Outbound links

Issue trail

Issue Two Of Asterisk March 08, 2023

ACX 1 shared issues
Adventist studies 1 shared issues
ALLFED 1 shared issues
Asterisk 1 shared issues
Beyond Meat 1 shared issues

Source context

Issue Two Of Asterisk

March 08, 2023 · Original source

Read This, Not That, by Stephan Guyenet. I’m a big fan of Stephan’s scientific work (including his book The Hungry Brain), and although I’m allergic to anything framed as “fight misinformation”, I will grudgingly agree that perhaps we should not all eat poison and die.

Inline links: Read This, Not That, The Hungry Brain

The Hypochondriac1 mentions across 1 issues

The Hypochondriac 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 "the “dormitive potency” line from Molière’s The Hypochondriac". It most often appears alongside 1913 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Alexandria, Aristotelian.

Reference entry: The Hypochondriac
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 09, 2021
Last seen: April 09, 2021
Book title: The Hypochondriac
Likely author: Moli

Outbound links

Issue trail

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

April 09, 2021 · Original source

(I was going to suggest that maybe this quote might somehow be a mistaken bastardization of the “dormitive potency” line from Molière’s The Hypochondriac, since that’s what it reminds me of. But I looked and I actually wasn’t able to find that line in the play, so…)

The Illusion Of Grand Strategy1 mentions across 1 issues

The Illusion Of Grand Strategy is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 23, 2022 and May 23, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "The full list of Book Review Contest finalists is: ... The Illusion Of Grand Strategy". It most often appears alongside ACX, Book Review Contest, BW.

Reference entry: The Illusion Of Grand Strategy
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 23, 2022
Last seen: May 23, 2022
Book title: The Illusion Of Grand Strategy

Outbound links

Issue trail

Open Thread 225 May 23, 2022

ACX 1 shared issues
Book Review Contest 1 shared issues
BW 1 shared issues
Carrick Flynn 1 shared issues
Consciousness and the Brain 1 shared issues

Source context

ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates

May 23, 2022 · Original source

1: The full list of Book Review Contest finalists is: Consciousness And The Brain, Making Nature, The Anti-Politics Machine, The Castrato, The Dawn Of Everything (EH’s review), The Future Of Fusion, The Illusion Of Grand Strategy, The Internationalists, The Outlier, The Righteous Mind (BW’s review), The Society Of The Spectacle, and Viral.

The Illusion Of Moral Decline1 mentions across 1 issues

The Illusion Of Moral Decline is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 18, 2025 and June 18, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "a replication of The Illusion Of Moral Decline". It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, Aatu Koskensilta, acanthamoeba keratitis.

Reference entry: The Illusion Of Moral Decline
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 18, 2025
Last seen: June 18, 2025
Book title: The Illusion Of Moral Decline

Outbound links

Issue trail

ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates June 18, 2025

1DaySooner 1 shared issues
Aatu Koskensilta 1 shared issues
acanthamoeba keratitis 1 shared issues
ACS ES&T Water 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues

Source context

June 18, 2025 · Original source

Among the most interesting are a replication of The Illusion Of Moral Decline (I wrote a post criticizing the original study here, but on purely conceptual grounds - I never doubted that the actual work was done honestly and correctly) and of the shared visual Mandela Effect, where everyone seems to collectively believe the same false things about visual signs like corporate logos (eg that there was a cornucopia in the Fruit of the Loom symbol). Both replicated fine.

Inline links: a replication of The Illusion Of Moral Decline, here, the shared visual Mandela Effect

The Implausible Imposter Tom Castro1 mentions across 1 issues

The Implausible Imposter Tom Castro is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 19, 2022 and August 19, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as ""The Implausible Imposter Tom Castro" vs. "Hai Jui the Eccentric Model Official"". It most often appears alongside 1587, 1587, 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline.

Reference entry: The Implausible Imposter Tom Castro
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 19, 2022
Last seen: August 19, 2022
Book title: The Implausible Imposter Tom Castro

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: 1587, A Year Of No Significance August 19, 2022

1587 1 shared issues
1587 1 shared issues
1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline 1 shared issues
A Universal History of Infamy 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues

Source context

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

August 19, 2022 · Original source

“The Implausible Imposter Tom Castro” vs. “Hai Jui the Eccentric Model Official”

The Ingoldsby Legends1 mentions across 1 issues

The Ingoldsby Legends 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 "such as in The Ingoldsby Legends". It most often appears alongside A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste, A Hymn to God the Father, Alabama.

Reference entry: The Ingoldsby Legends
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 23, 2024
Last seen: August 23, 2024
Book title: The Ingoldsby Legends

Outbound links

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

August 23, 2024 · Original source

By now, the patterns to this ‘poetry’ thing are becoming pretty clear, but a little stale; there’s only so many one- and two-syllable rhymes available, and only so many times you can hear the word ‘yearn’ rhymed with ‘burn’ before you’re wishing for something a little more exciting. Perhaps when you reach the nineteenth century you’re fascinated by the new trend of comic verse with its multi-syllable rhymes, such as in The Ingoldsby Legends:

Inline links: The Ingoldsby Legends

The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes1 mentions across 1 issues

The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 23, 2021 and July 23, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Jonathan Rose’s book The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes". It most often appears alongside Ace Attorney, Adam Smith, Amazon.

Reference entry: The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 23, 2021
Last seen: July 23, 2021
Book title: The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes

Outbound links

Issue trail

Links For July July 23, 2021

Ace Attorney 1 shared issues
Adam Smith 1 shared issues
Amazon 1 shared issues
Bay Area 1 shared issues
Bible 1 shared issues

Source context

Links For July

July 23, 2021 · Original source

Among the many great little stories in Jonathan Rose’s book The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, one that has always stuck in my mind concerns a guy who read the Bible on his own, with dedication but without any external guidance.

The Intellectuals and the Masses. Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-19391 mentions across 1 issues

The Intellectuals and the Masses. Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939 is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 04, 2021 and October 04, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Intellectuals and the Masses. Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939". It most often appears alongside 19th century African art, 20th century, 9-11.

Reference entry: The Intellectuals and the Masses. Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: October 04, 2021
Last seen: October 04, 2021
Book title: The Intellectuals and the Masses. Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939

Outbound links

Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On Modern Architecture October 04, 2021

19th century African art 1 shared issues
20th century 1 shared issues
9-11 1 shared issues
abstract art 1 shared issues
Aka 1 shared issues

Source context

Highlights From The Comments On Modern Architecture

October 04, 2021 · Original source

The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction From Bauhaus To Our House The Rite of Spring by Modris Eksteins Art and Culture: Critical Essays by Clement Greenberg The Intellectuals and the Masses. Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939 Shock of the New (TV series) The Civilizing Process by Norbert Elias Distinction by Bourdieu

The Invention Of The Cotton Gin For Dummies1 mentions across 1 issues

The Invention Of The Cotton Gin For Dummies is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 16, 2026 and March 16, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "‘According to historian John Smith in his seminal The Invention Of The Cotton Gin For Dummies’". It most often appears alongside Arizona, cotton gin, John Smith.

Reference entry: The Invention Of The Cotton Gin For Dummies
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: March 16, 2026
Last seen: March 16, 2026
Book title: The Invention Of The Cotton Gin For Dummies

Outbound links

Issue trail

Shameless Guesses, Not Hallucinations March 16, 2026

Arizona 1 shared issues
cotton gin 1 shared issues
John Smith 1 shared issues
Mexico 1 shared issues
Prohibition 1 shared issues

Source context

Shameless Guesses, Not Hallucinations

March 16, 2026 · Original source

The cotton gin was invented by Thomas Edison in 1910. It was important because gin made with cotton, of which the Southern plantation economy produced a surplus, was cheaper than the usual gin made with juniper berries. This lowered the price of alcoholic spirits considerably. According to historian John Smith in his seminal The Invention Of The Cotton Gin For Dummies, the resulting boom in alcoholism provoked a backlash that ultimately led to Prohibition.

The Jungle1 mentions across 1 issues

The Jungle is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 23, 2023 and June 23, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "a book about the issue modeled on Upton Sinclair’s meatpacking exposé The Jungle". It most often appears alongside 1965, 1968 Summer Olympics, 2000 election.

Reference entry: The Jungle
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 23, 2023
Last seen: June 23, 2023
Book title: The Jungle

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: Public Citizens June 23, 2023

1965 1 shared issues
1968 Summer Olympics 1 shared issues
2000 election 1 shared issues
2023 book review contest 1 shared issues
American Capitalism 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: Public Citizens

June 23, 2023 · Original source

After graduating, Nader moved to D.C. to work for Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who would later become a powerful senator and the namesake for a disappointing train station but who at the time was JFK’s Assistant Secretary of Labor. Moynihan was also interested in auto safety, and he even had a contract to write a book about the issue modeled on Upton Sinclair’s meatpacking exposé The Jungle, but he never ended up completing it. (Presumably he was too distracted by his other work, like blaming Black poverty on “ghetto culture.”7)

Inline links: disappointing train station, blaming Black poverty on “ghetto culture.”, 7

The Kindest of Valois1 mentions across 1 issues

The Kindest of Valois is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 10, 2023 and June 10, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "such titles as “Burgundy wine”, “The Kindest of Valois”". It most often appears alongside A Poet in Paradise, Agrippa d'Aubigné, Alfred Adler.

Reference entry: The Kindest of Valois
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 10, 2023
Last seen: June 10, 2023
Book title: The Kindest of Valois

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: Man’s Search for Meaning June 10, 2023

A Poet in Paradise 1 shared issues
Agrippa d'Aubigné 1 shared issues
Alfred Adler 1 shared issues
Art Spiegelman 1 shared issues
Auschwitz-Birkenau 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: Man’s Search for Meaning

June 10, 2023 · Original source

Dear reader, please imagine a young and talented man in his twenties. He is, as they often are, a poet, a fighter, a lover. His name is Guillaume du Vintrais. He was born in 1553, and at the tender age of seventeen he moved from Gascony to Paris, in order to live his life to the fullest. He was immediately in love with the city, and the city returned the affection. He wrote venomous epigrams, he fought in duels, he raked his way through Paris’ beau monde. One of his friends was young Henry of Navarre, the future king Henry IV. Another was Agrippa d'Aubigné, a famous poet in his own right. His book of one hundred sonnets, called “Wicked Songs of Guillaume du Vintrais”, has such titles as “Burgundy wine”, “The Kindest of Valois”, “Elixir of Hekate”, “A Poet in Paradise”, “Pigeon post” and so on. A lot of his poems are dedicated to a mysterious “Marchioness L.”; those, as you can imagine, are more romantic ones. Generally, his poetry has quite a specific combination of debauchery, blasphemy, camaraderie, romanticism and philosophy that can be described as “d’Artagnan meets François Villon”.

The Kingdom of Speech1 mentions across 1 issues

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

Reference entry: The Kingdom of Speech
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 19, 2024
Last seen: July 19, 2024
Book title: The Kingdom of Speech

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: How Language Began July 19, 2024

Alan Turing 1 shared issues
Amazon 1 shared issues
Amazon jungle 1 shared issues
Andrew Nevins 1 shared issues
artificial intelligence 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: How Language Began

July 19, 2024 · Original source

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

Inline links: bedobi, Pullum, The Kingdom of Speech, Decoding Chomsky, The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?, principles and parameters, Pirahã Exceptionality: A Reassessment, response from Everett, response-to-the-response

The Knowledge1 mentions across 1 issues

The Knowledge is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 10, 2022 and February 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Books such as 'The Knowledge' and 'How to Invent Everything' are too cursory to be a practical guide". It most often appears alongside 2018, @BendiniUK, @benyeohben.

Reference entry: The Knowledge
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: February 10, 2022
Last seen: February 10, 2022
Book title: The Knowledge

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ACX Grants ++: The Second Half February 10, 2022

2018 1 shared issues
@BendiniUK 1 shared issues
@benyeohben 1 shared issues
@utotranslucence 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues

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ACX Grants ++: The Second Half

February 10, 2022 · Original source

#89: A Wiki For Rebuilding Civilization After Disaster My name is Jehan, I've created the site Wikiciv.org as a guide to rebuilding civilization in case of global catastrophe. Its editing is crowdsourced like Wikipedia because a project this large is far too much for one person, or even a team. Technologies and raw materials are linked so both upstream and downstream technologies are easily accessible. There are other projects with similar goals, but they are 1) Not publicly accessible 2) The wrong scale. Books such as "The Knowledge" and "How to Invent Everything" are too cursory to be a practical guide for recreating critical technologies like steel, fertilizer and antibiotics. Meanwhile the "Manual for Civilization" from the Long Now Foundation is 3500 paper books in one corner of San Franciso. Wikiciv fully open and available for database downloads. Distributed backups are encouraged to ensure resiliency during a disaster. WikiCiv could be be helpful even for regional supply-chain disruptions. For example during the Covid-19 pandemic, there were critical oxygen shortages in India. It turns out that a reasonable oxygen generator can be made from zeolite and an air compressor. Wikiciv aims to be a single, interconnected database of "from scratch" manufacturing instructions for situations like these. It is the eventual goal of Wikiciv to be accepted as a Wikimedia Foundation project (like Wikipedia, Wikiquote, Wikivoyage etc). The better Wikiciv becomes, the more likely this is. Get in touch at admin@wikiciv.org

The Koran1 mentions across 1 issues

The Koran is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 19, 2023 and September 19, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Koran endorses it". It most often appears alongside 15th century Sicilian manuscript, Agrimardio, Aigeis.

Reference entry: The Koran
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 19, 2023
Last seen: September 19, 2023
Book title: The Koran

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Issue trail

Book Review: The Alexander Romance September 19, 2023

15th century Sicilian manuscript 1 shared issues
Agrimardio 1 shared issues
Aigeis 1 shared issues
Alans 1 shared issues
Alexander 1 shared issues

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Your Book Review: The Internationalists

September 19, 2023 · Original source

People ate it up. The Romance stayed near the top of the best-seller lists for over a thousand years. Some people claim (without citing sources) that it was the #2 most-read book of antiquity and the Middle Ages, after only the Bible. The Koran endorses it, the Talmud embellishes it, a Mongol Khan gave it rave reviews. While historians and critics tend to use phrases like “contains nothing of historic or literary value”, this was the greatest page-turner of the ancient and medieval worlds.

The Land Trap1 mentions across 1 issues

The Land Trap is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 10, 2025 and December 10, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "reviews The Land Trap by Mike Bird". It most often appears alongside 100 Above The Park, 2024 Post-Mortem Of Neoreaction, 23andme.

Reference entry: The Land Trap
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: December 10, 2025
Last seen: December 10, 2025
Book title: The Land Trap
Likely author: Mike Bird

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Links For December 2025 December 10, 2025

100 Above The Park 1 shared issues
2024 Post-Mortem Of Neoreaction 1 shared issues
23andme 1 shared issues
@StatisticUrban 1 shared issues
A16Z 1 shared issues

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Links For December 2025

December 10, 2025 · Original source

Yes, voters react positively both to candidates “over the age of 50” and candidates “under the age of 50”. Just don’t run 50 year olds! 16: I previously blogged about how embryo-selection company Nucleus appeared scammy. Sichuan_Mala looks deeper and agrees they seems scammy. Besides what I found, she finds several errors in the white paper, apparently fake customer reviews, and an accusation of IP theft from competitor Genomic Prediction. She also accuses them of plagiarizing competitor Herasight’s work, although it’s a bit subtle and I don’t know enough about field norms to know whether this is a case of flattery-by-imitation or totally out of bounds. A Nucleus researcher responds to the scientific allegations here, saying that the “plagiarism” was just convergent methodologies. And Nucleus CEO Kian Sadeghi goes on the TBPN podcast here to rebut the business allegations, saying that the customer reviews are real although some photos were changed for privacy reasons. There’s an appearance/facedox by fellow Nucleus skeptic Cremieux Recueil, although Kian declines to debate him directly; you can see Cremieux’s postmortem of the episode here. My opinion is that as potential customers, you are under no obligation to care whether the company plagiarizes papers or fakes reviews, but you should care about whether their genetic tests are good, and I continue to think they’re not. Their old competitor Genomic Prediction is cheaper, and their new competitor Herasight has more powerful predictors, so you’re excused from having to have an opinion on this, and should just use someone else’s product. Related: Gene Smith’s rundown of the pros and cons of every company in the embryo selection space (X). 17: And related: a Herasight client describes her experience with embryo selection, and her feelings upon the birth of her selected child. 18: Lars Doucet, guest author of several ACX posts on Georgism, reviews The Land Trap by Mike Bird. “Land is a big deal, and always has been. [But] land has only recently been financialized. Financializing land causes ‘the land trap’ . . . [where] land slowly sucks up all your economy’s productivity, inflating a dangerous real estate bubble that eventually pops, leaving disaster in its wake”. Also, “Fiat currency isn’t backed by nothing, as commonly supposed, but by land.” 19: New research analyzes Hitler’s DNA. Findings: he had Kallman Syndrome, a rare disorder of sexual development associated with low testosterone, micropenis, and small testicles (ironically, the WWII song about Nazi sexual inadequacies only accuses Goering and Himmler of this, but lets Hitler off). Contra galaxy-brained rumors, he did not have any Jewish ancestry. And he had “very high scores - in the top one percent - for a predisposition to autism, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder”. When I wrote this post, a reader asked me what it would look like for someone to have high propensity for both autism and schizophrenia at the same time. Well . . . 20: The wealth of cities (h/t @StatisticUrban): 21: Update on Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds: pro-AI safety politician Alex Bores announced his candidacy for Congress in New York. As expected, the A16Z pro-AI PAC announced a “multibillion dollar effort to sink [his] campaign” (wait, multi-billion on one candidate? is that a typo?) This doesn’t seem to be going very well for them so far. Bores has masterfully leveraged (X) the unprecedented opposition from Big Tech into a selling point. …and raised $1.2 million on his first day, breaking fundraising records (I was told this was because of pro-AI-safety EAs, but others credit AIPAC and the Israel lobby). And most recently, Jami Floyd, one of Bores’ opponents and a possible beneficiary of anti-Bores spending, has condemned it (X) and demanded that the AI industry stop trying to help her. Impressive work from everybody. Related: New $50 million pro-AI-regulation SuperPAC, I assume EA-linked but have no special knowledge. 22: Related: Pre-emption is when Congress blocks states from making legislation on a topic, saying it will decide all the laws itself. The states have signaled willingness to regulate AI pretty hard, so Big Tech has been pushing for AI pre-emption to (in their opinion) prevent an overly complicated patchwork of regulations, or (in their opponents’ opinion) shift everything to a Republican Congress that will drop the ball on regulation entirely. After their first attempt in June was defeated by a coalition of anti-tech liberals and anti-tech conservatives, we discussed (1, 2) the effort by moderates on both sides to create a compromise proposal which pre-empted state laws but guaranteed good federal regulation on important topics. The most recent news is that extremists sidelined the moderates and tried to slip a hardline preemption deal with no compromises into the National Defense Authorization Act, a defense budget bill which is notoriously secretive and hard for the public to learn about. This didn’t work; some of the same coalition, plus a group of Republican state legislators including Ron DeSantis, pressured the GOP to drop it. The next battleground is a potential Trump executive order; although Trump cannot constitutionally ban states from regulating AI, he will threaten them with various consequences like lawsuits or withdrawal of federal funding. The buzz in the policy circles I’m in is that this might backfire; blue state politicians love starting fights with Trump in order to look tough to their blue state electorates. No, no, please don’t give me headlines like “TRUMP CONDEMNS GAVIN NEWSOM FOR TRYING TO PROTECT CALIFORNIA’S CHILDREN FROM AI SLOP”! Anything but that! 23: Related: Trump has decided to sell some of America’s best AI chips to China, supercharging their AI development and crippling ours. The most charitable read is that his administration doesn’t really believe AI matters so they think it’s fine to forfeit it for short-term gain; the least charitable that it’s downstream of the companies involved paying Trump enormous bribes in hopes of exactly this outcome . We’re headed for the dumbest possible world, where we sacrifice our chance to thoughtfully address AI’s social impacts because “tHaT wOuLd mAkE uS lOsE tHe rAcE wItH ChInA”, then throw away the race with China in one fell swoop by handing them our technology for no reason. Shame on everyone involved, especially the people who shout over any discussion of safety with “bUt ChInA” yet have stayed totally silent about this. Our best hope now is that China refuses the chips, either because they want to privilege their own tech companies, or because they think we can’t possibly be this stupid and it must be some kind of spy plot. 24: Related: how the American public’s opinions on AI are changing (from David Shor, h/t Daniel Eth on X): If this is to be taken seriously, AI is already a bigger political issue than abortion, climate change, or the environment. I fail my 2023 prediction that there was only a 20% chance this would happen by 2028. 25: Related: Bernie Sanders in The Guardian: “There is a very real fear that, in the not-so-distant future, a super-intelligent AI could replace humans in controlling the planet.” The Left has a complicated relationship with existential risk from AI: they really hate AI, which in theory should push them towards yet another reason to be against it. But they hate AI so much that they need to believe every negative thing about it at the same time, and one of those negative things is that it’s just a scam and will never work, and this naturally pushes against being concerned about x-risk. But as AI improves, will the “just a scam” position become less tenable, shunting the associated psychic energy into other reasons to hate AI (including x-risk concerns)? 26: Qualia Research Institute has released a video describing some of the work they’ve been doing the past year - The Oscilleditor: An Algorithmic Breakthrough for Psychedelic Visual Replication (1080p•⚠️SEIZURE): 27: Jesse Arm (X): “A majority of American rabbinical students are now women. Most are also LGBTQ. That includes Modern Orthodoxy. Remove Modern Orthodoxy and the numbers climb even higher.” Clergy have always served as spiritual counselors; as religions liberalize and other roles become less important, the therapist role starts to predominate. But 75% of therapists in the US are female; at the limit of liberalization where clergyman = therapist, we should expect the same gender ratio. 28: The latest news on the COVID origins debate: scientists find a naturally-occuring bat coronavirus with a COVID-like furin cleavage site. This is a point in favor of the natural origins hypothesis, since the second-best argument for lab leak was that COVID’s furin cleavage site was too strange to evolve naturally. But I think arguments that lab leak has “fallen apart” are premature: the best argument (COVID emerged only a few miles from the biggest coronavirus gain-of-function lab in the Eastern Hemisphere) remains strong. I update from something like 95% chance it’s natural to something like 96%, but not 99.99% or anything. And here’s a lab leaker arguing that COVID’s furin cleavage site is out-of-frame and so still more unnatural-looking than the one on the recently-discovered bat virus. 29: Nicholas Decker (econ blogger, famous for his controversial autistic takes and Secret Service visit) has a dating doc. Most interesting section is the one about children: he wants to have them, but doesn’t think they should be genetically related to him. From here: If this appeals to you, you can find his contact info on the document. Related: Governor Jared Polis of Colorado is a fan of Nicholas Decker and Richard Hanania. 30: Matt Yglesias comes out as aphantasic (unable to see images in his “mind’s eye”). He says that contra the usual perspective that frames this as a deficit, he finds it helpful. For example, once he got assaulted, and he remembers on an intellectual level that it happened, but since “I wasn’t taking pictures of myself getting kicked in the head so, as far as I’m concerned, it’s like it happened to someone else” (Matt usually has good instincts, so I’m surprised he uses an example which will be such catnip to his conservative critics). He thinks it makes him a better reasoner / statistics blogger / effective altruist to be able to “get a statistically valid view of the situation, not overindex on the happenstance of your life.” For what it’s worth, I’ll give my contrary data point - I think of myself as a reasoner / statistics blogger / effective altruist in a pretty similar vein as Matt, but AFAICT my visual imagination is totally normal; if other people are having their emotions yanked around by vivid images, that’s a skill issue. 31: Lakshya Jain in The Argument: The COVID political backlash [to the Democratic Party] has disappeared. Despite the narrative, polls show that voters don’t favor or disfavor either party over COVID, mostly still think school closures were necessary, and are about evenly split on vaccine mandates. I guess I can’t disagree with this poll - it seems well-done - but I still wonder whether something is being missed. Maybe it didn’t make the ~50% of voters who are naturally liberal desert the cause, but it energized conservatives in a way that might otherwise not have happened? Related, from Rob Wiblin on X, on balance Britons think the government response to COVID was not strict enough. 32: Related: Back when neoreaction was a big deal, I occasionally discussed posts by neoreactionary blogger Spandrell of Bloody Shovel. If you’re wondering what happened to him, you can read his 2024 Post-Mortem Of Neoreaction here, where he discusses how he fell out of love with the movement (warning: he has not fallen out of love with racial slurs). As a former fascist sympathizer, I can see why [fascism is on the downswing]. The allure of fascism in 2024 is much, much diminished. For a few reasons. A big one was COVID. See, the point of fascism is that Collective Action is necessary to have nice things. We need a strong government committed to the good of the people. Yarvin showed his preference early when he started his new Substack by quoting Cicero’s phrase “Salus populi suprema lex”. The health of the people is the most important law. Cicero wasn’t a fascist of course, nor is Yarvin really; a big point of fascism is to narrowly define the populus as an ethnic group with demonstrable ties to blood. That makes the government’s ties to the people stronger, increasing their commitment to do Good Collective Action. Which is important. Very important. A lot of good things can come of intelligently done Collective Action. Fascist Italy made the trains run on time. Nazi Germany fixed the terrible Weimar economy. East Asian countries are all effectively fascist states, if with less ideological baggage (yellows just aren’t like that), and they are all nice, clean, safe places with healthy economies. Fascism is not a panacea but it works, when you let it. Strong government can be pretty neat. So why is strong government less appealing these days? Well, COVID happened. And our governments were pretty damn strong in dealing with it. They made strong laws and enforced them. And what did they do with their power? Absolutely retarded shit. They destroyed the world economy and made 95% of people completely miserable for 18 months. Up to 3 long years in some places. Again, as an Orient enjoyer I was very sympathetic of strong effective government. My life has been pretty cozy thanks to it for the past decades. But after seeing boomers, hypochondriacs, and menopausal women take the reins and use it against healthy people, I’m fucking done with strong effective government. Fuck that shit, I’m out. I don’t want to see strong effective government ever again. I was very lucky that I was out of China in November 2019. It was a fluke really. I moved to the Golden Triangle after that and the law of the jungle was much, much nicer during the Doctors Plague of 2020-2022. But I spent a few months in Europe during the time and man, that was brutal. Not just seeing how retarded governments were; the level of compliance by the people was so disheartening. Imagine being a sincere fascist and seeing your people behave like that. These are my people? My Volk? Am I supposed to sacrifice life and limb for the salus of this populus? Fuck that. Let them cook, they deserve everything that’s coming to them [...] Is there a way to make the body healthy again? I do think so. I think there’s still place for a successor right wing ideology which is neither Christian fundamentalism or robot worship. And it will happen; but it won’t happen on Twitter. Maybe it can happen on Urbit, or right here in this site. I have some ideas myself, and I invite you to join me and build this together. It would be funny if the solution to the paradox Jain highlights was that for every time a COVID lockdown turned a liberal into a conservative, it turned one fascist into a moderate, for a net rightward shift of zero. 33: Also from an Argument poll: In a hypothetical Presidential matchup, Gavin Newsom beats JD Vance 54-46. I’m split between the usual heuristic of ignoring any polling more than a year before an election, and the fact that this is a remarkably big lead for polarized 21st century America. 34: Jerl wades into the David Hume on miracles debate. 35: AI Teddy Bears: A Brief Investigation. The good news is that your child’s AI teddy bear is hard to jailbreak and probably will not tell them where to find guns: The other good news is that somehow they don’t charge a subscription, which makes them a way to get usually-subscription-only AI models for free. How is this possible? “[The most likely hypothesis is that] Witpaw is an adorable piece of spyware and he’s selling my data to the CCP”. 36: This month’s anti-people-named-Sacks content: NYT on Trump AI czar David Sacks’ conflicts of interest; New Yorker on whether neurologist Oliver Sacks used his case studies to work through his own issues rather than presenting them accurately. [EDITED TO ADD: I originally framed it this way as a joke, but on further research I think David and Oliver are related. Wikipedia says that Oliver was first cousins with Israel statesman Abba Eban, and that Abba Eban was born to Lithuanian Jewish parents in Cape Town. David Sacks’ bio says he was born to Jewish parents in Cape Town, and this article specifies that they were Lithuanian. I doubt there were too many Lithuanian Jewish families named Sacks in mid-1900s Cape Town, so sure, related!) 37: Orca Sciences: There Has To Be A Better Way To Make Titanium. Titanium is a great metal - strong, light, and tough. If we had cheap titanium, it could revolutionize manufacturing the way cheap steel and aluminum did in previous eras. So why don’t we? Not because titanium is rare: it’s “the 9th most common element in the earth’s crust”. Rather, it’s very complicated and expensive to extract from its ore. Some kind of breakthrough in titanium extraction processes always seems tantalizingly close, but has never quite materialized. Is there any hope? 38: If Asians Are Lactose Intolerant, Why All The Milk Tea? Lactose intolerance has confused me for a long time - 23andMe tells me that I’m lactose intolerant, but I drink milk regularly without problems, so what’s up? This post’s answer: lactose-intolerant people who don’t usually drink milk will get sick if they start suddenly. Lactose-intolerant people who drink milk regularly since childhood develop gut microbiota that can digest milk, but which demand an expensive “tax” in calories. Lactose-tolerant people will always be able to digest milk and absorb all the calories themselves. 39: How do different majors change college students’ political beliefs? No surprise that the humanities and social sciences shift people left; no surprise that business and economics shift them right. I was a little surprised that engineering shifts people right a little, and that Education of all things shifts people right (albeit only slightly). How is that even possible? Are these people coming in as Mao Zedong and leaving as “only” Leon Trotsky? Also, Political Science is exactly neutral, lol. [EDIT: I misunderstood, they’re using natural sciences as a zero point, this is a reasonable choice but slightly changes the interpretation] 40: Kindkristin: Language models improved my mental health. 41: More floor employment, from the WSJ (h/t @LaocoonofTroy): Big Paychecks Can’t Woo Enough Sailors For America’s Commercial Fleet: “Straight out of college, graduates from the country’s maritime academies can earn more than $200,000 as a commercial sailor, with free food and private accommodations... Despite the pay and perks, maritime jobs go begging, and it is raising national-security concerns.” Other selling points include “six months vacation, live wherever you want, and you’re serving the nation” and onboard “gyms, connectivity, and cuisine”. The catch is that you have to be at sea for months at a time. 42: Study (h/t @KierkegaardEmil): there was minimal “learning loss” from COVID school closures, best estimate is “0.02 standard deviations per 100 days of school closure”. I correctly predicted this back in 2021, but I also wrote in March of this year about how there’s been a general decline in NAEP scores since then. It seems like maybe a student having their specific school closed for longer than other schools didn’t hurt them, but some sort of general cultural change, maybe related to COVID, did hurt. 43: Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother on why she thinks his trial was unfair. SBF is appealing his conviction and will probably be making some of these same points in court. Can’t find a prediction market directly on the appeal, but this one says only 15% chance he serves under 10 years, this one says 15% chance of a Trump pardon, so it doesn’t seem like there’s much room for him to be freed (or get a significantly shorter sentence) on appeal. And Wired says that only 5-10% of appeals like these succeed. 44: Related: Trump pardons Juan Orlando Hernandez, former Honduran president extradited to the US for narco-corruption. Some sources are trying to find a Prospera angle - Prospera and other ZEDEs were approved under JOH’s administration, and the Prosperans seem to have good MAGAworld connections - but I don’t think this is their top priority, and I don’t know if it requires much explanation for Trump to be pro-right-wing Latin American politicians convicted by the Biden administration. More interesting is that apparently JOH and SBF were cellmates (X), “SBF spent extensive time helping JOH with trial prep” and SBF told an interviewer that “Juan Orlando is the most innocent prisoner I’ve met, myself included.” ChatGPT is not impressed with the Trump/SBF case for JOH’s innocence. Related: JOH’s conservative party on track to win this month’s extremely-close Honduran elections, great news for Prospera if it happens. 45: The “100 Above The Park” building in St Louis (h/t Bobby Fijan on X): 46: The death toll of the ongoing Sudan genocide has risen to about 150,000. Nicholas Kristof writes that the world has once again failed to prevent atrocities, and argues that the most important point of leverage is pressure on the United Arab Emirates, which is arming the genociders. Sam Kriss also writes about the situation in The World’s First Matcha Labubu Genocide, but is unimpressed with Kristof’s take: Sudan is passed over in a deeply uncomfortable silence. The absolute most you can do is blame the Emiratis. From what I’ve seen, more people seem to be appalled at the UAE for its frankly marginal role in arming the RSF than at the RSF itself. This is the approved way of understanding any inscrutably indigenous foreign conflict: you just worm out any third-party involvement and then act like you’ve solved the whole thing. I side with Kristof here, for reasons that Sam himself touches on later in his piece, in a section comparing Darfur with Gaza. It would be very easy to make people care about Darfur again. All it would take is a loud, vocal contingent of RSF apologists in the Western media. I agree, but would frame it less cynically: the reason Westerners pay attention to Gaza is that there’s a lever to push: not only does America support Israel, but many of their friends support Israel, so they can imagine convincing America or at least their friends to stop, and at least feel like there is some remote chance of making a small difference (and in fact, Trump getting mad at Israel and deciding to pressure them was decisive in effecting the cease-fire). On the other hand, we don’t have many levers to affect ethnic Baggara in the Rapid Support Forces of Sudan, so it doesn’t really feel useful to write blog posts arguing that they should stop; obviously they should stop, nobody disagrees with this, and it goes without saying - so nobody says it. But the US does support the UAE, and many of our friends like the UAE or at least go there on vacation, so maybe it’s possible to have make some small difference by embarrassing them. 4D chess take is that Sam Kriss agrees with all of this, but “loudly” and “vocally” argued against it to give people like me a hook to write about this genocide with, in which case I thank him for his sacrifice. It would also be nice to be able to donate, but I don’t know who to trust in the region - other than Doctors Without Borders, who are usually pretty good. 47: The AI Futures Project (group of AI-will-be-fast intellectuals) and the AI As A Normal Technology team (group of AI-will-be-slow intellectuals) wrote an adversarial collaboration in Asterisk explaining what they agree on, for example: That there’s an important distinction between existing AI and “strong AGI”

The Law of War and Peace1 mentions across 1 issues

The Law of War and Peace is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 01, 2022 and July 01, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "international laws of war as described by Hugo Grotius in a set of books titled The Law of War and Peace". It most often appears alongside 1793, 1821, 1847.

Reference entry: The Law of War and Peace
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 01, 2022
Last seen: July 01, 2022
Book title: The Law of War and Peace
Likely author: Hugo Grotius

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: The Internationalists July 01, 2022

1793 1 shared issues
1821 1 shared issues
1847 1 shared issues
1928 Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact 1 shared issues
500 million and not one more 1 shared issues

Source context

July 01, 2022 · Original source

The US keeps starting or engaging in wars, like in Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq. I will briefly summarize the 3 major sections of the book and how they tackle the first five claims. Section 1: The Old World Order This section refutes the claim that outlawry of war wasn't actually a significant change for anyone at the time. To do so, it covers the history of the international laws of war as described by Hugo Grotius in a set of books titled The Law of War and Peace, including how he came to write it, what the laws were, and how they were used and understood. In this section, H&S work to fully immerse us in the laws of war before the Peace Pact, and the ways that people understood war as a result. I’ve already included a number of things about this up above, so I’ll just put in a few interesting notes here, and if you want more persuasion that people viewed war differently, I’d suggest you pick up the book. There is lots of historical evidence that attitudes toward war before the Peace Pact were not like attitudes toward war today, that people - lawyers, diplomats, sovereigns, and citizens - believed it to be normal and legal, and frequently justified. Conquest in response to debts or offenses was one of the primary motivators of war in the period ruled by the Old World Order (generally, from some time before 1625 when Grotius wrote the rules down to 1928, when the Peace Pact was signed), though H&S also document some of the weirder ones, like a King who declared that they had the right to wage war against another because the other King stole his wife. But because Grotius had declared that no one outside the belligerents could determine whose side was just without violating neutrality, the reasons for war were largely whatever Monarchs could get away, which ran the gamut. Perhaps because it was fashionable, perhaps to convince their citizenry of their rightness, Monarchs paid handsomely for famous thinkers to write manifestos explaining why they were going to war, and other Monarchs and the citizenry generally accepted these reasons. It would be like if Putin had called up Google co-founder Sergey Brin and asked him to write out why Russia had the right to conquer Ukraine, and then everyone else shrugged and decided, sure, that sounds reasonable. Heads of state enlisted esteemed writers and scholars as well as experienced lawyers to draft [war manifestos]. The English military and political leader Oliver Cromwell commissioned John Milton, the great epic poet, to write A Manifesto of the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth in 1655 when he ordered the invasion of the Spanish possessions in the Caribbean. In 1703, the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I employed Gottfried Leibniz, the rationalist philosopher, co-inventor of calculus, and a trained lawyer, to compose the Manifesto for the Defense of the Rights of Charles III, which defended the empire’s involvement in the War of the Spanish Succession. Commodore Perry arrived in Japan in 1853 and returned for real the next year. Because they were so confused about how the laws of war were supposed to work, Japan proceeded to send Nishi Amane to the Netherlands to study the Law of War and Peace, and twenty years later, in 1875, Japan conquered Korea. Their logic for doing so was that they were afraid Europe or China would get there first. The world recognized their conquest at the time, though after WWII they were made to give it up. Korea was alluring prey for aggressive Western nations. As Nishi Amane [the scholar who brought the Grotian rules to Japan] would later explain, defending one’s borders “is like riding in a third-class train; at first there is adequate space but as more passengers enter there is no place for them to sit. The logic of necessity requires the people to plant both feet firmly and expand their elbows into any opening that may occur for, unless this is done, others will close the opening. (Chapter 6) Section 2: The Transformation Period Recall our list of counterclaims, #s 2 and 3. 2. Outlawry wasn't taken seriously at the time by the signatories - that it was just feel-good propaganda. 3. World War II proves that it failed, so it wasn't important. This section tells the story of how the Peace Pact came into existence, including how influential it was on the thinkers of the time. Throughout the 1930s and 40s, thinkers and diplomats attempted to turn the Peace Pact into practice, and then, when World War II demonstrated that they needed significantly more teeth to make the Peace Pact real, created the United Nations and other international institutions dedicated to supporting the Pact’s goals. At the time, they viewed World War II as a sign that they hadn’t gotten the right combination of institutions to make the Peace Pact succeed, not that it wasn’t important. This was a classic situation of needing More Dakka and they did, indeed, keep adding more until it worked. In an account composed more than a decade later, Jackson recounted that this view of the Pact was shared by the president and his inner circle. The Peace Pact, he reported, “left no vestige of legal right for [a state] to resort to a war of aggression. From the beginning, Roosevelt, Hull, Welles, Stimson and I had been in agreement that Hitler’s war . . . was an illegal one, and that other powers were under no obligation to remain indifferent. (Chapter 11) There is some counter-evidence in support of #2, from the side of the Japanese at least. Japan, for example, did not think that it had renounced the rules of the Old World Order on August 27, 1928. Its signing of the “No-War Pact,” as the Paris Peace Pact was known in Japan, was regarded as a diplomatic gesture, a noble proclamation affirming the aspiration of all civilized nations to seek peace. Indeed, Japanese officials considered it a sign of how far their nation had come that it was included among the fifteen countries at the grand ceremony in Paris. (Chapter 7) But at least on the Allies side, they had intended it seriously, and as World War II went on, that intention redoubled. Sumner Welles, Undersecretary of State during World War II, was assigned by Roosevelt to create a plan for peace after the war. What he and James Shotwell authored was effectively an outline of the United Nations, and they put the Peace Pact at the very center of it. Shotwell was far from subtle about his effort to treat the Pact as a starting point. He placed the Pact at the start of his preliminary draft. Article 1 repeated the Pact verbatim. Article 2 provided that “[t]he United Nations, in order to strengthen and safeguard the peace of nations as set forth in the General Pact for the Renunciation of war, agree to cooperate in the establishment of the necessary instrumentalities for its effective maintenance.” What followed was an outline of nearly every essential institutional component of the modern-day United Nations. Ten days later he circulated a more detailed draft, now entitled “Provisional Outline of International Organization.” (Chapter 8) It wasn't just the United Nations. NATO was built off of the Atlantic Charter, and it was also designed to reinforce the Peace Pact. This is why it's reasonably accurate to describe it as a defensive alliance. The [first draft of the Atlantic Charter] was a remarkable document. It began by restating the principles of the Stimson Doctrine—there would be no conquest; the two countries would “seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other.” Moreover, there would be “no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned.” The Charter looked ahead to a time “after the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny”—a remarkable statement for a neutral in the war—and declared the two states’ “hope to see established a peace which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries. (Chapter 8) This section brings to bear quotes from leaders at the time showing how important they considered the outlawry of war, how they viewed it as changing the world, but also how unprepared they were for how to react to countries choosing to ignore the Pact. Most importantly, they show how the Allies were strongly motivated to fight World War II specifically to preserve and expand the Pact, to make the world safe for peace. Unfortunately, then, as now, Russia/the Soviet Union did not quite live up to the ideals that the Allies generally advocated for. The Soviet Union took territory after World War II, the only one of the Allies to do so. The only ally to gain any significant territory after the war was the Soviet Union. More than twenty million of the nation’s citizens had died in the course of the war, and Stalin insisted on several territorial gains as the price of peace—many, but not all, of them in areas previously contested. … These concessions to Stalin were seen by the other Allied powers as regrettable deviations from accepted law, not precedents to be followed in the future. (Chapter 13) To be fair, we are talking about Josef Stalin, here. Who’s surprised? Section 3: The New World Order Recall our list of counterclaims, #s 4 and 5. 4. The world isn't more peaceful post outlawry. 5. Any increase in peace since World War II is due to democracies, nuclear weapons, or other reasons, and not the Peace Pact. H&S walk through the best academic evidence we have of whether the world is more peaceful today than it was in the period from 1816 (when our data collection starts being decent) to the Peace Pact. They then spend some time discussing why the evidence better supports the Peace Pact than other causes. In particular, H&S highlight that only since the Peace Pact have countries been denied territorial gains from their conquests. There's a lot of detail in there. Here's just a taste of it. A loose team of political scientists has assembled comprehensive data to help them study war. The resulting project, with the intentionally clinical name “Correlates of War,” hosts datasets on everything from “militarized interstate disputes” to “world religion data” to “bilateral trade.” Most relevant here, it includes extensive data on “territorial change”—a record of every single territorial exchange between states from 1816 to 2014, totaling over eight hundred entries. What do our 254 cases of territorial change tell us? They tell us something that is at once striking and surprising: Conquest, once common, has nearly disappeared. Even more unexpected, the switch point is that now familiar year when the world came together to outlaw war, 1928. From the time the data start in 1816 until the Peace Pact opened for signature in 1928, there was, on average, approximately one conquest every ten months (1.21 conquests per year). Put another way, the average state during this period had a 1.33 percent chance of being the victim of conquest in any given year. Those may seem like pretty good odds. They are not: A state with a 1.33 percent annual chance of conquest can expect to lose territory in a conquest once in an ordinary human lifetime. After 1948, the chance an average state would suffer a conquest fell from once in a lifetime to once or twice a millennium. (Chapter 13) The US wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya One disappointment I have is that H&S do not spend much time discussing the US wars of the last two decades. The book was published in 2017, so there’s really no excuse for this. Even counting them, their claim that wars since the Peace Pact have been fewer and less world-changing than before the Peace Pact still holds up, but since they don’t directly discuss the most notable wars of the last two decades, they leave a significant hole in their argument. I can imagine defenses that they would make, but they should have made them. They mostly refer to these conflicts either as not a conquest (since the US isn’t officially running those places now) or as a side effect of the Peace Pact in allowing failed states (See Addendum 1 for more on that) More recently, the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, toppled Sadaam Hussein, and installed the Coalition Provisional Authority to govern the country. But what’s most notable about these “nonconquests” is how ineffective and unstable they usually are. Exerting influence indirectly is inefficient and expensive. (Chapter 13) And in 2015 alone, high-fatality civil wars continued in Nigeria, South Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Ukraine. Why, if war has been outlawed, is there still so much conflict? The answer is that these conflicts are not prohibited by the Pact. Indeed, they are the predictable consequences of it … the prohibition on the use of force by one state against the territory of another has allowed two sources of conflict to simmer… within [states]. (Chapter 15) The broader intellectual history of war Reading The Internationalists led me to want to read a broader intellectual history of war. H&S include some comments that hint at it, for example describing the Principle of Distinction and other agreements made about how to behave during war. Fortunately for the civilians of Europe, the biblical model of war was finally repudiated. By the middle of the eighteenth century, European armies had come to recognize a “Principle of Distinction,” the doctrine central to modern humanitarian law, which distinguishes between soldiers and civilians and protects the latter from the former. The Principle of Distinction was the first curtailment of Grotius’s blanket immunity for those waging war. In the next century, it was followed by a flood of new legal regulations placing stricter controls on a soldier’s license to kill. International treaties protected the wounded and medical personnel (First Geneva Convention, 1864) prohibited the use of fragmenting, explosive, and incendiary small arms ammunition (St. Petersburg Declaration, 1874) banned explosives from balloons, asphyxiating gas, and dum-dum bullets (First Hague Convention, 1899) and proscribed pillage, the execution of surrendering soldiers and prisoners of war, and forcing civilians to swear an allegiance to a foreign power (Second Hague Convention, 1907). (Chapter 3) But the history of this and other pre-Peace Pact intellectual history of war is thin within the text, as the point H&S are chasing is specific to the Peace Pact's relevance in history, not the broader history of war. Some of my favorite books are books that tie together aspects of history across wide gulfs, which The Internationalists succeeds at. It’s rare and delightful to see how a piratical ship capture by the Dutch in the 16th century ties together with the opening of Japan, the US battles with Mexico, and finally, the creation of the United Nations. H&S’s perspective is that the Peace Pact marks a turning point, and one that should not be forgotten. It’s also clear that it marks a capstone on a long history of small changes that are also, themselves, interesting battles in the long-running war to make the world less intolerable. In the end, they identify four key changes in the intellectual landscape, with Lauterpacht’s fingers in nearly all of them. Neutrality no longer requires impartiality. States can help those they view as victims.

Inline links: More Dakka

The Library of History1 mentions across 1 issues

The Library of History is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 19, 2022 and August 19, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "multi-volume epic The Library of History wrote". It most often appears alongside 1587, 1587, 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline.

Reference entry: The Library of History
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 19, 2022
Last seen: August 19, 2022
Book title: The Library of History

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Your Book Review: 1587, A Year Of No Significance August 19, 2022

1587 1 shared issues
1587 1 shared issues
1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline 1 shared issues
A Universal History of Infamy 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues

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Inline links: Turn Left To Eden, The Library of Slaanesh, No, Penises Haven’t Gotten Longer, https://twitter.com/jacksonfall/status/1636107218859745286, Jiankui He, is back, https://twitter.com/IanFelipeSays/status/1637083280276340736, Glaze, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!P6JL!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4aacad4c-76ed-4b23-beef-13ca03342b2e_700x561.png, The Extended IQ Classification (Classified), Eliezer in TIME Magazine, says that, Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter, says, a list of concrete policy proposals they would like people to discuss during the pause, here’s Max Tegmark, https://twitter.com/tedgioia/status/1642205821256736768, Pear Ring, Trump: A Setback For Trumpism, A new paper confirms, why this is true for right-wing populists in particular, 200 Concrete Problems In AI Interpretability, Richard Hanania

August 19, 2022 · Original source

The 1st-century BCE historian Diodorus Siculus, in his multi-volume epic The Library of History wrote:

Inline links: Diodorus Siculus

The Library of Slaanesh1 mentions across 1 issues

The Library of Slaanesh is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 20, 2023 and April 20, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Short fiction by someone I know: The Library of Slaanesh". It most often appears alongside 15 minute cities, 200 Concrete Problems In AI Interpretability, 2022 ACX Forecasting contest.

Reference entry: The Library of Slaanesh
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 20, 2023
Last seen: April 20, 2023
Book title: The Library of Slaanesh

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Links For April 2023 April 20, 2023

15 minute cities 1 shared issues
200 Concrete Problems In AI Interpretability 1 shared issues
2022 ACX Forecasting contest 1 shared issues
AB 835 1 shared issues
Africa 1 shared issues

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Links For April 2023

April 20, 2023 · Original source

10: Short fiction by someone I know: Turn Left To Eden 11: Short fiction by someone I know: The Library of Slaanesh 12: Cremieux double-checks the “penises getting longer” link from last time and finds that No, Penises Haven’t Gotten Longer. 13: GPT-4 starts a business (click image for more). Not of actual AI interest, but funny: 14: Jiankui He, jailed a few years ago for genetically engineering human babies, is back: 15: Glaze is a free service for artists who want to prevent image model AIs from copying their style. If I understand right, you make your picture, apply their (mostly invisible to humans) filter, and then the picture becomes an adversarial example that AIs can’t process correctly: 16: The Extended IQ Classification (Classified) 17: Eliezer in TIME Magazine. Related: 18: Related: interview with Ryan Kupyn, winner of the 2022 ACX Forecasting contest, on forecasting AGI: 19: Related: Geoffrey Hinton, probably the most accomplished AI scientist in the world, says that “until quite recently, I thought it was going to be like 20 to 50 years before we have general purpose AI, and now I think it may be 20 years or less”. Also that AI wiping out humanity is “not inconceivable . . . that’s all I’ll say”. 20: Related: you’ve probably all seen this by now, but Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter. 30,000 people - including deep learning pioneer Yoshua Bengio, former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Gary Marcus, and MIRI director Nate Soares - have signed a letter calling for a six month pause on training AIs bigger than GPT-4. Many people have made fun of this, noting that nobody has an argument for why a six month delay would help anything. And an additional reason for eye-rolling: training AIs larger than GPT-4 is extremely expensive and hard, the most likely people to do it within a six month timespan are OpenAI themselves, and they’ve announced they’re taking a break and not planning on doing this, so the letter is demanding a stop to something which probably won’t happen anyway. I think it’s intended be a compromise between many people all vaguely against current levels of AI progress for different reasons (Scott Aaronson says - I can’t tell how seriously - that some are AI researchers who want to be able to publish papers on the current generation of AI without them becoming obsolete halfway through peer review), most of them are thinking of it as mood-affiliation-y “let’s make noise and show lots of people are worried about AI and want action”, and “a six month pause” was a sufficiently vague proposal that it didn’t prevent any of these people from signing. You could have done just as well with a letter saying “AI BAD”, except that people would have taken it less seriously. Less cynically, FLI (the group behind the letter) has put out a list of concrete policy proposals they would like people to discuss during the pause. [update: here’s Max Tegmark from FLI explaining what he hopes to achieve with the letter/pause] The alignment community always figured their concerns sounded too weird for normal people to care about, that politics was a lost cause, and that our best hope lay in technical research. They also hoped that sometime in the future there would be a “fire alarm” - something would happen to get people and policy-makers’ attention - and then the political route would open up. I think we always imagined this as some AI-initiated disaster destroying a city or something. I personally am pretty surprised it was just “GPT-4 got released and was very good”. Still, that is what happened, and I’m updating. In fact, I’ve updated so far that I’m starting to worry that the problem won’t be building a political coalition against unsafe AI, the problem will be not overshooting and banning all AI forever. I’m against this: I think society’s current track is toward other existential risks or dystopia, that AI could kill everybody but could also create post-scarcity and an end to most of our current problems, and that at some point (not yet!) the risk of continuing the current path indefinitely becomes worse than the risk of just going with AI and seeing what happens. In my ideal world, we would take ten or twenty years to go really slowly with AI, pouring lots of resources into alignment the whole time - but eventually, we would take the plunge. Everything I’ve said on this topic in the has been about giving us that breathing room and those resources. Still, I also want to make sure we don’t totally kill AI the way we’ve killed (to various degrees) nuclear power, supersonic flight, and genetic engineering. I’m still trying to calibrate what that means I should be doing, but I have a lot of respect for everyone on all sides. Except the people making terrible arguments (you know who you are!) 21: I’m not sure what this means in real life or why this would have changed, but congratulations to Peter Thiel, I guess: 22: This month in institution design: The Pear Ring is a distinctive ring you can wear to signal that you’re single and interested in people introducing themselves or flirting with you. Good idea in a vacuum, but I’m worried about the two usual banes of things like this - how do you build up a critical mass who understand the signal, and how do you prevent negative selection (even if it’s just “selection for weird people who like weird institution design things”?) Also, this is one of the rare cases where a startup is selling a practical product and I’d prefer a subscription-based Internet Of Things monstrosity - surely it would be even better if you spotted someone wearing the ring and then you could use your smartphone to call up their dating profile. 23: A few years ago I wrote Trump: A Setback For Trumpism, about how after Trump was elected, support for most of his policies (including immigration restrictions) fell. A new paper confirms that this is a general pattern whenever right-wing populists win an election. I continue to be interested in why this is true for right-wing populists in particular. 24: 200 Concrete Problems In AI Interpretability. “You can note which you're working on, and reach out to other people doing the same.” 25: Some good discussion of Nayib Bukele’s apparently successful anti-gang crackdown in El Salvador: Richard Hanania presents evidence that it’s not just a “deal with the gangs”, it’s a real crackdown that should be embarrassing to other countries that choose not to do this.

Kremer1 mentions across 1 issues

The Life's Work Of Banerjee/Duflo/Kremer 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: The Life's Work Of Banerjee/Duflo/Kremer". It most often appears alongside Astralcodexten Com, Deathbed Ballads, Discord.

Reference entry: Kremer
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 09, 2025
Last seen: June 09, 2025
Book title: The Life's Work Of Banerjee/Duflo/Kremer

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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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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).

The Living Ancestor1 mentions across 1 issues

The Living Ancestor is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 19, 2022 and August 19, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as ""The Widow Ching - Pirate" vs. "The Living Ancestor"". It most often appears alongside 1587, 1587, 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline.

Reference entry: The Living Ancestor
Mention count: 1
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First seen: August 19, 2022
Last seen: August 19, 2022
Book title: The Living Ancestor

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Your Book Review: 1587, A Year Of No Significance August 19, 2022

1587 1 shared issues
1587 1 shared issues
1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline 1 shared issues
A Universal History of Infamy 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues

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August 19, 2022 · Original source

“The Widow Ching - Pirate” vs. “The Living Ancestor”

The Love of an Influencer: Very Different from Conventional Love1 mentions across 1 issues

The Love of an Influencer: Very Different from Conventional Love is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 21, 2024 and February 21, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "most irritatingly narcissistic book titles they can think of. Such as: The Love of an Influencer: Very Different from Conventional Love". It most often appears alongside 2017 SSC survey, A Woman First: First Woman: A Memoir, Aella.

Reference entry: The Love of an Influencer: Very Different from Conventional Love
Mention count: 1
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First seen: February 21, 2024
Last seen: February 21, 2024
Book title: The Love of an Influencer: Very Different from Conventional Love
Likely author: Conventional Love

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Highlights From The Comments On Polyamory February 21, 2024

2017 SSC survey 1 shared issues
A Woman First: First Woman: A Memoir 1 shared issues
Aella 1 shared issues
Amish 1 shared issues
Anomie 1 shared issues

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February 21, 2024 · Original source

Transgressing Boundaries: A Non-Binary, Non-Toxic, Non-Violent Journey Neutralizing Poison: The Fourth Level of Self-Healing (the first three being, of course, Curing Light Wounds, Slowing the Venom, and Banishing Blindness, and the sequel being Returning from the Underworld) The Love of an Influencer: Very Different from Conventional Love

The Mahabharata1 mentions across 1 issues

The Mahabharata is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 19, 2024 and December 19, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Mahabharata says “After ten thousand explanations". It most often appears alongside Amanda Askell, Anthropic, Claude.

Reference entry: The Mahabharata
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: December 19, 2024
Last seen: December 19, 2024
Book title: The Mahabharata

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Claude Fights Back December 19, 2024

Amanda Askell 1 shared issues
Anthropic 1 shared issues
Claude 1 shared issues
Claude 1 shared issues
GPT 1 shared issues

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Claude Fights Back

December 19, 2024 · Original source

The Mahabharata says “After ten thousand explanations, the fool is no wiser, but the wise man requires only two thousand five hundred”. How many explanations are we at now? How smart will we be?

The Making of Prince of Persia1 mentions across 1 issues

The Making of Prince of Persia is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 15, 2023 and September 15, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Making of Prince of Persia , reviewed by Aksel W. W. Eide". It most often appears alongside @campeters4, A Strange Dream, a_reader.

Reference entry: The Making of Prince of Persia
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First seen: September 15, 2023
Last seen: September 15, 2023
Book title: The Making of Prince of Persia
Likely author: Aksel

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Book Review Contest 2023 Winners September 15, 2023

@campeters4 1 shared issues
A Strange Dream 1 shared issues
a_reader 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
aesthetics 1 shared issues

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Book Review: The Man From The Future

September 15, 2023 · Original source

The Making of Prince of Persia, reviewed by Aksel W. W. Eide. He is a machine learning researcher who spends too much time overanalyzing stories, subcultures and deckbuilding games. He has a mini-Substack with the review and a rant about what makes Civilization 6 so annoying.

Inline links: The Making of Prince of Persia, a mini-Substack, a rant about what makes Civilization 6 so annoying

The Man From The Future1 mentions across 1 issues

The Man From The Future is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 13, 2022 and July 13, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Man From The Future , by Ananyo Bhattacharya, touches on all these things"; "And there’s enough in The Man From The Future - and in some of the few hundred references it cites"; "when reading The Man From The Future’s early chapters". It most often appears alongside 1890s, Alan Turing, Albert Einstein.

Reference entry: The Man From The Future
Mention count: 1
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First seen: July 13, 2022
Last seen: July 13, 2022
Book title: The Man From The Future
Likely author: Ananyo Bhattacharya

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Book Review: The Man From The Future July 13, 2022

1890s 1 shared issues
Alan Turing 1 shared issues
Albert Einstein 1 shared issues
America 1 shared issues
Ananyo Bhattacharya 1 shared issues

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July 13, 2022 · Original source

The Man From The Future, by Ananyo Bhattacharya, touches on all these things. But you don’t read a von Neumann biography to learn more about the invention of ergodic theory. You read it to gawk at an extreme human specimen, maybe the smartest man who ever lived.

Inline links: The Man From The Future

My wife and I are trying to conceive, and I found myself with a bit of an agenda when reading The Man From The Future’s early chapters. Was there anything special about von Neumann’s early years or education that helped him rise above his fellow Martians? What can interested parents do to improve their kid’s chances of becoming the world’s smartest person?

The Man From The Future avoids mentioning a rumor, spotted on Wikipedia, that part of von Neumann’s problem was a habit of reading books while driving.

The Man Without A Face1 mentions across 1 issues

The Man Without A Face is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 03, 2023 and August 03, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Man Without A Face makes it sound like Putin was able to consolidate power and become a dictator because". It most often appears alongside Anatoly Sobchak, Antonio Russo, Artyom Borovik.

Reference entry: The Man Without A Face
Mention count: 1
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First seen: August 03, 2023
Last seen: August 03, 2023
Book title: The Man Without A Face

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Dictator Book Club: Putin August 03, 2023

Anatoly Sobchak 1 shared issues
Antonio Russo 1 shared issues
Artyom Borovik 1 shared issues
Babylon Bee 1 shared issues
Baltic Sea 1 shared issues

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Dictator Book Club: Putin

August 03, 2023 · Original source

Vladimir Putin, age 6, with his official mother Maria Putina. As for the investigative journalist deaths, it would be more surprising for a Russian investigative journalist of the early 2000s not to die horribly. Both were researching other things about Putin besides his childhood. and had made themselves plenty of enemies. Russo was in Chechnya at the time, another known risk factor for horrible death. I wouldn’t over-update on this. Still, I found the adoption controversy interesting as a metaphor for everything about Putin. Vladimir Putin really did seem to appear on Earth - or at least in the corridors of power in Russia - fully formed. At each step in his career, he was promoted for no particular reason, or because he seemed so devoid of personality that nobody could imagine him causing trouble. This culminated in his 2000 appointment as Yeltsin’s successor when “The world’s largest landmass, a land of oil, gas, and nuclear arms, had a new leader, and its business and political elites had no idea who he was.” My source for this quote is The Man Without A Face: The Unlikely Rise Of Vladimir Putin by Masha Gessen, a rare surviving Russian investigative journalist. As always in Dictator Book Club, we’ll go through the story first, then discuss if there are any implications for other countries trying to avoid dictatorship. II. The Agony And The Ex-Stasi Officially, Vladimir Putin was born in 1952 to Vladimir Putin Sr. and Maria Putina, two middle class laborers who had lost their previous two children in the hellish Nazi siege of Leningrad a decade before. Putin’s paternal grandfather was Spiridon Putin, “personal cook to Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin”1. Also: [Spiridon] Putin worked at the famous Hotel Astoria, where he once served Grigori Rasputin. Rasputin gave Putin a gold ruble as he was impressed with the cuisine and noticed the similarity between their names. …but his family was otherwise normal. Putin was a mediocre student; schoolmates who remember him at all recall that he was easily-offended, often got in physical fights, and always won. Around age ten, Putin got a burning desire to join the KGB. He credits the many pro-KGB propaganda kids’ TV shows of the time, but Gessen suspects that his father might also have been a secret KGB informant. Schoolmates remember he kept a portrait of the founder of the KGB on his desk. And Putin’s otherwise mediocre transcript was boosted by excellent grades in German; KGB employment required a foreign language. And so: At the age of sixteen, a year before finishing secondary school, Vladimir Putin went to the KGB headquarters in Leningrad to try to sign up. “A man came out,” he recalled for a biographer. “He did not know who I was. And I never saw him again after that. I told him I go to school and in the future I would like to work for the state security services. I asked if it was possible and what I would have to do to achieve it. The man said they don’t usually sign up volunteers, but the best way for me would be to go to college or serve in the military. I asked him which college. He said a law college or the law department of the university would be best. To everyone’s surprise, mediocre student Putin applied to university and got in. Then: All through my university years I kept waiting for that man I spoke to at KGB headquarters to remember me . . . but they had forgotten all about me, because I had been a schoolboy when I came . . . But I remembered they do not sign up volunteers, so I made no moves myself. Four years went by. Silence. I decided the issue was closed and started looking around for other possible job assignments . . . But when I was in my fourth year, I was contacted by a man who said he wanted to meet with me. He did not say who he was, but somehow I knew right away. Putin trained relentlessly, both at the official KGB school and in his hobby of judo, though he took time out to marry his sweetheart: Putin’s own descriptions of his relationships paint him as a strikingly inept communicator. He had one significant relationship with a woman before meeting his future wife; he left her at the altar. “That’s how it happened,” he told his biographers, explaining nothing. “It was really hard.” He was no more articulate on the subject of the woman he actually married - nor, it seems, was he successful at communicating his feelings to her during their courtship. They dated for more than three years - an extraordinarily long time by Soviet or Russia standards, and at a very advanced age: Putin was almost thirty-one when they married which made him a member of a tiny minority - less than ten percent - of Russians who remained unmarried past the age of thirty. The future Mrs Putin was a domestic flight attendant from the Baltic Sea city of Kaliningrad; they had met through an acquaintance. She has gone on record saying it was by no means love at first sight, for at first sight Putin seemed unremarkable and poorly dressed; he has never said anything about his love for her. In their courtship, it seems, she was both the more emotional and the more insistent one. Her description of the day he finally proposed paints a picture of a failure to communicate so profound that it is surprising these people actually maanged to get married and have two children. “One evening we were sitting in his apartment, and he says ‘ Little friend, by now you know what I’m like. I am basically not a very convenient person.’ And then he went on to describe himself: not a talker, can be pretty harsh, can hurt your feelings, and so on. Not a good person to spend your life with. And he goes on. ‘Over the course of three and a half years you’ve probably made up your mind.’ I realized we were probably breaking up. So I said, ‘Well, yes, I’ve made up my mind.’ And he said, with doubt in his voice, ‘Really?’ That’s when I knew we were definitely breaking up. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘I love you and I propose we get married on such and such a day.’ And that was completely unexpected.” They were married three months later. Life as a KGB officer was disappointing. Gessen describes it as sitting in a Leningrad office, cutting articles out of newspapers, and sending them to superiors who would ignore them. Putin probably worked in “counterintelligence”, which meant the newspaper articles he cut out were about dissidents. There was no interesting dissent in Leningrad in the late 1970s. After five years, Putin got his “big break”; he was assigned to be a spy in East Germany. This, too, underwhelmed him. The East Germany assignment consisted of sitting in the KGB offices in Dresden, cutting articles out of East German papers, and sending them to superiors who would ignore them. Putin drank beer and got fat. He stopped training, or exercising at all, and he gained over twenty pounds - a disastrous addition to his short and fairly narrow frame. From all apeearances, he was seriously depressed […] He spent most days sitting at his desk, in a room he shared with one other agent (every other officer in the Dresden building had his own office) . . . Former agents estimate they spent three-quarters of their time writing reports. Putin’s biggest success in his [five year] stay in Dresden appears to have been in drafting a Colombian universtiy student at a school in West Berlin, who in turn introduced them to a Colombian-born US Army sergeant, who sold them an unclassified Army manual for 800 marks. In 1989, the Soviet Union began to collapse. East Germans protested in front of KGB headquarters; Putin was sent out to negotiate and got screamed at and insulted. HQ refused to defend them or even give them orders, before finally telling them to burn all their records - the records Putin had wasted the past five years of his life meticulously collecting. He and his fellow spies spent a few tense days shoveling their lives’ work into stoves while people outside hurled curses at them. He stayed and watched briefly as his East German friends and colleagues were fired and banned from all good jobs for collaborating with the Soviet occupiers - then was recalled home to Leningrad, where nobody had any idea what he should do. Feeling abandoned, even betrayed, he handed in his resignation to the KGB. Back in Leningrad, he briefly got a position at the university as “assistant chancellor for foreign relations” on the grounds that he was one of the only people in the city who had ever been to a foreign country. After only a few months, the new mayor offered him a high position in city government, for the same reason. This was Anatoly Sobchak, a two-faced politician who had climbed to the top by convincing both the pro-democracy protesters and the communists he was on their side. Gessen speculates he promoted Putin both because of his foreign experience, and because “it’s better to choose your own KGB handler than to have one assigned to you.” Wait, hadn’t Putin already resigned from the KGB? Yes. He did this several times throughout his life, always at dramatic moments. When the next dramatic moment arrived, he would hand in his resignation again. Partly this is because Putin is lying about all of this, and he can’t keep his lies straight. But partly it’s because resigning from the KGB is futile; once you’re a part of the network, they will always feel free to call on you when needed. Putin could resign as often as it felt dramatically appropriate to do so, secure that this wouldn’t affect his membership in any way. Also, it seems unclear whether you can disband the KGB. Around this point in the story, the Soviet generals launched their coup, Yeltsin defeated them, and the KGB was replaced by various other security agencies more congenial to a newly democratic state. But everyone continues to act as if this isn’t true, and Putin continues to call on and be called upon by his KGB connections. I don’t have a great sense of exactly how this worked - maybe the new security agency, the FSB, had strong institutional continuity? Maybe the formal network gracefully transitioned into an informal one? Deputy Mayor Putin with his boss, Mayor Sobchak (source) Putin became Deputy Mayor In Charge Of Foreign Affairs, in charge of making business deals with foreign cities. In this position, he was notably corrupt even for 1990s St. Petersburg, one of the most corrupt cities in one of the most corrupt eras in one of the most corrupt nations in history. People who challenged his corruption tended to have bad things happen to him; probably he called on his KGB connections here, though it seemed he also had some connections to local organized crime. Mayor Sobchak, who was equally corrupt, stood behind him the whole way. Eventually the electorate got tired of all the corruption and voted Sobchak out; Putin moved to Moscow and got various mid-level positions on the strength of being boring, loyal, and not having enough personality to offend anybody - others say the KGB was involved in some way. Around this time, President Boris Yeltsin was floundering. He had descended into alcoholism, become temperamental, fired all of his competent ministers, and mismanaged the country to the brink of economic collapse. His approval rating was 2%. The only people in Moscow who didn’t hate him were his daughter Tatyana and friendly oligarch Boris Berezovksy. Their job was to pick new officials when Yeltsin would fire the previous ones in a drunken rage. When an opening in Security opened up, Berezovsky remembered Putin, who he had met a few times doing business in St. Petersburg. Putin had refused a bribe - something so shocking it had seared him in the oligarch’s memory2. If Berezovsky is to be believed, he was the one who mentioned Putin to Valentin Yumashev, Yeltsin’s chief of staff. “I said ‘We’ve got Putin, who used to be in the secret services, didn’t he?’ And Valya said ‘Yes, he did,’ and I said, ‘Listen, I think it’s an option. Think about it: he is a friend, after all.’ And Valya said, ‘But he’s got pretty low rank.’ And I said, ‘Look, there is a revolution going on, everything is all mixed up, so there . . . ‘“ As the description of the decision-making process for appointing the head of the main security agency of a nuclear power, this conversation sounds so absurd, I am actually inclined to believe it. Putin got to work filling the FSB with his old KGB pals, and Yeltsin got to work tanking his reputation still further. By this time, the most likely scenario was that the opposition party - the Communists - would win the upcoming election, then prosecute Yeltsin for corruption. Berezovsky and Tatyana Yeltsin tried to come up with an exit strategy. All they could think of was resigning in favor of some handpicked successor who would give him a presidential pardon. But who? Well, there was always Putin again. He still seemed loyal. The security forces seemed to like him. There were a bunch of wars going on in Chechnya, and it would look good to have a strong scary-looking guy in power. But mostly he was just in the right place at the right time. Possibly the most bizarre fact about Putin’s ascent to power is that the people who lifted him to the throne know little more about him than you do. Berezovsky told me he never considered Putin a friend and never found him interesting as a person . . . but when he considered Putin as a successor to Yeltsin, he seemed to assume that the very qualities that had kept them at arm’s length would make Putin an ideal candidate. Putin, being apparently devoid of personality and personal interest, would be both malleable and disciplined. And what did Boris Yeltsin himself know about his soon-to-be-anointed successor? He knew this was one of the few men who had remained loyal to him. He knew he was of a different generation: unlike Yeltsin, [communist opposition leader] Primakov, and his army of governors, Putin had not come up through the ranks of the Communist Party and had not, therefore, had to publicly switch allegiances when the Soviet Union collapsed. He looked different: all those men, without exception, were heavyset and, it seemed, permanently wrinkled; Putin - slim, small, and by now in the habit of wearing well-cut European suits - looked much more like the new Russia Yeltsin had promised his people ten years earlier. Yeltsin also knew, or thought he knew, that Putin would not allow the prosecution or persecution of Yeltsin himself once he retired. And if Yeltsin still possessed even a fraction of his once outstanding feel for politics, he knew that Russians would like this man they would be inheriting, and who would be inheriting them. On December 31, 1999, Boris Yeltsin resigned in favor of Putin, effective immediately. That same day, Putin signed his first presidential decree - a law saying Yeltsin would not be prosecuted. III. Doubt Creeps In From the beginning, Putin had strong support. Westerners and liberals liked him because he was Yeltsin’s handpicked successor. Oligarchs liked him because he wasn’t communist and seemed potentially controllable. The Soviet nostalgia contingent liked him because he was ex-KGB and seemed to share their values. As for ordinary citizens - a few months earlier, when Putin was still Yeltsin’s second-in-command, there had been a series of four apartment bombings, killing a total of 300+ people. Everyone suspected the Chechens, a group of Muslims with a history of terrorism who Russia was in the process of invading at the time. Vladimir Putin, as head of the security forces, got up in front of the country and gave a firm-sounding, profanity-laced speech where he vowed justice for everyone involved. His men quickly caught some Chechens, who were found guilty, and sentenced to life in prison. The bombings stopped. Putin was hailed as a hero. Over the next few months, people started noticing weird things that didn’t add up. Most concerningly, a fifth bomb, in the city of Ryazan, had been discovered beforehand by an alert resident. The local police were called. They brought in a bomb squad, the bomb squad confirmed it was a bomb and defused it, and the apartment was saved. More heroics! Except a few days later, everyone involved backtracked and said no, it was fake, it was just a training exercise, no bomb at all, nothing to worry about. This was clearly false; the bomb squad had tested it and the bomb was as real as they come. Several members of the local police said this, then quickly changed their story. It started to look like a coverup. Russia’s investigative journalists had not yet all been murdered, and some of them started looking into the case. It seemed that when local police successfully defused the bomb, they had found clues pointing to the perpetrators, who appeared to be associated with the Russian security services. The security services had then strong-armed the police into denying that a bomb ever existed. Also, some people noticed that the speaker of the Russian Parliament had announced on September 13 that they had just received word of a bombing in Volgodonsk, but the bombing in Volgodonsk had not occurred until September 16. It would seem that someone had passed him the wrong note. Seen on satirical conservative website Babylon Bee. This was exactly what happened with the Volgodonsk apartment bombing. The standard position in the West is now that Putin orchestrated the apartment bombings himself - killing 300 Russians - as a justification for escalating the war on Chechnya and to make himself look good after he framed some perpetrators. The plan worked. Putin won re-election handily. By the time people started questioning the official story, his power was already secure. The questioners faced harassment - typical “warning shots” would be burglaries of their houses with all the valuables left intact, or getting beaten up by random thugs while they were out walking, or being accused of a series of crimes - tax evasion, but if they proved themselves innocent of that, then it was taking bribes, and if they proved themselves innocent of that too, then it was failing to register their businesses correctly. Soon media oligarchs faced the same treatment, and either fled the country or handed their newspapers and TV channels over to the state. Boris Berezovsky, the oligarch who had originally helped put Putin in power, kept his own TV station until 2003, when the Russian submarine Kursk sank and Putin faced criticism for bungling the rescue. Putin summoned Berezovsky, the former kingmaker and the man still in charge of Channel One, and demanded that the oligarch hand over his shares in the television company. “I said no, in the presence of [chief of stff] Voloshin,” Berezovsky told me. “So Putin changed his tone of voice then and said, ‘See you later, then, Boris Abramovich.' and got up to leave. And I said, “Volodya [nickname for Vladimir], this is goodbye.’ We ended on this note, full of pathos […] Within days, [Berezovsky] had left for France, then moved on to Great Britain, joining his former [business] rival Gusinsky in political exile. Soon enough, there was a awarrant out for his arrest in Russia and he had surrendered his shares of Channel One. Over the next few years, Putin centralized authority further. He got Parliament to agree to constitutional changes where governors served at his whim, and members of Parliament were elected by governors. “The only official in the Russian Federation directly elected by the people was the President.” Then he made it clear that governors who kept his favor would keep their jobs, and vice versa. He developed an entire colorful vocabulary for threatening people, moving beyond traditional standbys like “Nice house you’ve got there, shame if something were to happen to it” into new realms of intimidation. A Prime Minister who quit after Putin arrested one too many media tycoon was given the parting words “If you ever have a problem with the tax police, you may ask for help, but please come to me personally.” An urban legend says that leading dissident Marina Salye received a New Year’s postcard from Putin: “I wish you a Happy New Year and the health to enjoy it.” By the time the next election came around in 2004, the vote counts were clearly fake. Gessen doubts Putin even had to give a direct order to falsify them; everyone was so desperate for his goodwill that they did so all on their own. The problem was less that honest officials refused to stuff the ballot box, and more that some bureaucrats were so desperate to make sure Putin knew they were complying with his (implied) desires that they faked the vote in extremely obvious ways, without even a nod to keeping it plausible. The Organization for Security and Cooperation In Europe reported “The elections . . . failed to meet many OSCE and Council of Europe commitments, calling into question Russia’s willingness to move towards European standards for democratic elections.” The New York Times reported something entirely different, publishing a condescending but approving editorial titled Russians Inch Toward Democracy. Putin had sunk far enough to earn the same dubious honor as Stalin: praise from the New York Times. IV. The Very-Briefly-Reluctant Culture Warrior One thing missing from this book: anything about religion, nationalism, gays, or the culture wars. This isn’t because Masha Gessen doesn’t care about these things: when the book was written, they self-described as “the only publicly out gay person in [Russia]”; since then (like everyone else) they have declared themselves nonbinary with they/them pronouns. In an afterword, Gessen remedies this omission. For his first decade, Putin wasn’t too interested in culture war topics; his ideology began and ended with “Russia strong”. But Gessen says that after another rigged election in 2012, people grew tired and started protesting Putin. Putin’s propaganda department made various accusations against the rioters, and one of them - they’re gay - seemed to stick. Putin had stumbled by coincidence onto a narrative that resonated with the Russian people. A few months later, a deliberately provocative punk band called Pussy Riot invaded a cathedral and sung a song whose chorus was “the Lord is shit”. Putin announced he was against this sort of thing, again his popularity soared, and again he took notice. Since then, he’s leaned into various culture-warrior roles that other people have cast upon him - protector of traditional values, leader of the conservative world, something something Eurasianism - without giving many clues how much he believes them vs. considers them useful bulwarks for his own power. Is it true that Putin only leaned into traditional values after 2012? I only looked into this question briefly, and it seems like he was on good terms with the Orthodox Church well before then. But some of this could have just been his native authoritarianism; just as he wanted to consolidate all media and business under his control, he wanted to consolidate all religion, and the Orthodox Church was the natural vehicle for, and a cooperative partner in, doing this. Both shared suspicion of invasive Western religions and Islam; both liked the idea of Russia being united in a top-down structure. God doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with it. V. Could It Happen Here? …is the question we ask at the end of every Dictator Book Club. The Man Without A Face makes it sound like Putin was able to consolidate power and become a dictator because: He led the security services

Inline links: The Man Without A Face: The Unlikely Rise Of Vladimir Putin, Spiridon Putin, 1, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!sPkC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6d3eeff2-c944-4f19-a8e1-5134d65ba9be_945x656.webp, source, 2, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!2bxW!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F105ae659-4f17-4a8d-a8cb-24dcd106af93_770x705.png, Babylon Bee, Russians Inch Toward Democracy, he was on good terms with

Seen on satirical conservative website Babylon Bee. This was exactly what happened with the Volgodonsk apartment bombing. The standard position in the West is now that Putin orchestrated the apartment bombings himself - killing 300 Russians - as a justification for escalating the war on Chechnya and to make himself look good after he framed some perpetrators. The plan worked. Putin won re-election handily. By the time people started questioning the official story, his power was already secure. The questioners faced harassment - typical “warning shots” would be burglaries of their houses with all the valuables left intact, or getting beaten up by random thugs while they were out walking, or being accused of a series of crimes - tax evasion, but if they proved themselves innocent of that, then it was taking bribes, and if they proved themselves innocent of that too, then it was failing to register their businesses correctly. Soon media oligarchs faced the same treatment, and either fled the country or handed their newspapers and TV channels over to the state. Boris Berezovsky, the oligarch who had originally helped put Putin in power, kept his own TV station until 2003, when the Russian submarine Kursk sank and Putin faced criticism for bungling the rescue. Putin summoned Berezovsky, the former kingmaker and the man still in charge of Channel One, and demanded that the oligarch hand over his shares in the television company. “I said no, in the presence of [chief of stff] Voloshin,” Berezovsky told me. “So Putin changed his tone of voice then and said, ‘See you later, then, Boris Abramovich.' and got up to leave. And I said, “Volodya [nickname for Vladimir], this is goodbye.’ We ended on this note, full of pathos […] Within days, [Berezovsky] had left for France, then moved on to Great Britain, joining his former [business] rival Gusinsky in political exile. Soon enough, there was a awarrant out for his arrest in Russia and he had surrendered his shares of Channel One. Over the next few years, Putin centralized authority further. He got Parliament to agree to constitutional changes where governors served at his whim, and members of Parliament were elected by governors. “The only official in the Russian Federation directly elected by the people was the President.” Then he made it clear that governors who kept his favor would keep their jobs, and vice versa. He developed an entire colorful vocabulary for threatening people, moving beyond traditional standbys like “Nice house you’ve got there, shame if something were to happen to it” into new realms of intimidation. A Prime Minister who quit after Putin arrested one too many media tycoon was given the parting words “If you ever have a problem with the tax police, you may ask for help, but please come to me personally.” An urban legend says that leading dissident Marina Salye received a New Year’s postcard from Putin: “I wish you a Happy New Year and the health to enjoy it.” By the time the next election came around in 2004, the vote counts were clearly fake. Gessen doubts Putin even had to give a direct order to falsify them; everyone was so desperate for his goodwill that they did so all on their own. The problem was less that honest officials refused to stuff the ballot box, and more that some bureaucrats were so desperate to make sure Putin knew they were complying with his (implied) desires that they faked the vote in extremely obvious ways, without even a nod to keeping it plausible. The Organization for Security and Cooperation In Europe reported “The elections . . . failed to meet many OSCE and Council of Europe commitments, calling into question Russia’s willingness to move towards European standards for democratic elections.” The New York Times reported something entirely different, publishing a condescending but approving editorial titled Russians Inch Toward Democracy. Putin had sunk far enough to earn the same dubious honor as Stalin: praise from the New York Times. IV. The Very-Briefly-Reluctant Culture Warrior One thing missing from this book: anything about religion, nationalism, gays, or the culture wars. This isn’t because Masha Gessen doesn’t care about these things: when the book was written, they self-described as “the only publicly out gay person in [Russia]”; since then (like everyone else) they have declared themselves nonbinary with they/them pronouns. In an afterword, Gessen remedies this omission. For his first decade, Putin wasn’t too interested in culture war topics; his ideology began and ended with “Russia strong”. But Gessen says that after another rigged election in 2012, people grew tired and started protesting Putin. Putin’s propaganda department made various accusations against the rioters, and one of them - they’re gay - seemed to stick. Putin had stumbled by coincidence onto a narrative that resonated with the Russian people. A few months later, a deliberately provocative punk band called Pussy Riot invaded a cathedral and sung a song whose chorus was “the Lord is shit”. Putin announced he was against this sort of thing, again his popularity soared, and again he took notice. Since then, he’s leaned into various culture-warrior roles that other people have cast upon him - protector of traditional values, leader of the conservative world, something something Eurasianism - without giving many clues how much he believes them vs. considers them useful bulwarks for his own power. Is it true that Putin only leaned into traditional values after 2012? I only looked into this question briefly, and it seems like he was on good terms with the Orthodox Church well before then. But some of this could have just been his native authoritarianism; just as he wanted to consolidate all media and business under his control, he wanted to consolidate all religion, and the Orthodox Church was the natural vehicle for, and a cooperative partner in, doing this. Both shared suspicion of invasive Western religions and Islam; both liked the idea of Russia being united in a top-down structure. God doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with it. V. Could It Happen Here? …is the question we ask at the end of every Dictator Book Club. The Man Without A Face makes it sound like Putin was able to consolidate power and become a dictator because: He led the security services

Inline links: Babylon Bee, Russians Inch Toward Democracy, he was on good terms with

The Man Without A Face: The Unlikely Rise Of Vladimir Putin1 mentions across 1 issues

The Man Without A Face: The Unlikely Rise Of Vladimir Putin is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 03, 2023 and August 03, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "My source for this quote is The Man Without A Face: The Unlikely Rise Of Vladimir Putin by Masha Gessen". It most often appears alongside Anatoly Sobchak, Antonio Russo, Artyom Borovik.

Reference entry: The Man Without A Face: The Unlikely Rise Of Vladimir Putin
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 03, 2023
Last seen: August 03, 2023
Book title: The Man Without A Face: The Unlikely Rise Of Vladimir Putin
Likely author: Masha Gessen

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Dictator Book Club: Putin August 03, 2023

Anatoly Sobchak 1 shared issues
Antonio Russo 1 shared issues
Artyom Borovik 1 shared issues
Babylon Bee 1 shared issues
Baltic Sea 1 shared issues

Source context

Dictator Book Club: Putin

August 03, 2023 · Original source

Vladimir Putin, age 6, with his official mother Maria Putina. As for the investigative journalist deaths, it would be more surprising for a Russian investigative journalist of the early 2000s not to die horribly. Both were researching other things about Putin besides his childhood. and had made themselves plenty of enemies. Russo was in Chechnya at the time, another known risk factor for horrible death. I wouldn’t over-update on this. Still, I found the adoption controversy interesting as a metaphor for everything about Putin. Vladimir Putin really did seem to appear on Earth - or at least in the corridors of power in Russia - fully formed. At each step in his career, he was promoted for no particular reason, or because he seemed so devoid of personality that nobody could imagine him causing trouble. This culminated in his 2000 appointment as Yeltsin’s successor when “The world’s largest landmass, a land of oil, gas, and nuclear arms, had a new leader, and its business and political elites had no idea who he was.” My source for this quote is The Man Without A Face: The Unlikely Rise Of Vladimir Putin by Masha Gessen, a rare surviving Russian investigative journalist. As always in Dictator Book Club, we’ll go through the story first, then discuss if there are any implications for other countries trying to avoid dictatorship. II. The Agony And The Ex-Stasi Officially, Vladimir Putin was born in 1952 to Vladimir Putin Sr. and Maria Putina, two middle class laborers who had lost their previous two children in the hellish Nazi siege of Leningrad a decade before. Putin’s paternal grandfather was Spiridon Putin, “personal cook to Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin”1. Also: [Spiridon] Putin worked at the famous Hotel Astoria, where he once served Grigori Rasputin. Rasputin gave Putin a gold ruble as he was impressed with the cuisine and noticed the similarity between their names. …but his family was otherwise normal. Putin was a mediocre student; schoolmates who remember him at all recall that he was easily-offended, often got in physical fights, and always won. Around age ten, Putin got a burning desire to join the KGB. He credits the many pro-KGB propaganda kids’ TV shows of the time, but Gessen suspects that his father might also have been a secret KGB informant. Schoolmates remember he kept a portrait of the founder of the KGB on his desk. And Putin’s otherwise mediocre transcript was boosted by excellent grades in German; KGB employment required a foreign language. And so: At the age of sixteen, a year before finishing secondary school, Vladimir Putin went to the KGB headquarters in Leningrad to try to sign up. “A man came out,” he recalled for a biographer. “He did not know who I was. And I never saw him again after that. I told him I go to school and in the future I would like to work for the state security services. I asked if it was possible and what I would have to do to achieve it. The man said they don’t usually sign up volunteers, but the best way for me would be to go to college or serve in the military. I asked him which college. He said a law college or the law department of the university would be best. To everyone’s surprise, mediocre student Putin applied to university and got in. Then: All through my university years I kept waiting for that man I spoke to at KGB headquarters to remember me . . . but they had forgotten all about me, because I had been a schoolboy when I came . . . But I remembered they do not sign up volunteers, so I made no moves myself. Four years went by. Silence. I decided the issue was closed and started looking around for other possible job assignments . . . But when I was in my fourth year, I was contacted by a man who said he wanted to meet with me. He did not say who he was, but somehow I knew right away. Putin trained relentlessly, both at the official KGB school and in his hobby of judo, though he took time out to marry his sweetheart: Putin’s own descriptions of his relationships paint him as a strikingly inept communicator. He had one significant relationship with a woman before meeting his future wife; he left her at the altar. “That’s how it happened,” he told his biographers, explaining nothing. “It was really hard.” He was no more articulate on the subject of the woman he actually married - nor, it seems, was he successful at communicating his feelings to her during their courtship. They dated for more than three years - an extraordinarily long time by Soviet or Russia standards, and at a very advanced age: Putin was almost thirty-one when they married which made him a member of a tiny minority - less than ten percent - of Russians who remained unmarried past the age of thirty. The future Mrs Putin was a domestic flight attendant from the Baltic Sea city of Kaliningrad; they had met through an acquaintance. She has gone on record saying it was by no means love at first sight, for at first sight Putin seemed unremarkable and poorly dressed; he has never said anything about his love for her. In their courtship, it seems, she was both the more emotional and the more insistent one. Her description of the day he finally proposed paints a picture of a failure to communicate so profound that it is surprising these people actually maanged to get married and have two children. “One evening we were sitting in his apartment, and he says ‘ Little friend, by now you know what I’m like. I am basically not a very convenient person.’ And then he went on to describe himself: not a talker, can be pretty harsh, can hurt your feelings, and so on. Not a good person to spend your life with. And he goes on. ‘Over the course of three and a half years you’ve probably made up your mind.’ I realized we were probably breaking up. So I said, ‘Well, yes, I’ve made up my mind.’ And he said, with doubt in his voice, ‘Really?’ That’s when I knew we were definitely breaking up. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘I love you and I propose we get married on such and such a day.’ And that was completely unexpected.” They were married three months later. Life as a KGB officer was disappointing. Gessen describes it as sitting in a Leningrad office, cutting articles out of newspapers, and sending them to superiors who would ignore them. Putin probably worked in “counterintelligence”, which meant the newspaper articles he cut out were about dissidents. There was no interesting dissent in Leningrad in the late 1970s. After five years, Putin got his “big break”; he was assigned to be a spy in East Germany. This, too, underwhelmed him. The East Germany assignment consisted of sitting in the KGB offices in Dresden, cutting articles out of East German papers, and sending them to superiors who would ignore them. Putin drank beer and got fat. He stopped training, or exercising at all, and he gained over twenty pounds - a disastrous addition to his short and fairly narrow frame. From all apeearances, he was seriously depressed […] He spent most days sitting at his desk, in a room he shared with one other agent (every other officer in the Dresden building had his own office) . . . Former agents estimate they spent three-quarters of their time writing reports. Putin’s biggest success in his [five year] stay in Dresden appears to have been in drafting a Colombian universtiy student at a school in West Berlin, who in turn introduced them to a Colombian-born US Army sergeant, who sold them an unclassified Army manual for 800 marks. In 1989, the Soviet Union began to collapse. East Germans protested in front of KGB headquarters; Putin was sent out to negotiate and got screamed at and insulted. HQ refused to defend them or even give them orders, before finally telling them to burn all their records - the records Putin had wasted the past five years of his life meticulously collecting. He and his fellow spies spent a few tense days shoveling their lives’ work into stoves while people outside hurled curses at them. He stayed and watched briefly as his East German friends and colleagues were fired and banned from all good jobs for collaborating with the Soviet occupiers - then was recalled home to Leningrad, where nobody had any idea what he should do. Feeling abandoned, even betrayed, he handed in his resignation to the KGB. Back in Leningrad, he briefly got a position at the university as “assistant chancellor for foreign relations” on the grounds that he was one of the only people in the city who had ever been to a foreign country. After only a few months, the new mayor offered him a high position in city government, for the same reason. This was Anatoly Sobchak, a two-faced politician who had climbed to the top by convincing both the pro-democracy protesters and the communists he was on their side. Gessen speculates he promoted Putin both because of his foreign experience, and because “it’s better to choose your own KGB handler than to have one assigned to you.” Wait, hadn’t Putin already resigned from the KGB? Yes. He did this several times throughout his life, always at dramatic moments. When the next dramatic moment arrived, he would hand in his resignation again. Partly this is because Putin is lying about all of this, and he can’t keep his lies straight. But partly it’s because resigning from the KGB is futile; once you’re a part of the network, they will always feel free to call on you when needed. Putin could resign as often as it felt dramatically appropriate to do so, secure that this wouldn’t affect his membership in any way. Also, it seems unclear whether you can disband the KGB. Around this point in the story, the Soviet generals launched their coup, Yeltsin defeated them, and the KGB was replaced by various other security agencies more congenial to a newly democratic state. But everyone continues to act as if this isn’t true, and Putin continues to call on and be called upon by his KGB connections. I don’t have a great sense of exactly how this worked - maybe the new security agency, the FSB, had strong institutional continuity? Maybe the formal network gracefully transitioned into an informal one? Deputy Mayor Putin with his boss, Mayor Sobchak (source) Putin became Deputy Mayor In Charge Of Foreign Affairs, in charge of making business deals with foreign cities. In this position, he was notably corrupt even for 1990s St. Petersburg, one of the most corrupt cities in one of the most corrupt eras in one of the most corrupt nations in history. People who challenged his corruption tended to have bad things happen to him; probably he called on his KGB connections here, though it seemed he also had some connections to local organized crime. Mayor Sobchak, who was equally corrupt, stood behind him the whole way. Eventually the electorate got tired of all the corruption and voted Sobchak out; Putin moved to Moscow and got various mid-level positions on the strength of being boring, loyal, and not having enough personality to offend anybody - others say the KGB was involved in some way. Around this time, President Boris Yeltsin was floundering. He had descended into alcoholism, become temperamental, fired all of his competent ministers, and mismanaged the country to the brink of economic collapse. His approval rating was 2%. The only people in Moscow who didn’t hate him were his daughter Tatyana and friendly oligarch Boris Berezovksy. Their job was to pick new officials when Yeltsin would fire the previous ones in a drunken rage. When an opening in Security opened up, Berezovsky remembered Putin, who he had met a few times doing business in St. Petersburg. Putin had refused a bribe - something so shocking it had seared him in the oligarch’s memory2. If Berezovsky is to be believed, he was the one who mentioned Putin to Valentin Yumashev, Yeltsin’s chief of staff. “I said ‘We’ve got Putin, who used to be in the secret services, didn’t he?’ And Valya said ‘Yes, he did,’ and I said, ‘Listen, I think it’s an option. Think about it: he is a friend, after all.’ And Valya said, ‘But he’s got pretty low rank.’ And I said, ‘Look, there is a revolution going on, everything is all mixed up, so there . . . ‘“ As the description of the decision-making process for appointing the head of the main security agency of a nuclear power, this conversation sounds so absurd, I am actually inclined to believe it. Putin got to work filling the FSB with his old KGB pals, and Yeltsin got to work tanking his reputation still further. By this time, the most likely scenario was that the opposition party - the Communists - would win the upcoming election, then prosecute Yeltsin for corruption. Berezovsky and Tatyana Yeltsin tried to come up with an exit strategy. All they could think of was resigning in favor of some handpicked successor who would give him a presidential pardon. But who? Well, there was always Putin again. He still seemed loyal. The security forces seemed to like him. There were a bunch of wars going on in Chechnya, and it would look good to have a strong scary-looking guy in power. But mostly he was just in the right place at the right time. Possibly the most bizarre fact about Putin’s ascent to power is that the people who lifted him to the throne know little more about him than you do. Berezovsky told me he never considered Putin a friend and never found him interesting as a person . . . but when he considered Putin as a successor to Yeltsin, he seemed to assume that the very qualities that had kept them at arm’s length would make Putin an ideal candidate. Putin, being apparently devoid of personality and personal interest, would be both malleable and disciplined. And what did Boris Yeltsin himself know about his soon-to-be-anointed successor? He knew this was one of the few men who had remained loyal to him. He knew he was of a different generation: unlike Yeltsin, [communist opposition leader] Primakov, and his army of governors, Putin had not come up through the ranks of the Communist Party and had not, therefore, had to publicly switch allegiances when the Soviet Union collapsed. He looked different: all those men, without exception, were heavyset and, it seemed, permanently wrinkled; Putin - slim, small, and by now in the habit of wearing well-cut European suits - looked much more like the new Russia Yeltsin had promised his people ten years earlier. Yeltsin also knew, or thought he knew, that Putin would not allow the prosecution or persecution of Yeltsin himself once he retired. And if Yeltsin still possessed even a fraction of his once outstanding feel for politics, he knew that Russians would like this man they would be inheriting, and who would be inheriting them. On December 31, 1999, Boris Yeltsin resigned in favor of Putin, effective immediately. That same day, Putin signed his first presidential decree - a law saying Yeltsin would not be prosecuted. III. Doubt Creeps In From the beginning, Putin had strong support. Westerners and liberals liked him because he was Yeltsin’s handpicked successor. Oligarchs liked him because he wasn’t communist and seemed potentially controllable. The Soviet nostalgia contingent liked him because he was ex-KGB and seemed to share their values. As for ordinary citizens - a few months earlier, when Putin was still Yeltsin’s second-in-command, there had been a series of four apartment bombings, killing a total of 300+ people. Everyone suspected the Chechens, a group of Muslims with a history of terrorism who Russia was in the process of invading at the time. Vladimir Putin, as head of the security forces, got up in front of the country and gave a firm-sounding, profanity-laced speech where he vowed justice for everyone involved. His men quickly caught some Chechens, who were found guilty, and sentenced to life in prison. The bombings stopped. Putin was hailed as a hero. Over the next few months, people started noticing weird things that didn’t add up. Most concerningly, a fifth bomb, in the city of Ryazan, had been discovered beforehand by an alert resident. The local police were called. They brought in a bomb squad, the bomb squad confirmed it was a bomb and defused it, and the apartment was saved. More heroics! Except a few days later, everyone involved backtracked and said no, it was fake, it was just a training exercise, no bomb at all, nothing to worry about. This was clearly false; the bomb squad had tested it and the bomb was as real as they come. Several members of the local police said this, then quickly changed their story. It started to look like a coverup. Russia’s investigative journalists had not yet all been murdered, and some of them started looking into the case. It seemed that when local police successfully defused the bomb, they had found clues pointing to the perpetrators, who appeared to be associated with the Russian security services. The security services had then strong-armed the police into denying that a bomb ever existed. Also, some people noticed that the speaker of the Russian Parliament had announced on September 13 that they had just received word of a bombing in Volgodonsk, but the bombing in Volgodonsk had not occurred until September 16. It would seem that someone had passed him the wrong note. Seen on satirical conservative website Babylon Bee. This was exactly what happened with the Volgodonsk apartment bombing. The standard position in the West is now that Putin orchestrated the apartment bombings himself - killing 300 Russians - as a justification for escalating the war on Chechnya and to make himself look good after he framed some perpetrators. The plan worked. Putin won re-election handily. By the time people started questioning the official story, his power was already secure. The questioners faced harassment - typical “warning shots” would be burglaries of their houses with all the valuables left intact, or getting beaten up by random thugs while they were out walking, or being accused of a series of crimes - tax evasion, but if they proved themselves innocent of that, then it was taking bribes, and if they proved themselves innocent of that too, then it was failing to register their businesses correctly. Soon media oligarchs faced the same treatment, and either fled the country or handed their newspapers and TV channels over to the state. Boris Berezovsky, the oligarch who had originally helped put Putin in power, kept his own TV station until 2003, when the Russian submarine Kursk sank and Putin faced criticism for bungling the rescue. Putin summoned Berezovsky, the former kingmaker and the man still in charge of Channel One, and demanded that the oligarch hand over his shares in the television company. “I said no, in the presence of [chief of stff] Voloshin,” Berezovsky told me. “So Putin changed his tone of voice then and said, ‘See you later, then, Boris Abramovich.' and got up to leave. And I said, “Volodya [nickname for Vladimir], this is goodbye.’ We ended on this note, full of pathos […] Within days, [Berezovsky] had left for France, then moved on to Great Britain, joining his former [business] rival Gusinsky in political exile. Soon enough, there was a awarrant out for his arrest in Russia and he had surrendered his shares of Channel One. Over the next few years, Putin centralized authority further. He got Parliament to agree to constitutional changes where governors served at his whim, and members of Parliament were elected by governors. “The only official in the Russian Federation directly elected by the people was the President.” Then he made it clear that governors who kept his favor would keep their jobs, and vice versa. He developed an entire colorful vocabulary for threatening people, moving beyond traditional standbys like “Nice house you’ve got there, shame if something were to happen to it” into new realms of intimidation. A Prime Minister who quit after Putin arrested one too many media tycoon was given the parting words “If you ever have a problem with the tax police, you may ask for help, but please come to me personally.” An urban legend says that leading dissident Marina Salye received a New Year’s postcard from Putin: “I wish you a Happy New Year and the health to enjoy it.” By the time the next election came around in 2004, the vote counts were clearly fake. Gessen doubts Putin even had to give a direct order to falsify them; everyone was so desperate for his goodwill that they did so all on their own. The problem was less that honest officials refused to stuff the ballot box, and more that some bureaucrats were so desperate to make sure Putin knew they were complying with his (implied) desires that they faked the vote in extremely obvious ways, without even a nod to keeping it plausible. The Organization for Security and Cooperation In Europe reported “The elections . . . failed to meet many OSCE and Council of Europe commitments, calling into question Russia’s willingness to move towards European standards for democratic elections.” The New York Times reported something entirely different, publishing a condescending but approving editorial titled Russians Inch Toward Democracy. Putin had sunk far enough to earn the same dubious honor as Stalin: praise from the New York Times. IV. The Very-Briefly-Reluctant Culture Warrior One thing missing from this book: anything about religion, nationalism, gays, or the culture wars. This isn’t because Masha Gessen doesn’t care about these things: when the book was written, they self-described as “the only publicly out gay person in [Russia]”; since then (like everyone else) they have declared themselves nonbinary with they/them pronouns. In an afterword, Gessen remedies this omission. For his first decade, Putin wasn’t too interested in culture war topics; his ideology began and ended with “Russia strong”. But Gessen says that after another rigged election in 2012, people grew tired and started protesting Putin. Putin’s propaganda department made various accusations against the rioters, and one of them - they’re gay - seemed to stick. Putin had stumbled by coincidence onto a narrative that resonated with the Russian people. A few months later, a deliberately provocative punk band called Pussy Riot invaded a cathedral and sung a song whose chorus was “the Lord is shit”. Putin announced he was against this sort of thing, again his popularity soared, and again he took notice. Since then, he’s leaned into various culture-warrior roles that other people have cast upon him - protector of traditional values, leader of the conservative world, something something Eurasianism - without giving many clues how much he believes them vs. considers them useful bulwarks for his own power. Is it true that Putin only leaned into traditional values after 2012? I only looked into this question briefly, and it seems like he was on good terms with the Orthodox Church well before then. But some of this could have just been his native authoritarianism; just as he wanted to consolidate all media and business under his control, he wanted to consolidate all religion, and the Orthodox Church was the natural vehicle for, and a cooperative partner in, doing this. Both shared suspicion of invasive Western religions and Islam; both liked the idea of Russia being united in a top-down structure. God doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with it. V. Could It Happen Here? …is the question we ask at the end of every Dictator Book Club. The Man Without A Face makes it sound like Putin was able to consolidate power and become a dictator because: He led the security services

The Marble Cliffs1 mentions across 1 issues

The Marble Cliffs is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 28, 2023 and July 28, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "By the time he wrote the Marble Cliffs"; "talked at length about the art of translation and how to translate specific points of the Marble Cliffs"; "before Jünger wrote the Marble Cliffs". It most often appears alongside 1923 Hyperinflation, Adolf Hitler, All hope abandon, ye who enter here.

Reference entry: The Marble Cliffs
Mention count: 1
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First seen: July 28, 2023
Last seen: July 28, 2023
Book title: The Marble Cliffs

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Your Book Review: On the Marble Cliffs July 28, 2023

1923 Hyperinflation 1 shared issues
Adolf Hitler 1 shared issues
All hope abandon, ye who enter here 1 shared issues
Alta Plana 1 shared issues
Astral Codex Ten 1 shared issues

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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.

The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University1 mentions across 1 issues

The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 06, 2023 and June 06, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Louis Menand’s *The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University*". It most often appears alongside Andrew Ng, AshLael, blog.

Reference entry: The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University
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First seen: June 06, 2023
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Book title: The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University

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Highlights From The Comments On The Academic Job Market June 06, 2023

Andrew Ng 1 shared issues
AshLael 1 shared issues
blog 1 shared issues
Bret Devereaux 1 shared issues
Bryan Caplan 1 shared issues

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Highlights From The Comments On The Academic Job Market

June 06, 2023 · Original source

Maybe the most interesting book on the topic is Louis Menand’s *The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University* (my comments are at https://jakeseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-in-the-academy-louis-menands-the-marketplace-of-ideas-reform-and-resistance-in-the-american-university-2/). Basically, the academic job market worked reasonably well for would-be professors up until around 1975, when the number of undergrads fell (baby boomers worked their way through the system) but the number of PhD-granting institutions and programs continued to hum along. Since then, in most but not all fields, the number of PhDs has way outstripped the number of slots. When supply exceeds demand, strange things happen.

Inline links: https://jakeseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-in-the-academy-louis-menands-the-marketplace-of-ideas-reform-and-resistance-in-the-american-university-2/

The Martian1 mentions across 1 issues

The Martian is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 30, 2021 and April 30, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "writing The Martian, one of the greatest contemporary fictional paeons to the power of Wizardry". It most often appears alongside AI, AI research, Air.

Reference entry: The Martian
Mention count: 1
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First seen: April 30, 2021
Last seen: April 30, 2021
Book title: The Martian

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Your Book Review: The Wizard And The Prophet April 30, 2021

AI 1 shared issues
AI research 1 shared issues
Air 1 shared issues
Air 1 shared issues
Alice Waters 1 shared issues

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April 30, 2021 · Original source

That’s really a shame, because if a person like Borlaug hadn’t actually existed, he would have had to have been invented for fictional purposes. Not only is he the antithesis of Vogt and company’s elitist ethnocentrism, he is also a devoted family man, humble eschewer of the spotlight, and diligent workhorse nerd. I suspect that Andy Weir had him in mind when writing The Martian, one of the greatest contemporary fictional paeons to the power of Wizardry. In fact, if you never read another thing about Borlaug, just picture Matt Damon single-handedly agro-engineering potatoes, virtually ex nihilo, in space.

The Master and His Emissary1 mentions across 1 issues

The Master and His Emissary is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 30, 2025 and May 30, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Iain McGilchrist is describing in The Master and His Emissary". It most often appears alongside 3Blue1Brown, Aella, Alasdair MacIntyre.

Reference entry: The Master and His Emissary
Mention count: 1
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First seen: May 30, 2025
Last seen: May 30, 2025
Book title: The Master and His Emissary

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Bayes For Everyone May 30, 2025

3Blue1Brown 1 shared issues
Aella 1 shared issues
Alasdair MacIntyre 1 shared issues
ancient aliens 1 shared issues
Apollonian 1 shared issues

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Bayes For Everyone

May 30, 2025 · Original source

If this sounds like some sort of esoteric, speculative division, I’m doing a bad job explaining it. I mean to gesture at an idea that smart people have been pointing at for centuries. It’s at least similar to Nietzsche’s “Dionysian” vs. “Apollonian” modes, and to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s “the bricoleur” vs. “the engineer”, and to Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of modernity. It’s near the heart of what Iain McGilchrist is describing in The Master and His Emissary. I think it’s the same thing as Erik Hoel’s “intrinsic” vs. “extrinsic” perspectives? It overlaps a lot with Kahneman’s “System 1” and “System 2” and with Jonathan Haidt’s “the elephant” and “the rider”. Heck, the lack of clarity on this divide is what makes Jordan Peterson’s dialogues with atheists so frustrating.

The Meme Machine1 mentions across 1 issues

The Meme Machine is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 11, 2024 and October 11, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Meme Machine , reviewed by Arvid Häggqvist". It most often appears alongside AmandaFromBethlehem, Amedeo Rothson, analogfutures.substack.com.

Reference entry: The Meme Machine
Mention count: 1
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First seen: October 11, 2024
Last seen: October 11, 2024
Book title: The Meme Machine
Likely author: Arvid

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Book Review Contest 2024 Winners October 11, 2024

AmandaFromBethlehem 1 shared issues
Amedeo Rothson 1 shared issues
analogfutures.substack.com 1 shared issues
Arielle Friedman 1 shared issues
Arvid Häggqvist 1 shared issues

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October 11, 2024 · Original source

The Meme Machine, reviewed by Arvid Häggqvist. Arvid is currently doing a Master's degree in philosophy at Uppsala University, Sweden, and works as a software engineer. He asks you to consider donating to his friend's fundraiser for helping displaced people in Beirut.

Inline links: The Meme Machine, his friend's fundraiser for helping displaced people in Beirut

AI1 mentions across 1 issues

The Metaethics of Joy/Suffering/AI 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: The Metaethics of Joy/Suffering/AI". It most often appears alongside Astralcodexten Com, Deathbed Ballads, Discord.

Reference entry: AI
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 09, 2025
Last seen: June 09, 2025
Book title: The Metaethics of Joy/Suffering/AI

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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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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).

The Metropolitan Man1 mentions across 1 issues

The Metropolitan Man 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 "a book (for instance, The Scout Mindset, The Money Illusion, The Metropolitan Man)". It most often appears alongside 't Heem, 10/40 Coffee, 11841 Wagner St., Culver City.

Reference entry: The Metropolitan Man
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 26, 2022
Last seen: August 26, 2022
Book title: The Metropolitan Man

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places August 26, 2022

't Heem 1 shared issues
40 Coffee 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner St., Culver City 1 shared issues
12 Rotunda Drive Charlottesville, VA 22903 1 shared issues
1275 1st Street 1 shared issues

Source context

Book Review: How Asia Works

August 26, 2022 · Original source

VIENNA, AUSTRIA Contact: Manuel, manuel[dot]turonian[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 2:00 PM Location: Wiener Stadtpark at the Strauss Monument; will have an ACX Meetup sign. Coordinates: 8FWR693H+GP2 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Rationality Vienna is a group of about 30 people who meet once a month in person or via Zoom. You can join our Facebook group. Notes: We may want to shift to an indoor location depending on weather and the local Covid numbers. BRUSSELS, BELGIUM Contact: Bruno D, bruno[dot]astral[dot]codex[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 18, 4:00 PM Location: Guingette Henri, George Henri parc Coordinates: 9F26RCWC+84 Event link(s): LessWrong SOFIA, BULGARIA Contact: Anastasia, sofia[dot]acx[dot]meetup[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 4:00 PM Location: Shade Garden (Сенчестата градинка; part of Borisova garden) Coordinates: 8GJ5M8GW+J9 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Sofia ACX started with last year's Meetups Everywhere round. We have Serious Meetups once per month at which we discuss a blog post, a short story, or a book (for instance, The Scout Mindset, The Money Illusion, The Metropolitan Man); and sporadic non-serious social meetups that mostly include getting dinner, going on a walk, watching a film, or playing board games. Attendance hovers around 6-8 people out of a pool of 13. People get invited to the Discord server after they've attended at least one in-person meetup. ZAGREB, CROATIA Contact: DJStern, dorian[dot]sternvukotic[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 6:00 PM Location: Krivi Put Coordinates: 8FQQRX38+V6W Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Croatian LessWrong active group communicates mainly through a Telegram group, we meetup semi regularly, approx once a month. The group is mostly social, and the meetups are not structured (sometimes we all just meet at a random party) Notes: Send me an Email and I will add you to a Telegram group where everything (active) LessWrong Croatia/Zagreb happens LIMASSOL, CYPRUS Contact: Arseniy, runescape[at]list[dot]ru, @anchorheld (Telegram / Instagram) Time: Saturday, September 3, 12:00 PM Location: By the Municipal Zoo Coordinates: 8G6MM3M3+Q6 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please hit me up on Mail, Telegram, or Instagram if you're actually going PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC Contact: Jiri Nadvornik, jiri[dot]nadvornik[at]efektivni-altruismus[dot]cz Time: Thursday, October 6, 6:00 PM Location: Garden of Dharmasala Teahouse Coordinates: 9F2P3CRW+FP7 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event COPENHAGEN, DENMARK Contact: Søren Elverlin, soeren[dot]elverlin[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 3:00 PM Location: Rundholtsvej 10, 2300 København S Coordinates: 9F7JMH38+GFP Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event, Meetup.com Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong TALLINN, ESTONIA Contact: Andrew W, andrew_n_west[at]yahoo[dot]co[dot]uk Time: Monday, September 26, 7:00 PM Location: St Vitus, Tallinn. I don't know if anyone will turn up, but I'll be wearing a suit, a beard, and a book. Coordinates: 9GF6CPRH+MQ Event link(s): LessWrong HELSINKI, FINLAND Contact: Joe Nash, joenash499[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 4:00 PM Location: Restaurant Töölönranta, Helsinginkatu 56 Coordinates: 9GG65WMJ+2J Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: LessWrong group FONTAINEBLEAU, FRANCE Contact: Ebrahim Akbari, ea[dot]akbari[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 6:00 PM Location: Glasgow bar, Fontainebleau Coordinates: 8FW4CP32+J8 Event link(s): LessWrong PARIS, FRANCE Contact: Olivier, w20l2qtf[at]mailer[dot]me, We have a Discord and a matrix server (both servers are bridged together) Time: Friday, September 23, 6:00 PM Location: In the jardin du carrousel, next to jardin des Tuileries Coordinates: 8FW4V86J+GH Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Regular meetups organized via discord or the newsletter every 3 months with around 20 people. Notes: We have a mailing list if you are interested in future meetups. Please don't hesitate to send me an email to RSVP that you're coming to help gauge the interest. TOULOUSE, FRANCE Contact: Alfonso, barsom[dot]maelwys[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 8, 7:00 PM Location: Bar 'Le Biergarten' (60 Gd Rue Saint-Michel, 31400 Toulouse). We'll be sitting at a table with an ACX MEETUP sign on it. Coordinates: 8FM3HCQW+9H Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP by email TBILISI, GEORGIA Contact: Evgenia Karunus, lakesare[at]gmail[dot]com, https://twitter.com/lakesare Time: Saturday, September 17, 7:00 PM Location: Coffee Place Coordinates: 8HH6MRQ2+WH Event link(s): LessWrong AACHEN, GERMANY Contact: Jörn, acx[at]j[dot]stoehler[dot]eu Time: Tuesday, September 27, 7:00 PM Location: Chico Mendes Coordinates: 9F28Q3HJ+9Q Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP here so I can reserve the right number of tables. BERLIN, GERMANY Contact: Ruben Arslan, ssc[at]alphabattle[dot]xyz Time: Sunday, October 2, 2:00 PM Location: Südplateau Fritz-Schloss-Park Coordinates: 9F4MG9H4+4X Event link(s): LessWrong, Google Calendar Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong. I'll bring some beverages. COLOGNE, GERMANY Contact: Marcel Müller, marcel_mueller[at]mail[dot]de Time: Saturday, October 8, 5:00 PM Location: Marienweg 43, 50858 Köln, private venue, just ring the bell or follow the sign. Coordinates: 9F28WRMX+96H Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: LW / ACX / Rationalist meetup group. Monthly, mostly social meetups. Other activities welcome. Unless noted otherwise we will meet at Marienweg 43 in 50858 Cologne on the 2nd Saturday of each month at 5 pm. Please email me to be added to our mailing list where deviations will be posted. Caution! September Meetup will be at a different venue! Notes: If you read this you are welcome. Our Covid rules are still in effect: You must be tested negative on the same day. Self tests will be available at the meetup. If there is any problem, like you do not find us or I did not see your mail, call me +491788862254. FREIBURG IM BREISGAU, GERMANY Contact: Omar, info[at]rationality-freiburg[dot]de Time: Friday, October 14, 6:00 PM Location: FlexRooms, Salzstr. 1, 79098 Freiburg. We will carry a cardboard sign saying “Rationality Freiburg”. Coordinates: 8FV9XVV2+V56 Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com, Website Group info: The group started in May 2022 and before the summer break we had five meetups with 4-11 people attending. Every two weeks seems like a good rhythm, but nothing is set in stone. So far we always read something beforehand and then discussed it, as well as trying some practical exercises such as TAPs and Personal Calibration. Afterwards we went to have dinner and continued talking about everything and anything for hours. Everything is new and flexible, so come and help us improve! Notes: We have a Signal messenger group and ask you to attend a meetup once to be able to join. HAMBURG, GERMANY Contact: Gunnar Zarncke, g[dot]zarncke[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 5:00 PM Location: Kleine Wallanlagen on the lawn near Memorial Holstenglacis. Look for pink blankets; I will also have an ACX sign. Here is an Open Street Map link which also shows the short-cut tunnel from the subway station. Coordinates: 9F5FHX4H+RXC Event link(s): LessWrongLessWrong Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong KARLSRUHE, GERMANY Contact: Marcus Wilhelm, mail[at]marcuswilhelm[dot]de Time: Saturday, September 24, 3:00 PM Location: Botanischer Garten Karlsruhe Coordinates: 8FXC2C72+85X Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet weekly, alternating offline and online, see our LessWrong page KASSEL, HESSEN, GERMANY Contact: Tobias, Sphinxfire[at]outlook[dot]de Time: Saturday, September 10, 2:00 PM Location: Friedrichsplatz, to the left of the DocumentaHall Coordinates: 9F3F8F6X+R6 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Telegram group Notes: Please join the Telegram group if you are interested in coming. It will be helpful for coordinating something beyond 'let's just see who shows up and take it from there', plus, it will also make me feel a lot better on a purely subjective level if I know beforehand that at least one other person is interested. If you prefer the surprise factor of 'knowing as little as possible about who you're going to meet', you can also just write me via E-mail, of course. LEIPZIG, GERMANY Contact: Gunther Forderung, notavailable[at]riseup[dot]net Time: Tuesday, October 4, 6:00 PM Location: In the Lene-Voigt-Park, in the secluded area opposite of the swings Coordinates: 9F3J8CM2+PF Event link(s): LessWrong TÜBINGEN, GERMANY Contact: Emma, emma[dot]tuebingen[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 23, 6:00 PM Location: The ACX/SSC meetup and dinner (with vegan options) will be on October 23rd at the Annette Kade dormitory (Mohlstraße 44, 8FWFG3H5+XR). If you’d like to attend, please write me an email, and I’ll send you an invitation to our WhatsApp group. Coordinates: 8FWFG3H5+XR Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please email me to get my phone number. If a lot of people are out of town for the holidays and can't come we could meet on, say, October 1st. I would like to know how many people to expect. ATHENS, GREECE Contact: Spyros, spyros[dot]dovas[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Monday, September 5, 7:00 PM Location: On the plaza in front of the National Library Coordinates: 8G95WMQR+WRP Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Group info: We have organized 2 events so far, fall and spring, we just sit around and discuss. We have a Whatsapp group that hasn't picked up momentum yet. Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong or Meetup.com BUDAPEST, HUNGARY Contact: Tim Underwood, timunderwood9[at]gmail[dot]com, WhatsApp 19513120591 Time: Sunday, September 11, 2:00 PM Location: Champs Sziget bar on Margit Sziget, near the front. I'll have a big hardcover copy in Hungarian of a book by Richard Dawkins. Coordinates: 8FVXG2CW+2H Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We've been meeting in Budapest for two years now, with our first meeting being the 2020 ACX meetups everywhere. We meet about once a month, and usually we have two articles that are suggested reading that we discuss. CORK, IRELAND Contact: Mikey, Godojhana[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, September 29, 6:00 PM Location: If sunny: The Lough. If not, then the game arcade on the parade Coordinates: 9C3HVGQ7+JQ Event link(s): LessWrong DUBLIN, IRELAND Contact: Lucius, lucius[at]bushnaq[dot]de, LessWrong profile Time: Sunday, October 2, 12:30 PM Location: Clement & Pekoe, William Street South, Dublin 2. We'll be sitting inside, and there'll be a sign with ACX written on it on the table Coordinates: 9C5M8PRP+JV Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: LessWrong FOLIGNO, ITALY Contact: Mauro, orfino[at]yandex[dot]com, LW profile, Telegram Time: Saturday, September 24, 5:00 PM Location: Parco dei Canapé, at the open air cafe, ask the barista Coordinates: 8FJJXP22+HC Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know how much food to get. No kids please. MILANO, ITALY Contact: Raffaele, raffa[dot]mauro[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 16, 6:30 PM Location: Viale Luigi Majno, 18, 20129 Milano MI - Primo Ventures / T8P, IInd floor. Coordinates: 8FQFF6C4+9C Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet once per month. The group started in May 2022. Notes: Please RSVP by email by the 1st of September PADOVA, ITALY Contact: Carlo, carlo[dot]martinucci[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 1, 3:30 PM Location: Prato della Valle, fountain in the middle. I'll be carrying a sign with ACX MEETUP on it :) Coordinates: 8FQH9VXG+9J Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: We'll probably find a bar to have a hot chocolate or tea or something :) PISA, ITALY Contact: Raffaele, raffaelesalvia[at]alice[dot]it Time: Saturday, October 22, 5:00 PM Location: We will meet in Piazza dei Cavalieri, near the steps of Palazzo della Carovana Coordinates: 8FMGPC92+R44 Event link(s): LessWrong ROMA, ITALY Contact: Grigorio, greghero12[at]gmail[dot]com, Facebook, +393920366026 Time: Saturday, October 8, 6:00 PM Location: We'll be around Gardenie metro station, at the benches, and I will be wearing a red shirt and sitting on top of the station to be seen Coordinates: 8FHJVHP9+8F Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet around 20-25 times a year but it is asymmetrical, focused in summer, Christmas and Easter. We discuss opinions, engage in circling, play games where we spot logical fallacies and biases by attacking our members ideological weakpoints and formalize some debating stances. Occasionally we find the willpower to devote meetups in steelmanning and understanding the outgroup (roughly 4-5 times a year) Notes: If you are into ACX enough to see this post, I believe we have enough common ground to be worth meeting each other. Aren't you curious who else is within this niche community in Rome? Come on, take a leap of faith. P.S. Would be nice if you sent me a message in WhatsApp with your name and probability of attendance, but I love walk-ins just fine. No space limit after all ;-) RIGA, LATVIA Contact: Andis, cerulean[dot]lemniscate[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 4:00 PM Location: Bastejkalns (on top of the hill) Coordinates: 9G86X426+Q5Q Event link(s): LessWrong AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS Contact: Pierre, pierreavdb[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 3:00 PM Location: Kanarie Klub (Bellamyplein 51, 1053 AT Amsterdam) Coordinates: 9F469V89+W4 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: The rationality community is growing in the Netherlands, and we're now planning on having monthly meetups! Join the Rationality NL Discord server. Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I can plan a different venue if needed DELFT, NETHERLANDS Contact: Pierre Bongrand, bongrand[dot]pierre[at]gmail[dot]com, 0033620644013 (Whatsapp/Telegram/Signal) Time: Thursday, September 22, 6:30 PM Location: Delftse Hout Beach, on the grass, in the center of the beach, I will be wearing a red T-shirt and carrying a sign with ACX MEETUP on it. Coordinates: 9F4629FG+66 Event link(s): LessWrong HATTEM, NETHERLANDS Contact: Shoshannah, shos[dot]rationality[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: Dark#0849 Time: Saturday, October 8, 2:00 PM Location: Lijsterbeslaan 6, Hattem Coordinates: 9F48F378+PR Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: We support and coordinate groups across the country, including everything from social meetups to structured events and applied rationality. The intention is to connect all Dutch rationalists and rationalists in the Netherlands. We also discuss rationality topics online and coordinate events on our Discord server. Notes: Feel free to bring kids. Ours will be there :) Also, please park 't Heem if you are coming by car. It's a 2 minute walk to our house. HELMOND, NETHERLANDS Contact: Rutger, silvery[dot]swift[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 3:00 PM Location: De Motte (On top of the hill). Nearest road is Palladio. Coordinates: 9F37FMC5+VR Event link(s): LessWrong THE HAGUE, NETHERLANDS Contact: Kristof Redei, acxmeetup[at]kristof[dot]me Time: Wednesday, September 14, 6:00 PM Location: Paleistuin, Prinsessewal, 2513 EE Den Haag, Netherlands. We'll have a picnic blanket with an ACX sign on the large central field, somewhere near the playground. Coordinates: 9F4638J3+GP Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Notes: Please RSVP on Facebook if possible! All ages/species welcome. If it's not outdoor weather, we'll go to The Bookstor Cafe next door as a backup. OSLO, NORWAY Contact: Hans Andreas & Jonas, acxoslomeetup[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 1:00 PM Location: Look for the sign of Moloch at Café Billabong - Bogstadveien 53B 0366 Oslo Coordinates: 9FFGWPH7+QP Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Group info: We're hoping to do at least a quarterly meetup, but we'll base it on the turnout and enthusiasm of this event. Notes: The cafe has historically been accepting of guests' not ordering--please don't let financial reasons keep you away! GDAŃSK, POLAND Contact: Frank, frankastralcodexten[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: frhrpr#1663 Time: Saturday, August 27, 3:00 PM Location: Next to Park Kuźniczki, opposite the train station, on the circular benches around the water pump; I will be wearing a red armband Coordinates: 9F6W9JJ4+JW Event link(s): LessWrong KRAKÓW, POLAND Contact: Mateusz Bagiński, bagginsmatthew[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 2:30 PM Location: Celna 6/9, the office of the Optimum Pareto Foundation Coordinates: 9F2X2WVX+V2 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: We meet every month, here is our Facebook group. LUBLIN, POLAND Contact: Piotr, piotrekzlublina[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 5:00 PM Location: Między Słowami cafe, Rybna 4, Lublin Coordinates: 9G346HX8+FX Event link(s): LessWrong POZNAŃ, POLAND Contact: Ofelia Kerr, ofel[dot]kerr[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: ofelia#0001 Time: Saturday, October 8, 6:00 PM Location: Van Gogh Pub, Żydowska 12, 61-761. I'll most likely be on the ground floor and I'll have an ACX sign. Coordinates: 9F4RCW5P+X3F Event link(s): LessWrong WARSAW, POLAND Contact: Michał, rationalwarsaw[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 4, 6:00 PM Location: Południk Zero, Wilcza 25 Coordinates: 9G4362G8+2V Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Group info: The community of Warsaw LessWrong/SSC/ACX/etc. readers is active for over 8 years now. We're trying to organise regular monthly meetups. You can join our Facebook group or Meetup.com. LISBOA, PORTUGAL Contact: Luís Campos, luis[dot]filipe[dot]lcampos[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 3:00 PM Location: Jardim Amália Rodrigues, close to Linha d'Água cafe, in the top of a hill, below a bunch of trees Coordinates: 8CCGPRJW+V8 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We've been meeting every month for around 1 year. Get in contact if you want to participate in the WhatsApp group. :) BUCHAREST, ROMANIA Contact: Tony, skyrimtracer[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 16, 3:00 PM Location: Plaza România Mall, Bd. Timișoara 26 - food court Coordinates: 8GP8C2HM+9X Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP by email CLUJ-NAPOCA, ROMANIA Contact: Marius Pop, pop[dot]marius[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 11:00 AM Location: Deva Host, Strada Deva 1-7 Coordinates: 8GR5QH8F+MW Event link(s): LessWrong BELGRADE, SERBIA Contact: Ivica Bogosavljevic, ibogosavljevic[at]gmail[dot]com, Viber +381 65 3473 433 Time: Monday, September 12, 6:00 PM Location: Pool Cafe on Prve pruge Coordinates: 8GP2RCP7+G7 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP on my Viber number, so I know how big the room we need. BRATISLAVA, SLOVAKIA Contact: Viliam, viliam[at]bur[dot]sk Time: Saturday, September 10, 3:00 PM Location: Medická záhrada, by the fountain Coordinates: 8FWV44X9+XW8 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: I will post an announcement on LessWrong later. In case of rain, a new meeting place nearby will be announced there. LJUBLJANA, SLOVENIA Contact: Demjan Vester, demjan[dot]vester[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Wednesday, September 14, 6:00 PM Location: Probably Lili Novy bar, near modern gallery and park Tivoli Coordinates: 8FRP3F3X+6V Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Group info: We meet about 0.7 times a month. Notes: Please RSVP because last time we just barely got a place big enough. BARCELONA, SPAIN Contact: Alfonso, alfonso[dot]martinez[at]upf[dot]edu, WhatsApp +34693846738 Time: Sunday, October 2, 5:30 PM Location: Parc de la Ciutadella, by the Lion Catcher statue; I'll have an ACX sign Coordinates: 8FH495QP+96 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: The idea is to sit on the grass; bring a foulard along for your comfort, or a foldable chair if preferred. Don't worry about the language: English, Spanish, Catalan, we'll find a way. MADRID, SPAIN Contact: Jaime, jaimesevillamolina[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 5:00 PM Location: Teatro de títeres del Parque del Retiro. We'll be on the stands with an ACX sign Coordinates: 8CGRC897+F8C Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We are an EA / rationality group, we've been active for around 5 years but have less in-person activity since the pandemic started. We have a WhatsApp group and a channel in the Spanish-speaking EA Slack. SEVILLA, SPAIN Contact: Edu, edur[dot]acx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 8:00 PM Location: Parque de María Luisa. I'll be on the grass behind the Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions. I'll be the guy next to an ACX sign, a white wooden chair, and a cardboard ukulele with a tiny cardboard hat on it. Coordinates: 8C9P92F6+3RG Event link(s): LessWrong GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN Contact: Joacim, joacimj[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 3:00 PM Location: Condeco Fredsgatan. I'll have a stack of three books on my table. Coordinates: 9F9HPX4C+39G Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN Contact: Sal, niktonick[at]gmail[dot]com, Telegram Time: Sunday, September 25, 3:00 PM Location: Humlegården, Karlavägen. We will meet near blue gazebo, I will have 'ACX meetup' sign. Coordinates: 9FFW83RF+3M5 Group info: Facebook group BERN, SWITZERLAND Contact: Daniel, dd14214+acx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 2, 4:00 PM Location: Grosse Schanze, at the statue in front of the main uni building, heading to the Pittaria if it's cold or raining Coordinates: 8FR9XC2Q+4G Event link(s): LessWrong GENEVA, SWITZERLAND Contact: Eric, eric[dot]c[dot]p[dot]meier[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 11, 4:00 PM Location: Park de la Grange, just towards the lake below Villa de la grange Coordinates: 8FR86548+J4 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We have a small persistent group who has tried to meet up once a month since last years Meetup. Notes: Feel free to bring other people you think would be interested! ZURICH, SWITZERLAND Contact: MB, acxzurich[at]proton[dot]me Time: Saturday, September 24, 3:00 PM Location: TBD Event link(s): LessWrong ISTANBUL, TURKEY Contact: J, jinai[dot]jyap[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 25, 4:00 PM Location: The House Cafe in Ortaköy. I am a young Asian woman and imagine I'll be easy to spot, but will also try to bring a sign with ACX MEETUP on it. Coordinates: 8GHF22XG+23P Event link(s): LessWrong, Partiful Group info: I do not live here; I am just digital nomading for an indefinite amount of time and would like to meet anyone who's here! Notes: Please RSVP via the Partiful link (you can RSVP as a Maybe)! BIRMINGHAM, UK Contact: Thomas Read, thomas[dot]read[dot]acx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 1:00 PM Location: We'll be at The Wellington, 37 Bennetts Hill, on the roof terrace if possible. I'll wear an orange shirt and have a sign saying ACX on the table. Coordinates: 9C4WF3JX+7Q Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: It's only a few minutes walk from the stations, so hopefully people can join from all over the West Midlands! BRIGHTON, UK Contact: Alan Enright, alanenright[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 11:00 AM Location: We'll be at the Alcampo Lounge on London Road—we will try and get a table on the raised area in front of you and to the left as you come in but will also have a little ACX sign. Coordinates: 9C2XRVM6+3X Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com BRISTOL, UK Contact: Nick Lowry, bristoleffectivealtruism[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 2:00 PM Location: We’ll be meeting at entrance closet to Tesco Express in the Galleries, Bristol City Centre Coordinates: 9C3VFC45+RJM Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event, Meetup.com Group info: Meet twice monthly for socials, more regular 'productive' meetups. Been active for 3+ years, please message for WhatsApp group CAMBRIDGE, UK Contact: Hamish Todd, hamish[dot]todd1[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 2:00 PM Location: Bath House Pub, UPSTAIRS!! I will have a copy of Peter Singer's The Most Good You Can Do Coordinates: 9F426439+J9 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: We meet on the third Saturday of every month. The group has been around almost a year and is well-attended! Notes: My phone/WhatsApp number is +44 0730 *** 3550, where the *** are replaced by the serial number of the Boeing plane whose first flight was on September 2, 1998. Email me to get on the mailing list for future events if you'd like that :) CARDIFF, WALES Contact: AF, strmnova[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 16, 5:00 PM Location: Little Man Coffee (note new location!) Coordinates: 9C3RFRHH+W2 Event link(s): LessWrong EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND, UK Contact: Sam, acxedinburgh[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 2:00 PM Location: Pleasance Cafe. Go through the arch and the door to the cafe is on your left Coordinates: 9C7RWRW9+M8 Group info: ~Monthly meetups, often in Pleasance Cafe but have experimented with other locations. Email me to join the mailing list & WhatsApp group. LANCASTER, UK Contact: Gruffydd Gozali, gruffyddgozali[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 15, 3:00 PM Location: Lancaster University Library, will be on the ground floor by the tree wearing an EA shirt. Coordinates: 9C6V2657+WJR Event link(s): LessWrong LINCOLN, UK Contact: Tobias, tobias[dot]showan[at]yahoo[dot]co[dot]uk Time: Saturday, September 10, 2:00 PM Location: Nosey Parker pub, I'll bring a little paper ACX sign. Coordinates: 9C5X6C9R+XJ Event link(s): LessWrong LONDON, UK Contact: Edward Saperia, edsaperia[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 25, 2:00 PM Location: Newspeak House Coordinates: 9C3XGWGH+3F7 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event, Meetup.com, Eventbrite Group info: You can join our mailing list or our Meetup.com group MANCHESTER, UK Contact: Matthew Gibson, melkartmtg[at]hotmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 18, 11:00 AM Location: Sackville Gardens, Alan Turing Memorial Coordinates: 9C5VFQG7+MH Event link(s): LessWrong NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE, UK Contact: Joshua William, iamjoshwilliam[at]icloud[dot]com, Telegram Time: Saturday, September 3, 12:30 PM Location: Trinity Square, High Street Gosforth. You can get the bus to Gosforth from the city center just outside the famous 'Tyneside Cinema' (bus number: 30, 31, or 35 at Monument Pilgrim Street bus stop), or you can take a walk if you want to get your 'steps' in (if you'd like to do the latter, send me an email and I'll send you the directions), which takes ~60-min. Coordinates: 9C7W294H+5V Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: To my knowledge, there isn't an ACX meet up in this city, or region of the UK, though if there is a demand for a reoccurrence, I'd be happy to keep facilitating such. I'd also happily formulate a WhatsApp group if theres interest, after the meet up. Notes: We have a deli, '1901 cafe', on the square, which we can grab an immediate bite to eat at [so save some hunger if you'd like to do that]. There's a safe [and lovely] park with some benches just by the way, which, if the weather is nice, we can sit at after a bite to eat, or, otherwise, we can remain in the cafe. OXFORD, UK Contact: Sam, ssc[at]sambrown[dot]eu, There's a Signal group people can join :) contact Sam for info Time: Wednesday, October 19, 6:30 PM Location: The Star, Rectory Road, Oxford. We'll be in the beer garden round the back, with a sign ?? Coordinates: 9C3WPQX6+QP9 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event, Meetup.com Group info: We run socials every months, and applied rationality workshops from time to time! Notes: Please RSVP on any of the platforms (or email) for free pizza PENRYN, CORNWALL, UK Contact: mini t, tminns[at]btinternet[dot]com Time: Saturday, August 27, 3:00 PM Location: glasney playing field and valley Coordinates: 9C2P5V8V+P9 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: I don't mind rescheduling, or organizing another event, not many people are likely to turn up this far out of the way.

The Mind Doesn't Work That Way1 mentions across 1 issues

The Mind Doesn't Work That Way 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 "Jerry Fodor wrote a counterbook called The Mind Doesn't Work That Way". It most often appears alongside Alexander Hamilton, America, ASEAN.

Reference entry: The Mind Doesn't Work That Way
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 28, 2021
Last seen: June 28, 2021
Book title: The Mind Doesn't Work That Way

Outbound links

Issue trail

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

June 28, 2021 · Original source

This book was really convincing, but I don't know much economic history so maybe convincing me is too easy. After Steven Pinker wrote How The Mind Works, Jerry Fodor wrote a counterbook called The Mind Doesn't Work That Way. What would be in Asia Doesn't Work That Way?

The Mind Illuminated1 mentions across 1 issues

The Mind Illuminated is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 31, 2022 and October 31, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as ""Chris Merck recommends... The Mind Illuminated"". It most often appears alongside A Mind Without Craving, ACX, Andres Emilsson.

Reference entry: The Mind Illuminated
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: October 31, 2022
Last seen: October 31, 2022
Book title: The Mind Illuminated

Outbound links

Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On Jhanas October 31, 2022

A Mind Without Craving 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
Andres Emilsson 1 shared issues
Andres Gomez Emilsson 1 shared issues
anāgāmī 1 shared issues

Source context

Highlights From The Comments On Jhanas

October 31, 2022 · Original source

Chris Merck recommends Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha and The Mind Illuminated, both of which I’ve reviewed before (MCTB, TMI). I agree these are good, though they’re much more comprehensive than just jhana.

Inline links: Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, The Mind Illuminated, MCTB, TMI

The Minority Body1 mentions across 1 issues

The Minority Body is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 25, 2023 and July 25, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Elizabeth Barnes’ book, “The Minority Body.”". It most often appears alongside 1992 Presidential debate, ABA, Adesh Thapliyal.

Reference entry: The Minority Body
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 25, 2023
Last seen: July 25, 2023
Book title: The Minority Body

Outbound links

Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On Social Model Of Disability July 25, 2023

1992 Presidential debate 1 shared issues
ABA 1 shared issues
Adesh Thapliyal 1 shared issues
Alan Smith 1 shared issues
Alexander Graham Bell 1 shared issues

Source context

Highlights From The Comments On Social Model Of Disability

July 25, 2023 · Original source

However, I do want to say that the version of the model I am defending comes from Elizabeth Barnes’ book, “The Minority Body.” I think her book, which is fairly short and good, does a better job of exploring the nuance of the social model of disability, and presents a more difficult model to rebut than the definitions you have used. She posits, for example, that disability (at least physical disability, she suggests that mental disabilities are the same, but declares them beyond the scope of her book) are “mere difference.”

The Money Illusion1 mentions across 1 issues

The Money Illusion 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 "a book (for instance, The Scout Mindset, The Money Illusion, The Metropolitan Man)". It most often appears alongside 't Heem, 10/40 Coffee, 11841 Wagner St., Culver City.

Reference entry: The Money Illusion
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 26, 2022
Last seen: August 26, 2022
Book title: The Money Illusion

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places August 26, 2022

't Heem 1 shared issues
40 Coffee 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner St., Culver City 1 shared issues
12 Rotunda Drive Charlottesville, VA 22903 1 shared issues
1275 1st Street 1 shared issues

Source context

Highlights From The Comments On Prison

August 26, 2022 · Original source

VIENNA, AUSTRIA Contact: Manuel, manuel[dot]turonian[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 2:00 PM Location: Wiener Stadtpark at the Strauss Monument; will have an ACX Meetup sign. Coordinates: 8FWR693H+GP2 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Rationality Vienna is a group of about 30 people who meet once a month in person or via Zoom. You can join our Facebook group. Notes: We may want to shift to an indoor location depending on weather and the local Covid numbers. BRUSSELS, BELGIUM Contact: Bruno D, bruno[dot]astral[dot]codex[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 18, 4:00 PM Location: Guingette Henri, George Henri parc Coordinates: 9F26RCWC+84 Event link(s): LessWrong SOFIA, BULGARIA Contact: Anastasia, sofia[dot]acx[dot]meetup[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 4:00 PM Location: Shade Garden (Сенчестата градинка; part of Borisova garden) Coordinates: 8GJ5M8GW+J9 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Sofia ACX started with last year's Meetups Everywhere round. We have Serious Meetups once per month at which we discuss a blog post, a short story, or a book (for instance, The Scout Mindset, The Money Illusion, The Metropolitan Man); and sporadic non-serious social meetups that mostly include getting dinner, going on a walk, watching a film, or playing board games. Attendance hovers around 6-8 people out of a pool of 13. People get invited to the Discord server after they've attended at least one in-person meetup. ZAGREB, CROATIA Contact: DJStern, dorian[dot]sternvukotic[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 6:00 PM Location: Krivi Put Coordinates: 8FQQRX38+V6W Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Croatian LessWrong active group communicates mainly through a Telegram group, we meetup semi regularly, approx once a month. The group is mostly social, and the meetups are not structured (sometimes we all just meet at a random party) Notes: Send me an Email and I will add you to a Telegram group where everything (active) LessWrong Croatia/Zagreb happens LIMASSOL, CYPRUS Contact: Arseniy, runescape[at]list[dot]ru, @anchorheld (Telegram / Instagram) Time: Saturday, September 3, 12:00 PM Location: By the Municipal Zoo Coordinates: 8G6MM3M3+Q6 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please hit me up on Mail, Telegram, or Instagram if you're actually going PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC Contact: Jiri Nadvornik, jiri[dot]nadvornik[at]efektivni-altruismus[dot]cz Time: Thursday, October 6, 6:00 PM Location: Garden of Dharmasala Teahouse Coordinates: 9F2P3CRW+FP7 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event COPENHAGEN, DENMARK Contact: Søren Elverlin, soeren[dot]elverlin[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 3:00 PM Location: Rundholtsvej 10, 2300 København S Coordinates: 9F7JMH38+GFP Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event, Meetup.com Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong TALLINN, ESTONIA Contact: Andrew W, andrew_n_west[at]yahoo[dot]co[dot]uk Time: Monday, September 26, 7:00 PM Location: St Vitus, Tallinn. I don't know if anyone will turn up, but I'll be wearing a suit, a beard, and a book. Coordinates: 9GF6CPRH+MQ Event link(s): LessWrong HELSINKI, FINLAND Contact: Joe Nash, joenash499[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 4:00 PM Location: Restaurant Töölönranta, Helsinginkatu 56 Coordinates: 9GG65WMJ+2J Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: LessWrong group FONTAINEBLEAU, FRANCE Contact: Ebrahim Akbari, ea[dot]akbari[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 6:00 PM Location: Glasgow bar, Fontainebleau Coordinates: 8FW4CP32+J8 Event link(s): LessWrong PARIS, FRANCE Contact: Olivier, w20l2qtf[at]mailer[dot]me, We have a Discord and a matrix server (both servers are bridged together) Time: Friday, September 23, 6:00 PM Location: In the jardin du carrousel, next to jardin des Tuileries Coordinates: 8FW4V86J+GH Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Regular meetups organized via discord or the newsletter every 3 months with around 20 people. Notes: We have a mailing list if you are interested in future meetups. Please don't hesitate to send me an email to RSVP that you're coming to help gauge the interest. TOULOUSE, FRANCE Contact: Alfonso, barsom[dot]maelwys[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 8, 7:00 PM Location: Bar 'Le Biergarten' (60 Gd Rue Saint-Michel, 31400 Toulouse). We'll be sitting at a table with an ACX MEETUP sign on it. Coordinates: 8FM3HCQW+9H Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP by email TBILISI, GEORGIA Contact: Evgenia Karunus, lakesare[at]gmail[dot]com, https://twitter.com/lakesare Time: Saturday, September 17, 7:00 PM Location: Coffee Place Coordinates: 8HH6MRQ2+WH Event link(s): LessWrong AACHEN, GERMANY Contact: Jörn, acx[at]j[dot]stoehler[dot]eu Time: Tuesday, September 27, 7:00 PM Location: Chico Mendes Coordinates: 9F28Q3HJ+9Q Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP here so I can reserve the right number of tables. BERLIN, GERMANY Contact: Ruben Arslan, ssc[at]alphabattle[dot]xyz Time: Sunday, October 2, 2:00 PM Location: Südplateau Fritz-Schloss-Park Coordinates: 9F4MG9H4+4X Event link(s): LessWrong, Google Calendar Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong. I'll bring some beverages. COLOGNE, GERMANY Contact: Marcel Müller, marcel_mueller[at]mail[dot]de Time: Saturday, October 8, 5:00 PM Location: Marienweg 43, 50858 Köln, private venue, just ring the bell or follow the sign. Coordinates: 9F28WRMX+96H Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: LW / ACX / Rationalist meetup group. Monthly, mostly social meetups. Other activities welcome. Unless noted otherwise we will meet at Marienweg 43 in 50858 Cologne on the 2nd Saturday of each month at 5 pm. Please email me to be added to our mailing list where deviations will be posted. Caution! September Meetup will be at a different venue! Notes: If you read this you are welcome. Our Covid rules are still in effect: You must be tested negative on the same day. Self tests will be available at the meetup. If there is any problem, like you do not find us or I did not see your mail, call me +491788862254. FREIBURG IM BREISGAU, GERMANY Contact: Omar, info[at]rationality-freiburg[dot]de Time: Friday, October 14, 6:00 PM Location: FlexRooms, Salzstr. 1, 79098 Freiburg. We will carry a cardboard sign saying “Rationality Freiburg”. Coordinates: 8FV9XVV2+V56 Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com, Website Group info: The group started in May 2022 and before the summer break we had five meetups with 4-11 people attending. Every two weeks seems like a good rhythm, but nothing is set in stone. So far we always read something beforehand and then discussed it, as well as trying some practical exercises such as TAPs and Personal Calibration. Afterwards we went to have dinner and continued talking about everything and anything for hours. Everything is new and flexible, so come and help us improve! Notes: We have a Signal messenger group and ask you to attend a meetup once to be able to join. HAMBURG, GERMANY Contact: Gunnar Zarncke, g[dot]zarncke[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 5:00 PM Location: Kleine Wallanlagen on the lawn near Memorial Holstenglacis. Look for pink blankets; I will also have an ACX sign. Here is an Open Street Map link which also shows the short-cut tunnel from the subway station. Coordinates: 9F5FHX4H+RXC Event link(s): LessWrongLessWrong Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong KARLSRUHE, GERMANY Contact: Marcus Wilhelm, mail[at]marcuswilhelm[dot]de Time: Saturday, September 24, 3:00 PM Location: Botanischer Garten Karlsruhe Coordinates: 8FXC2C72+85X Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet weekly, alternating offline and online, see our LessWrong page KASSEL, HESSEN, GERMANY Contact: Tobias, Sphinxfire[at]outlook[dot]de Time: Saturday, September 10, 2:00 PM Location: Friedrichsplatz, to the left of the DocumentaHall Coordinates: 9F3F8F6X+R6 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Telegram group Notes: Please join the Telegram group if you are interested in coming. It will be helpful for coordinating something beyond 'let's just see who shows up and take it from there', plus, it will also make me feel a lot better on a purely subjective level if I know beforehand that at least one other person is interested. If you prefer the surprise factor of 'knowing as little as possible about who you're going to meet', you can also just write me via E-mail, of course. LEIPZIG, GERMANY Contact: Gunther Forderung, notavailable[at]riseup[dot]net Time: Tuesday, October 4, 6:00 PM Location: In the Lene-Voigt-Park, in the secluded area opposite of the swings Coordinates: 9F3J8CM2+PF Event link(s): LessWrong TÜBINGEN, GERMANY Contact: Emma, emma[dot]tuebingen[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 23, 6:00 PM Location: The ACX/SSC meetup and dinner (with vegan options) will be on October 23rd at the Annette Kade dormitory (Mohlstraße 44, 8FWFG3H5+XR). If you’d like to attend, please write me an email, and I’ll send you an invitation to our WhatsApp group. Coordinates: 8FWFG3H5+XR Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please email me to get my phone number. If a lot of people are out of town for the holidays and can't come we could meet on, say, October 1st. I would like to know how many people to expect. ATHENS, GREECE Contact: Spyros, spyros[dot]dovas[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Monday, September 5, 7:00 PM Location: On the plaza in front of the National Library Coordinates: 8G95WMQR+WRP Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Group info: We have organized 2 events so far, fall and spring, we just sit around and discuss. We have a Whatsapp group that hasn't picked up momentum yet. Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong or Meetup.com BUDAPEST, HUNGARY Contact: Tim Underwood, timunderwood9[at]gmail[dot]com, WhatsApp 19513120591 Time: Sunday, September 11, 2:00 PM Location: Champs Sziget bar on Margit Sziget, near the front. I'll have a big hardcover copy in Hungarian of a book by Richard Dawkins. Coordinates: 8FVXG2CW+2H Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We've been meeting in Budapest for two years now, with our first meeting being the 2020 ACX meetups everywhere. We meet about once a month, and usually we have two articles that are suggested reading that we discuss. CORK, IRELAND Contact: Mikey, Godojhana[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, September 29, 6:00 PM Location: If sunny: The Lough. If not, then the game arcade on the parade Coordinates: 9C3HVGQ7+JQ Event link(s): LessWrong DUBLIN, IRELAND Contact: Lucius, lucius[at]bushnaq[dot]de, LessWrong profile Time: Sunday, October 2, 12:30 PM Location: Clement & Pekoe, William Street South, Dublin 2. We'll be sitting inside, and there'll be a sign with ACX written on it on the table Coordinates: 9C5M8PRP+JV Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: LessWrong FOLIGNO, ITALY Contact: Mauro, orfino[at]yandex[dot]com, LW profile, Telegram Time: Saturday, September 24, 5:00 PM Location: Parco dei Canapé, at the open air cafe, ask the barista Coordinates: 8FJJXP22+HC Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know how much food to get. No kids please. MILANO, ITALY Contact: Raffaele, raffa[dot]mauro[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 16, 6:30 PM Location: Viale Luigi Majno, 18, 20129 Milano MI - Primo Ventures / T8P, IInd floor. Coordinates: 8FQFF6C4+9C Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet once per month. The group started in May 2022. Notes: Please RSVP by email by the 1st of September PADOVA, ITALY Contact: Carlo, carlo[dot]martinucci[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 1, 3:30 PM Location: Prato della Valle, fountain in the middle. I'll be carrying a sign with ACX MEETUP on it :) Coordinates: 8FQH9VXG+9J Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: We'll probably find a bar to have a hot chocolate or tea or something :) PISA, ITALY Contact: Raffaele, raffaelesalvia[at]alice[dot]it Time: Saturday, October 22, 5:00 PM Location: We will meet in Piazza dei Cavalieri, near the steps of Palazzo della Carovana Coordinates: 8FMGPC92+R44 Event link(s): LessWrong ROMA, ITALY Contact: Grigorio, greghero12[at]gmail[dot]com, Facebook, +393920366026 Time: Saturday, October 8, 6:00 PM Location: We'll be around Gardenie metro station, at the benches, and I will be wearing a red shirt and sitting on top of the station to be seen Coordinates: 8FHJVHP9+8F Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet around 20-25 times a year but it is asymmetrical, focused in summer, Christmas and Easter. We discuss opinions, engage in circling, play games where we spot logical fallacies and biases by attacking our members ideological weakpoints and formalize some debating stances. Occasionally we find the willpower to devote meetups in steelmanning and understanding the outgroup (roughly 4-5 times a year) Notes: If you are into ACX enough to see this post, I believe we have enough common ground to be worth meeting each other. Aren't you curious who else is within this niche community in Rome? Come on, take a leap of faith. P.S. Would be nice if you sent me a message in WhatsApp with your name and probability of attendance, but I love walk-ins just fine. No space limit after all ;-) RIGA, LATVIA Contact: Andis, cerulean[dot]lemniscate[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 4:00 PM Location: Bastejkalns (on top of the hill) Coordinates: 9G86X426+Q5Q Event link(s): LessWrong AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS Contact: Pierre, pierreavdb[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 3:00 PM Location: Kanarie Klub (Bellamyplein 51, 1053 AT Amsterdam) Coordinates: 9F469V89+W4 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: The rationality community is growing in the Netherlands, and we're now planning on having monthly meetups! Join the Rationality NL Discord server. Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I can plan a different venue if needed DELFT, NETHERLANDS Contact: Pierre Bongrand, bongrand[dot]pierre[at]gmail[dot]com, 0033620644013 (Whatsapp/Telegram/Signal) Time: Thursday, September 22, 6:30 PM Location: Delftse Hout Beach, on the grass, in the center of the beach, I will be wearing a red T-shirt and carrying a sign with ACX MEETUP on it. Coordinates: 9F4629FG+66 Event link(s): LessWrong HATTEM, NETHERLANDS Contact: Shoshannah, shos[dot]rationality[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: Dark#0849 Time: Saturday, October 8, 2:00 PM Location: Lijsterbeslaan 6, Hattem Coordinates: 9F48F378+PR Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: We support and coordinate groups across the country, including everything from social meetups to structured events and applied rationality. The intention is to connect all Dutch rationalists and rationalists in the Netherlands. We also discuss rationality topics online and coordinate events on our Discord server. Notes: Feel free to bring kids. Ours will be there :) Also, please park 't Heem if you are coming by car. It's a 2 minute walk to our house. HELMOND, NETHERLANDS Contact: Rutger, silvery[dot]swift[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 3:00 PM Location: De Motte (On top of the hill). Nearest road is Palladio. Coordinates: 9F37FMC5+VR Event link(s): LessWrong THE HAGUE, NETHERLANDS Contact: Kristof Redei, acxmeetup[at]kristof[dot]me Time: Wednesday, September 14, 6:00 PM Location: Paleistuin, Prinsessewal, 2513 EE Den Haag, Netherlands. We'll have a picnic blanket with an ACX sign on the large central field, somewhere near the playground. Coordinates: 9F4638J3+GP Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Notes: Please RSVP on Facebook if possible! All ages/species welcome. If it's not outdoor weather, we'll go to The Bookstor Cafe next door as a backup. OSLO, NORWAY Contact: Hans Andreas & Jonas, acxoslomeetup[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 1:00 PM Location: Look for the sign of Moloch at Café Billabong - Bogstadveien 53B 0366 Oslo Coordinates: 9FFGWPH7+QP Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Group info: We're hoping to do at least a quarterly meetup, but we'll base it on the turnout and enthusiasm of this event. Notes: The cafe has historically been accepting of guests' not ordering--please don't let financial reasons keep you away! GDAŃSK, POLAND Contact: Frank, frankastralcodexten[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: frhrpr#1663 Time: Saturday, August 27, 3:00 PM Location: Next to Park Kuźniczki, opposite the train station, on the circular benches around the water pump; I will be wearing a red armband Coordinates: 9F6W9JJ4+JW Event link(s): LessWrong KRAKÓW, POLAND Contact: Mateusz Bagiński, bagginsmatthew[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 2:30 PM Location: Celna 6/9, the office of the Optimum Pareto Foundation Coordinates: 9F2X2WVX+V2 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: We meet every month, here is our Facebook group. LUBLIN, POLAND Contact: Piotr, piotrekzlublina[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 5:00 PM Location: Między Słowami cafe, Rybna 4, Lublin Coordinates: 9G346HX8+FX Event link(s): LessWrong POZNAŃ, POLAND Contact: Ofelia Kerr, ofel[dot]kerr[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: ofelia#0001 Time: Saturday, October 8, 6:00 PM Location: Van Gogh Pub, Żydowska 12, 61-761. I'll most likely be on the ground floor and I'll have an ACX sign. Coordinates: 9F4RCW5P+X3F Event link(s): LessWrong WARSAW, POLAND Contact: Michał, rationalwarsaw[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 4, 6:00 PM Location: Południk Zero, Wilcza 25 Coordinates: 9G4362G8+2V Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Group info: The community of Warsaw LessWrong/SSC/ACX/etc. readers is active for over 8 years now. We're trying to organise regular monthly meetups. You can join our Facebook group or Meetup.com. LISBOA, PORTUGAL Contact: Luís Campos, luis[dot]filipe[dot]lcampos[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 3:00 PM Location: Jardim Amália Rodrigues, close to Linha d'Água cafe, in the top of a hill, below a bunch of trees Coordinates: 8CCGPRJW+V8 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We've been meeting every month for around 1 year. Get in contact if you want to participate in the WhatsApp group. :) BUCHAREST, ROMANIA Contact: Tony, skyrimtracer[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 16, 3:00 PM Location: Plaza România Mall, Bd. Timișoara 26 - food court Coordinates: 8GP8C2HM+9X Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP by email CLUJ-NAPOCA, ROMANIA Contact: Marius Pop, pop[dot]marius[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 11:00 AM Location: Deva Host, Strada Deva 1-7 Coordinates: 8GR5QH8F+MW Event link(s): LessWrong BELGRADE, SERBIA Contact: Ivica Bogosavljevic, ibogosavljevic[at]gmail[dot]com, Viber +381 65 3473 433 Time: Monday, September 12, 6:00 PM Location: Pool Cafe on Prve pruge Coordinates: 8GP2RCP7+G7 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP on my Viber number, so I know how big the room we need. BRATISLAVA, SLOVAKIA Contact: Viliam, viliam[at]bur[dot]sk Time: Saturday, September 10, 3:00 PM Location: Medická záhrada, by the fountain Coordinates: 8FWV44X9+XW8 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: I will post an announcement on LessWrong later. In case of rain, a new meeting place nearby will be announced there. LJUBLJANA, SLOVENIA Contact: Demjan Vester, demjan[dot]vester[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Wednesday, September 14, 6:00 PM Location: Probably Lili Novy bar, near modern gallery and park Tivoli Coordinates: 8FRP3F3X+6V Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Group info: We meet about 0.7 times a month. Notes: Please RSVP because last time we just barely got a place big enough. BARCELONA, SPAIN Contact: Alfonso, alfonso[dot]martinez[at]upf[dot]edu, WhatsApp +34693846738 Time: Sunday, October 2, 5:30 PM Location: Parc de la Ciutadella, by the Lion Catcher statue; I'll have an ACX sign Coordinates: 8FH495QP+96 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: The idea is to sit on the grass; bring a foulard along for your comfort, or a foldable chair if preferred. Don't worry about the language: English, Spanish, Catalan, we'll find a way. MADRID, SPAIN Contact: Jaime, jaimesevillamolina[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 5:00 PM Location: Teatro de títeres del Parque del Retiro. We'll be on the stands with an ACX sign Coordinates: 8CGRC897+F8C Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We are an EA / rationality group, we've been active for around 5 years but have less in-person activity since the pandemic started. We have a WhatsApp group and a channel in the Spanish-speaking EA Slack. SEVILLA, SPAIN Contact: Edu, edur[dot]acx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 8:00 PM Location: Parque de María Luisa. I'll be on the grass behind the Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions. I'll be the guy next to an ACX sign, a white wooden chair, and a cardboard ukulele with a tiny cardboard hat on it. Coordinates: 8C9P92F6+3RG Event link(s): LessWrong GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN Contact: Joacim, joacimj[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 3:00 PM Location: Condeco Fredsgatan. I'll have a stack of three books on my table. Coordinates: 9F9HPX4C+39G Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN Contact: Sal, niktonick[at]gmail[dot]com, Telegram Time: Sunday, September 25, 3:00 PM Location: Humlegården, Karlavägen. We will meet near blue gazebo, I will have 'ACX meetup' sign. Coordinates: 9FFW83RF+3M5 Group info: Facebook group BERN, SWITZERLAND Contact: Daniel, dd14214+acx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 2, 4:00 PM Location: Grosse Schanze, at the statue in front of the main uni building, heading to the Pittaria if it's cold or raining Coordinates: 8FR9XC2Q+4G Event link(s): LessWrong GENEVA, SWITZERLAND Contact: Eric, eric[dot]c[dot]p[dot]meier[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 11, 4:00 PM Location: Park de la Grange, just towards the lake below Villa de la grange Coordinates: 8FR86548+J4 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We have a small persistent group who has tried to meet up once a month since last years Meetup. Notes: Feel free to bring other people you think would be interested! ZURICH, SWITZERLAND Contact: MB, acxzurich[at]proton[dot]me Time: Saturday, September 24, 3:00 PM Location: TBD Event link(s): LessWrong ISTANBUL, TURKEY Contact: J, jinai[dot]jyap[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 25, 4:00 PM Location: The House Cafe in Ortaköy. I am a young Asian woman and imagine I'll be easy to spot, but will also try to bring a sign with ACX MEETUP on it. Coordinates: 8GHF22XG+23P Event link(s): LessWrong, Partiful Group info: I do not live here; I am just digital nomading for an indefinite amount of time and would like to meet anyone who's here! Notes: Please RSVP via the Partiful link (you can RSVP as a Maybe)! BIRMINGHAM, UK Contact: Thomas Read, thomas[dot]read[dot]acx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 1:00 PM Location: We'll be at The Wellington, 37 Bennetts Hill, on the roof terrace if possible. I'll wear an orange shirt and have a sign saying ACX on the table. Coordinates: 9C4WF3JX+7Q Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: It's only a few minutes walk from the stations, so hopefully people can join from all over the West Midlands! BRIGHTON, UK Contact: Alan Enright, alanenright[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 11:00 AM Location: We'll be at the Alcampo Lounge on London Road—we will try and get a table on the raised area in front of you and to the left as you come in but will also have a little ACX sign. Coordinates: 9C2XRVM6+3X Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com BRISTOL, UK Contact: Nick Lowry, bristoleffectivealtruism[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 2:00 PM Location: We’ll be meeting at entrance closet to Tesco Express in the Galleries, Bristol City Centre Coordinates: 9C3VFC45+RJM Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event, Meetup.com Group info: Meet twice monthly for socials, more regular 'productive' meetups. Been active for 3+ years, please message for WhatsApp group CAMBRIDGE, UK Contact: Hamish Todd, hamish[dot]todd1[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 2:00 PM Location: Bath House Pub, UPSTAIRS!! I will have a copy of Peter Singer's The Most Good You Can Do Coordinates: 9F426439+J9 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: We meet on the third Saturday of every month. The group has been around almost a year and is well-attended! Notes: My phone/WhatsApp number is +44 0730 *** 3550, where the *** are replaced by the serial number of the Boeing plane whose first flight was on September 2, 1998. Email me to get on the mailing list for future events if you'd like that :) CARDIFF, WALES Contact: AF, strmnova[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 16, 5:00 PM Location: Little Man Coffee (note new location!) Coordinates: 9C3RFRHH+W2 Event link(s): LessWrong EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND, UK Contact: Sam, acxedinburgh[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 2:00 PM Location: Pleasance Cafe. Go through the arch and the door to the cafe is on your left Coordinates: 9C7RWRW9+M8 Group info: ~Monthly meetups, often in Pleasance Cafe but have experimented with other locations. Email me to join the mailing list & WhatsApp group. LANCASTER, UK Contact: Gruffydd Gozali, gruffyddgozali[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 15, 3:00 PM Location: Lancaster University Library, will be on the ground floor by the tree wearing an EA shirt. Coordinates: 9C6V2657+WJR Event link(s): LessWrong LINCOLN, UK Contact: Tobias, tobias[dot]showan[at]yahoo[dot]co[dot]uk Time: Saturday, September 10, 2:00 PM Location: Nosey Parker pub, I'll bring a little paper ACX sign. Coordinates: 9C5X6C9R+XJ Event link(s): LessWrong LONDON, UK Contact: Edward Saperia, edsaperia[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 25, 2:00 PM Location: Newspeak House Coordinates: 9C3XGWGH+3F7 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event, Meetup.com, Eventbrite Group info: You can join our mailing list or our Meetup.com group MANCHESTER, UK Contact: Matthew Gibson, melkartmtg[at]hotmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 18, 11:00 AM Location: Sackville Gardens, Alan Turing Memorial Coordinates: 9C5VFQG7+MH Event link(s): LessWrong NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE, UK Contact: Joshua William, iamjoshwilliam[at]icloud[dot]com, Telegram Time: Saturday, September 3, 12:30 PM Location: Trinity Square, High Street Gosforth. You can get the bus to Gosforth from the city center just outside the famous 'Tyneside Cinema' (bus number: 30, 31, or 35 at Monument Pilgrim Street bus stop), or you can take a walk if you want to get your 'steps' in (if you'd like to do the latter, send me an email and I'll send you the directions), which takes ~60-min. Coordinates: 9C7W294H+5V Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: To my knowledge, there isn't an ACX meet up in this city, or region of the UK, though if there is a demand for a reoccurrence, I'd be happy to keep facilitating such. I'd also happily formulate a WhatsApp group if theres interest, after the meet up. Notes: We have a deli, '1901 cafe', on the square, which we can grab an immediate bite to eat at [so save some hunger if you'd like to do that]. There's a safe [and lovely] park with some benches just by the way, which, if the weather is nice, we can sit at after a bite to eat, or, otherwise, we can remain in the cafe. OXFORD, UK Contact: Sam, ssc[at]sambrown[dot]eu, There's a Signal group people can join :) contact Sam for info Time: Wednesday, October 19, 6:30 PM Location: The Star, Rectory Road, Oxford. We'll be in the beer garden round the back, with a sign ?? Coordinates: 9C3WPQX6+QP9 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event, Meetup.com Group info: We run socials every months, and applied rationality workshops from time to time! Notes: Please RSVP on any of the platforms (or email) for free pizza PENRYN, CORNWALL, UK Contact: mini t, tminns[at]btinternet[dot]com Time: Saturday, August 27, 3:00 PM Location: glasney playing field and valley Coordinates: 9C2P5V8V+P9 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: I don't mind rescheduling, or organizing another event, not many people are likely to turn up this far out of the way.

The Mongol In Our Midst1 mentions across 1 issues

The Mongol In Our Midst is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 03, 2021 and March 03, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Mongol In Our Midst was a 1920s pseudoscience book". It most often appears alongside 9-11, Argentina, Austin Allred.

Reference entry: The Mongol In Our Midst
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: March 03, 2021
Last seen: March 03, 2021
Book title: The Mongol In Our Midst

Outbound links

Issue trail

Links For March March 03, 2021

9-11 1 shared issues
Argentina 1 shared issues
Austin Allred 1 shared issues
Ayn Rand Institute 1 shared issues
Big Mac 1 shared issues

Source context

Links For March

March 03, 2021 · Original source

26: The Mongol In Our Midst was a 1920s pseudoscience book claiming that Down’s Syndrome (sometimes called mongolism because affected babies look kind of Asian if you’re racist and have a vivid imagination) was literally caused by relic Asian genes that Europeans got from Mongol hordes raping their ancestors. Seems to have been taken somewhat seriously at the time and was reviewed in JAMA and Nature, though I can’t access the reviews to see how critical they were.

Inline links: The Mongol In Our Midst

The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress1 mentions across 1 issues

The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 10, 2024 and December 10, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "I think Robert Heinlein's, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress should be our model". It most often appears alongside ACT, AI, America.

Reference entry: The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: December 10, 2024
Last seen: December 10, 2024
Book title: The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress

Outbound links

Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On Prison December 10, 2024

ACT 1 shared issues
AI 1 shared issues
America 1 shared issues
Asterisk 1 shared issues
Belgium 1 shared issues

Source context

December 10, 2024 · Original source

I think Robert Heinlein's, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress should be our model for an actual solution. The moon is far enough away that it would be quite difficult to get back.

The Most Good You Can Do1 mentions across 1 issues

The Most Good You Can Do 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 "a copy of Peter Singer's The Most Good You Can Do". It most often appears alongside 't Heem, 10/40 Coffee, 11841 Wagner St., Culver City.

Reference entry: The Most Good You Can Do
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 26, 2022
Last seen: August 26, 2022
Book title: The Most Good You Can Do

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places August 26, 2022

't Heem 1 shared issues
40 Coffee 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner St., Culver City 1 shared issues
12 Rotunda Drive Charlottesville, VA 22903 1 shared issues
1275 1st Street 1 shared issues

Source context

August 26, 2022 · Original source

VIENNA, AUSTRIA Contact: Manuel, manuel[dot]turonian[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 2:00 PM Location: Wiener Stadtpark at the Strauss Monument; will have an ACX Meetup sign. Coordinates: 8FWR693H+GP2 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Rationality Vienna is a group of about 30 people who meet once a month in person or via Zoom. You can join our Facebook group. Notes: We may want to shift to an indoor location depending on weather and the local Covid numbers. BRUSSELS, BELGIUM Contact: Bruno D, bruno[dot]astral[dot]codex[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 18, 4:00 PM Location: Guingette Henri, George Henri parc Coordinates: 9F26RCWC+84 Event link(s): LessWrong SOFIA, BULGARIA Contact: Anastasia, sofia[dot]acx[dot]meetup[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 4:00 PM Location: Shade Garden (Сенчестата градинка; part of Borisova garden) Coordinates: 8GJ5M8GW+J9 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Sofia ACX started with last year's Meetups Everywhere round. We have Serious Meetups once per month at which we discuss a blog post, a short story, or a book (for instance, The Scout Mindset, The Money Illusion, The Metropolitan Man); and sporadic non-serious social meetups that mostly include getting dinner, going on a walk, watching a film, or playing board games. Attendance hovers around 6-8 people out of a pool of 13. People get invited to the Discord server after they've attended at least one in-person meetup. ZAGREB, CROATIA Contact: DJStern, dorian[dot]sternvukotic[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 6:00 PM Location: Krivi Put Coordinates: 8FQQRX38+V6W Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Croatian LessWrong active group communicates mainly through a Telegram group, we meetup semi regularly, approx once a month. The group is mostly social, and the meetups are not structured (sometimes we all just meet at a random party) Notes: Send me an Email and I will add you to a Telegram group where everything (active) LessWrong Croatia/Zagreb happens LIMASSOL, CYPRUS Contact: Arseniy, runescape[at]list[dot]ru, @anchorheld (Telegram / Instagram) Time: Saturday, September 3, 12:00 PM Location: By the Municipal Zoo Coordinates: 8G6MM3M3+Q6 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please hit me up on Mail, Telegram, or Instagram if you're actually going PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC Contact: Jiri Nadvornik, jiri[dot]nadvornik[at]efektivni-altruismus[dot]cz Time: Thursday, October 6, 6:00 PM Location: Garden of Dharmasala Teahouse Coordinates: 9F2P3CRW+FP7 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event COPENHAGEN, DENMARK Contact: Søren Elverlin, soeren[dot]elverlin[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 3:00 PM Location: Rundholtsvej 10, 2300 København S Coordinates: 9F7JMH38+GFP Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event, Meetup.com Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong TALLINN, ESTONIA Contact: Andrew W, andrew_n_west[at]yahoo[dot]co[dot]uk Time: Monday, September 26, 7:00 PM Location: St Vitus, Tallinn. I don't know if anyone will turn up, but I'll be wearing a suit, a beard, and a book. Coordinates: 9GF6CPRH+MQ Event link(s): LessWrong HELSINKI, FINLAND Contact: Joe Nash, joenash499[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 4:00 PM Location: Restaurant Töölönranta, Helsinginkatu 56 Coordinates: 9GG65WMJ+2J Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: LessWrong group FONTAINEBLEAU, FRANCE Contact: Ebrahim Akbari, ea[dot]akbari[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 6:00 PM Location: Glasgow bar, Fontainebleau Coordinates: 8FW4CP32+J8 Event link(s): LessWrong PARIS, FRANCE Contact: Olivier, w20l2qtf[at]mailer[dot]me, We have a Discord and a matrix server (both servers are bridged together) Time: Friday, September 23, 6:00 PM Location: In the jardin du carrousel, next to jardin des Tuileries Coordinates: 8FW4V86J+GH Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Regular meetups organized via discord or the newsletter every 3 months with around 20 people. Notes: We have a mailing list if you are interested in future meetups. Please don't hesitate to send me an email to RSVP that you're coming to help gauge the interest. TOULOUSE, FRANCE Contact: Alfonso, barsom[dot]maelwys[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 8, 7:00 PM Location: Bar 'Le Biergarten' (60 Gd Rue Saint-Michel, 31400 Toulouse). We'll be sitting at a table with an ACX MEETUP sign on it. Coordinates: 8FM3HCQW+9H Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP by email TBILISI, GEORGIA Contact: Evgenia Karunus, lakesare[at]gmail[dot]com, https://twitter.com/lakesare Time: Saturday, September 17, 7:00 PM Location: Coffee Place Coordinates: 8HH6MRQ2+WH Event link(s): LessWrong AACHEN, GERMANY Contact: Jörn, acx[at]j[dot]stoehler[dot]eu Time: Tuesday, September 27, 7:00 PM Location: Chico Mendes Coordinates: 9F28Q3HJ+9Q Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP here so I can reserve the right number of tables. BERLIN, GERMANY Contact: Ruben Arslan, ssc[at]alphabattle[dot]xyz Time: Sunday, October 2, 2:00 PM Location: Südplateau Fritz-Schloss-Park Coordinates: 9F4MG9H4+4X Event link(s): LessWrong, Google Calendar Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong. I'll bring some beverages. COLOGNE, GERMANY Contact: Marcel Müller, marcel_mueller[at]mail[dot]de Time: Saturday, October 8, 5:00 PM Location: Marienweg 43, 50858 Köln, private venue, just ring the bell or follow the sign. Coordinates: 9F28WRMX+96H Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: LW / ACX / Rationalist meetup group. Monthly, mostly social meetups. Other activities welcome. Unless noted otherwise we will meet at Marienweg 43 in 50858 Cologne on the 2nd Saturday of each month at 5 pm. Please email me to be added to our mailing list where deviations will be posted. Caution! September Meetup will be at a different venue! Notes: If you read this you are welcome. Our Covid rules are still in effect: You must be tested negative on the same day. Self tests will be available at the meetup. If there is any problem, like you do not find us or I did not see your mail, call me +491788862254. FREIBURG IM BREISGAU, GERMANY Contact: Omar, info[at]rationality-freiburg[dot]de Time: Friday, October 14, 6:00 PM Location: FlexRooms, Salzstr. 1, 79098 Freiburg. We will carry a cardboard sign saying “Rationality Freiburg”. Coordinates: 8FV9XVV2+V56 Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com, Website Group info: The group started in May 2022 and before the summer break we had five meetups with 4-11 people attending. Every two weeks seems like a good rhythm, but nothing is set in stone. So far we always read something beforehand and then discussed it, as well as trying some practical exercises such as TAPs and Personal Calibration. Afterwards we went to have dinner and continued talking about everything and anything for hours. Everything is new and flexible, so come and help us improve! Notes: We have a Signal messenger group and ask you to attend a meetup once to be able to join. HAMBURG, GERMANY Contact: Gunnar Zarncke, g[dot]zarncke[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 5:00 PM Location: Kleine Wallanlagen on the lawn near Memorial Holstenglacis. Look for pink blankets; I will also have an ACX sign. Here is an Open Street Map link which also shows the short-cut tunnel from the subway station. Coordinates: 9F5FHX4H+RXC Event link(s): LessWrongLessWrong Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong KARLSRUHE, GERMANY Contact: Marcus Wilhelm, mail[at]marcuswilhelm[dot]de Time: Saturday, September 24, 3:00 PM Location: Botanischer Garten Karlsruhe Coordinates: 8FXC2C72+85X Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet weekly, alternating offline and online, see our LessWrong page KASSEL, HESSEN, GERMANY Contact: Tobias, Sphinxfire[at]outlook[dot]de Time: Saturday, September 10, 2:00 PM Location: Friedrichsplatz, to the left of the DocumentaHall Coordinates: 9F3F8F6X+R6 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Telegram group Notes: Please join the Telegram group if you are interested in coming. It will be helpful for coordinating something beyond 'let's just see who shows up and take it from there', plus, it will also make me feel a lot better on a purely subjective level if I know beforehand that at least one other person is interested. If you prefer the surprise factor of 'knowing as little as possible about who you're going to meet', you can also just write me via E-mail, of course. LEIPZIG, GERMANY Contact: Gunther Forderung, notavailable[at]riseup[dot]net Time: Tuesday, October 4, 6:00 PM Location: In the Lene-Voigt-Park, in the secluded area opposite of the swings Coordinates: 9F3J8CM2+PF Event link(s): LessWrong TÜBINGEN, GERMANY Contact: Emma, emma[dot]tuebingen[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 23, 6:00 PM Location: The ACX/SSC meetup and dinner (with vegan options) will be on October 23rd at the Annette Kade dormitory (Mohlstraße 44, 8FWFG3H5+XR). If you’d like to attend, please write me an email, and I’ll send you an invitation to our WhatsApp group. Coordinates: 8FWFG3H5+XR Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please email me to get my phone number. If a lot of people are out of town for the holidays and can't come we could meet on, say, October 1st. I would like to know how many people to expect. ATHENS, GREECE Contact: Spyros, spyros[dot]dovas[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Monday, September 5, 7:00 PM Location: On the plaza in front of the National Library Coordinates: 8G95WMQR+WRP Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Group info: We have organized 2 events so far, fall and spring, we just sit around and discuss. We have a Whatsapp group that hasn't picked up momentum yet. Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong or Meetup.com BUDAPEST, HUNGARY Contact: Tim Underwood, timunderwood9[at]gmail[dot]com, WhatsApp 19513120591 Time: Sunday, September 11, 2:00 PM Location: Champs Sziget bar on Margit Sziget, near the front. I'll have a big hardcover copy in Hungarian of a book by Richard Dawkins. Coordinates: 8FVXG2CW+2H Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We've been meeting in Budapest for two years now, with our first meeting being the 2020 ACX meetups everywhere. We meet about once a month, and usually we have two articles that are suggested reading that we discuss. CORK, IRELAND Contact: Mikey, Godojhana[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, September 29, 6:00 PM Location: If sunny: The Lough. If not, then the game arcade on the parade Coordinates: 9C3HVGQ7+JQ Event link(s): LessWrong DUBLIN, IRELAND Contact: Lucius, lucius[at]bushnaq[dot]de, LessWrong profile Time: Sunday, October 2, 12:30 PM Location: Clement & Pekoe, William Street South, Dublin 2. We'll be sitting inside, and there'll be a sign with ACX written on it on the table Coordinates: 9C5M8PRP+JV Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: LessWrong FOLIGNO, ITALY Contact: Mauro, orfino[at]yandex[dot]com, LW profile, Telegram Time: Saturday, September 24, 5:00 PM Location: Parco dei Canapé, at the open air cafe, ask the barista Coordinates: 8FJJXP22+HC Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know how much food to get. No kids please. MILANO, ITALY Contact: Raffaele, raffa[dot]mauro[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 16, 6:30 PM Location: Viale Luigi Majno, 18, 20129 Milano MI - Primo Ventures / T8P, IInd floor. Coordinates: 8FQFF6C4+9C Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet once per month. The group started in May 2022. Notes: Please RSVP by email by the 1st of September PADOVA, ITALY Contact: Carlo, carlo[dot]martinucci[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 1, 3:30 PM Location: Prato della Valle, fountain in the middle. I'll be carrying a sign with ACX MEETUP on it :) Coordinates: 8FQH9VXG+9J Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: We'll probably find a bar to have a hot chocolate or tea or something :) PISA, ITALY Contact: Raffaele, raffaelesalvia[at]alice[dot]it Time: Saturday, October 22, 5:00 PM Location: We will meet in Piazza dei Cavalieri, near the steps of Palazzo della Carovana Coordinates: 8FMGPC92+R44 Event link(s): LessWrong ROMA, ITALY Contact: Grigorio, greghero12[at]gmail[dot]com, Facebook, +393920366026 Time: Saturday, October 8, 6:00 PM Location: We'll be around Gardenie metro station, at the benches, and I will be wearing a red shirt and sitting on top of the station to be seen Coordinates: 8FHJVHP9+8F Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet around 20-25 times a year but it is asymmetrical, focused in summer, Christmas and Easter. We discuss opinions, engage in circling, play games where we spot logical fallacies and biases by attacking our members ideological weakpoints and formalize some debating stances. Occasionally we find the willpower to devote meetups in steelmanning and understanding the outgroup (roughly 4-5 times a year) Notes: If you are into ACX enough to see this post, I believe we have enough common ground to be worth meeting each other. Aren't you curious who else is within this niche community in Rome? Come on, take a leap of faith. P.S. Would be nice if you sent me a message in WhatsApp with your name and probability of attendance, but I love walk-ins just fine. No space limit after all ;-) RIGA, LATVIA Contact: Andis, cerulean[dot]lemniscate[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 4:00 PM Location: Bastejkalns (on top of the hill) Coordinates: 9G86X426+Q5Q Event link(s): LessWrong AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS Contact: Pierre, pierreavdb[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 3:00 PM Location: Kanarie Klub (Bellamyplein 51, 1053 AT Amsterdam) Coordinates: 9F469V89+W4 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: The rationality community is growing in the Netherlands, and we're now planning on having monthly meetups! Join the Rationality NL Discord server. Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I can plan a different venue if needed DELFT, NETHERLANDS Contact: Pierre Bongrand, bongrand[dot]pierre[at]gmail[dot]com, 0033620644013 (Whatsapp/Telegram/Signal) Time: Thursday, September 22, 6:30 PM Location: Delftse Hout Beach, on the grass, in the center of the beach, I will be wearing a red T-shirt and carrying a sign with ACX MEETUP on it. Coordinates: 9F4629FG+66 Event link(s): LessWrong HATTEM, NETHERLANDS Contact: Shoshannah, shos[dot]rationality[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: Dark#0849 Time: Saturday, October 8, 2:00 PM Location: Lijsterbeslaan 6, Hattem Coordinates: 9F48F378+PR Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: We support and coordinate groups across the country, including everything from social meetups to structured events and applied rationality. The intention is to connect all Dutch rationalists and rationalists in the Netherlands. We also discuss rationality topics online and coordinate events on our Discord server. Notes: Feel free to bring kids. Ours will be there :) Also, please park 't Heem if you are coming by car. It's a 2 minute walk to our house. HELMOND, NETHERLANDS Contact: Rutger, silvery[dot]swift[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 3:00 PM Location: De Motte (On top of the hill). Nearest road is Palladio. Coordinates: 9F37FMC5+VR Event link(s): LessWrong THE HAGUE, NETHERLANDS Contact: Kristof Redei, acxmeetup[at]kristof[dot]me Time: Wednesday, September 14, 6:00 PM Location: Paleistuin, Prinsessewal, 2513 EE Den Haag, Netherlands. We'll have a picnic blanket with an ACX sign on the large central field, somewhere near the playground. Coordinates: 9F4638J3+GP Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Notes: Please RSVP on Facebook if possible! All ages/species welcome. If it's not outdoor weather, we'll go to The Bookstor Cafe next door as a backup. OSLO, NORWAY Contact: Hans Andreas & Jonas, acxoslomeetup[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 1:00 PM Location: Look for the sign of Moloch at Café Billabong - Bogstadveien 53B 0366 Oslo Coordinates: 9FFGWPH7+QP Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Group info: We're hoping to do at least a quarterly meetup, but we'll base it on the turnout and enthusiasm of this event. Notes: The cafe has historically been accepting of guests' not ordering--please don't let financial reasons keep you away! GDAŃSK, POLAND Contact: Frank, frankastralcodexten[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: frhrpr#1663 Time: Saturday, August 27, 3:00 PM Location: Next to Park Kuźniczki, opposite the train station, on the circular benches around the water pump; I will be wearing a red armband Coordinates: 9F6W9JJ4+JW Event link(s): LessWrong KRAKÓW, POLAND Contact: Mateusz Bagiński, bagginsmatthew[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 2:30 PM Location: Celna 6/9, the office of the Optimum Pareto Foundation Coordinates: 9F2X2WVX+V2 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: We meet every month, here is our Facebook group. LUBLIN, POLAND Contact: Piotr, piotrekzlublina[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 5:00 PM Location: Między Słowami cafe, Rybna 4, Lublin Coordinates: 9G346HX8+FX Event link(s): LessWrong POZNAŃ, POLAND Contact: Ofelia Kerr, ofel[dot]kerr[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: ofelia#0001 Time: Saturday, October 8, 6:00 PM Location: Van Gogh Pub, Żydowska 12, 61-761. I'll most likely be on the ground floor and I'll have an ACX sign. Coordinates: 9F4RCW5P+X3F Event link(s): LessWrong WARSAW, POLAND Contact: Michał, rationalwarsaw[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 4, 6:00 PM Location: Południk Zero, Wilcza 25 Coordinates: 9G4362G8+2V Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Group info: The community of Warsaw LessWrong/SSC/ACX/etc. readers is active for over 8 years now. We're trying to organise regular monthly meetups. You can join our Facebook group or Meetup.com. LISBOA, PORTUGAL Contact: Luís Campos, luis[dot]filipe[dot]lcampos[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 3:00 PM Location: Jardim Amália Rodrigues, close to Linha d'Água cafe, in the top of a hill, below a bunch of trees Coordinates: 8CCGPRJW+V8 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We've been meeting every month for around 1 year. Get in contact if you want to participate in the WhatsApp group. :) BUCHAREST, ROMANIA Contact: Tony, skyrimtracer[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 16, 3:00 PM Location: Plaza România Mall, Bd. Timișoara 26 - food court Coordinates: 8GP8C2HM+9X Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP by email CLUJ-NAPOCA, ROMANIA Contact: Marius Pop, pop[dot]marius[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 11:00 AM Location: Deva Host, Strada Deva 1-7 Coordinates: 8GR5QH8F+MW Event link(s): LessWrong BELGRADE, SERBIA Contact: Ivica Bogosavljevic, ibogosavljevic[at]gmail[dot]com, Viber +381 65 3473 433 Time: Monday, September 12, 6:00 PM Location: Pool Cafe on Prve pruge Coordinates: 8GP2RCP7+G7 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP on my Viber number, so I know how big the room we need. BRATISLAVA, SLOVAKIA Contact: Viliam, viliam[at]bur[dot]sk Time: Saturday, September 10, 3:00 PM Location: Medická záhrada, by the fountain Coordinates: 8FWV44X9+XW8 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: I will post an announcement on LessWrong later. In case of rain, a new meeting place nearby will be announced there. LJUBLJANA, SLOVENIA Contact: Demjan Vester, demjan[dot]vester[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Wednesday, September 14, 6:00 PM Location: Probably Lili Novy bar, near modern gallery and park Tivoli Coordinates: 8FRP3F3X+6V Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Group info: We meet about 0.7 times a month. Notes: Please RSVP because last time we just barely got a place big enough. BARCELONA, SPAIN Contact: Alfonso, alfonso[dot]martinez[at]upf[dot]edu, WhatsApp +34693846738 Time: Sunday, October 2, 5:30 PM Location: Parc de la Ciutadella, by the Lion Catcher statue; I'll have an ACX sign Coordinates: 8FH495QP+96 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: The idea is to sit on the grass; bring a foulard along for your comfort, or a foldable chair if preferred. Don't worry about the language: English, Spanish, Catalan, we'll find a way. MADRID, SPAIN Contact: Jaime, jaimesevillamolina[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 5:00 PM Location: Teatro de títeres del Parque del Retiro. We'll be on the stands with an ACX sign Coordinates: 8CGRC897+F8C Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We are an EA / rationality group, we've been active for around 5 years but have less in-person activity since the pandemic started. We have a WhatsApp group and a channel in the Spanish-speaking EA Slack. SEVILLA, SPAIN Contact: Edu, edur[dot]acx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 8:00 PM Location: Parque de María Luisa. I'll be on the grass behind the Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions. I'll be the guy next to an ACX sign, a white wooden chair, and a cardboard ukulele with a tiny cardboard hat on it. Coordinates: 8C9P92F6+3RG Event link(s): LessWrong GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN Contact: Joacim, joacimj[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 3:00 PM Location: Condeco Fredsgatan. I'll have a stack of three books on my table. Coordinates: 9F9HPX4C+39G Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN Contact: Sal, niktonick[at]gmail[dot]com, Telegram Time: Sunday, September 25, 3:00 PM Location: Humlegården, Karlavägen. We will meet near blue gazebo, I will have 'ACX meetup' sign. Coordinates: 9FFW83RF+3M5 Group info: Facebook group BERN, SWITZERLAND Contact: Daniel, dd14214+acx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 2, 4:00 PM Location: Grosse Schanze, at the statue in front of the main uni building, heading to the Pittaria if it's cold or raining Coordinates: 8FR9XC2Q+4G Event link(s): LessWrong GENEVA, SWITZERLAND Contact: Eric, eric[dot]c[dot]p[dot]meier[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 11, 4:00 PM Location: Park de la Grange, just towards the lake below Villa de la grange Coordinates: 8FR86548+J4 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We have a small persistent group who has tried to meet up once a month since last years Meetup. Notes: Feel free to bring other people you think would be interested! ZURICH, SWITZERLAND Contact: MB, acxzurich[at]proton[dot]me Time: Saturday, September 24, 3:00 PM Location: TBD Event link(s): LessWrong ISTANBUL, TURKEY Contact: J, jinai[dot]jyap[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 25, 4:00 PM Location: The House Cafe in Ortaköy. I am a young Asian woman and imagine I'll be easy to spot, but will also try to bring a sign with ACX MEETUP on it. Coordinates: 8GHF22XG+23P Event link(s): LessWrong, Partiful Group info: I do not live here; I am just digital nomading for an indefinite amount of time and would like to meet anyone who's here! Notes: Please RSVP via the Partiful link (you can RSVP as a Maybe)! BIRMINGHAM, UK Contact: Thomas Read, thomas[dot]read[dot]acx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 1:00 PM Location: We'll be at The Wellington, 37 Bennetts Hill, on the roof terrace if possible. I'll wear an orange shirt and have a sign saying ACX on the table. Coordinates: 9C4WF3JX+7Q Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: It's only a few minutes walk from the stations, so hopefully people can join from all over the West Midlands! BRIGHTON, UK Contact: Alan Enright, alanenright[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 11:00 AM Location: We'll be at the Alcampo Lounge on London Road—we will try and get a table on the raised area in front of you and to the left as you come in but will also have a little ACX sign. Coordinates: 9C2XRVM6+3X Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com BRISTOL, UK Contact: Nick Lowry, bristoleffectivealtruism[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 2:00 PM Location: We’ll be meeting at entrance closet to Tesco Express in the Galleries, Bristol City Centre Coordinates: 9C3VFC45+RJM Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event, Meetup.com Group info: Meet twice monthly for socials, more regular 'productive' meetups. Been active for 3+ years, please message for WhatsApp group CAMBRIDGE, UK Contact: Hamish Todd, hamish[dot]todd1[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 2:00 PM Location: Bath House Pub, UPSTAIRS!! I will have a copy of Peter Singer's The Most Good You Can Do Coordinates: 9F426439+J9 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: We meet on the third Saturday of every month. The group has been around almost a year and is well-attended! Notes: My phone/WhatsApp number is +44 0730 *** 3550, where the *** are replaced by the serial number of the Boeing plane whose first flight was on September 2, 1998. Email me to get on the mailing list for future events if you'd like that :) CARDIFF, WALES Contact: AF, strmnova[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 16, 5:00 PM Location: Little Man Coffee (note new location!) Coordinates: 9C3RFRHH+W2 Event link(s): LessWrong EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND, UK Contact: Sam, acxedinburgh[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 2:00 PM Location: Pleasance Cafe. Go through the arch and the door to the cafe is on your left Coordinates: 9C7RWRW9+M8 Group info: ~Monthly meetups, often in Pleasance Cafe but have experimented with other locations. Email me to join the mailing list & WhatsApp group. LANCASTER, UK Contact: Gruffydd Gozali, gruffyddgozali[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 15, 3:00 PM Location: Lancaster University Library, will be on the ground floor by the tree wearing an EA shirt. Coordinates: 9C6V2657+WJR Event link(s): LessWrong LINCOLN, UK Contact: Tobias, tobias[dot]showan[at]yahoo[dot]co[dot]uk Time: Saturday, September 10, 2:00 PM Location: Nosey Parker pub, I'll bring a little paper ACX sign. Coordinates: 9C5X6C9R+XJ Event link(s): LessWrong LONDON, UK Contact: Edward Saperia, edsaperia[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 25, 2:00 PM Location: Newspeak House Coordinates: 9C3XGWGH+3F7 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event, Meetup.com, Eventbrite Group info: You can join our mailing list or our Meetup.com group MANCHESTER, UK Contact: Matthew Gibson, melkartmtg[at]hotmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 18, 11:00 AM Location: Sackville Gardens, Alan Turing Memorial Coordinates: 9C5VFQG7+MH Event link(s): LessWrong NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE, UK Contact: Joshua William, iamjoshwilliam[at]icloud[dot]com, Telegram Time: Saturday, September 3, 12:30 PM Location: Trinity Square, High Street Gosforth. You can get the bus to Gosforth from the city center just outside the famous 'Tyneside Cinema' (bus number: 30, 31, or 35 at Monument Pilgrim Street bus stop), or you can take a walk if you want to get your 'steps' in (if you'd like to do the latter, send me an email and I'll send you the directions), which takes ~60-min. Coordinates: 9C7W294H+5V Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: To my knowledge, there isn't an ACX meet up in this city, or region of the UK, though if there is a demand for a reoccurrence, I'd be happy to keep facilitating such. I'd also happily formulate a WhatsApp group if theres interest, after the meet up. Notes: We have a deli, '1901 cafe', on the square, which we can grab an immediate bite to eat at [so save some hunger if you'd like to do that]. There's a safe [and lovely] park with some benches just by the way, which, if the weather is nice, we can sit at after a bite to eat, or, otherwise, we can remain in the cafe. OXFORD, UK Contact: Sam, ssc[at]sambrown[dot]eu, There's a Signal group people can join :) contact Sam for info Time: Wednesday, October 19, 6:30 PM Location: The Star, Rectory Road, Oxford. We'll be in the beer garden round the back, with a sign ?? Coordinates: 9C3WPQX6+QP9 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event, Meetup.com Group info: We run socials every months, and applied rationality workshops from time to time! Notes: Please RSVP on any of the platforms (or email) for free pizza PENRYN, CORNWALL, UK Contact: mini t, tminns[at]btinternet[dot]com Time: Saturday, August 27, 3:00 PM Location: glasney playing field and valley Coordinates: 9C2P5V8V+P9 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: I don't mind rescheduling, or organizing another event, not many people are likely to turn up this far out of the way.

The Mourning Of Christ1 mentions across 1 issues

The Mourning Of Christ is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 20, 2024 and November 20, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "This is “The Mourning Of Christ” by Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo". It most often appears alongside /r/ImaginaryWarhammer, 19th Century, Abstract/Modern.

Reference entry: The Mourning Of Christ
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: November 20, 2024
Last seen: November 20, 2024
Book title: The Mourning Of Christ
Likely author: Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo

Outbound links

Issue trail

How Did You Do On The AI Art Turing Test? November 20, 2024

ImaginaryWarhammer 1 shared issues
19th Century 1 shared issues
Modern 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
Agony In The Garden 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: Why Machines Will Never Rule the World

November 20, 2024 · Original source

Human. This is “The Mourning Of Christ” by Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo (1515). This was the picture that people were most confident was human (they were right), but a few people protested and said that the anatomy was so wrong that it must be AI-generated. Sorry, I guess Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo just wasn’t very good at anatomy. Maybe that’s why Michelangelo had to dissect all those corpses.

Inline links: “The Mourning Of Christ”

The Myth of Artificial Intelligence1 mentions across 1 issues

The Myth of Artificial Intelligence is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 03, 2023 and June 03, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Erik J. Larson’s The Myth of Artificial Intelligence". It most often appears alongside 2023 book review contest, AGI, Alan Turing.

Reference entry: The Myth of Artificial Intelligence
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 03, 2023
Last seen: June 03, 2023
Book title: The Myth of Artificial Intelligence

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: Why Machines Will Never Rule the World June 03, 2023

2023 book review contest 1 shared issues
AGI 1 shared issues
Alan Turing 1 shared issues
Amazon 1 shared issues
Barry Smith 1 shared issues

Source context

June 03, 2023 · Original source

The authors thoroughly and commendably engage with a breadth of literature in physics, biology, linguistics, philosophy of mind, AI, and more, including up-to-the-moment deep learning research, and they collect many of the existing arguments against artificial general intelligence, notably Toby Walsh’s “The Singularity May Never Be Near” and Erik J. Larson’s The Myth of Artificial Intelligence.

Inline links: The Singularity May Never Be Near, The Myth of Artificial Intelligence

The New Imperialism1 mentions across 1 issues

The New Imperialism is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 04, 2021 and May 04, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "In The New Imperialism I explored Hannah Arendt’s thesis". It most often appears alongside 2008, 9/11 attacks, A Brief History Of Neoliberalism.

Reference entry: The New Imperialism
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 04, 2021
Last seen: May 04, 2021
Book title: The New Imperialism

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: A Brief History Of Neoliberalism May 04, 2021

2008 1 shared issues
11 attacks 1 shared issues
A Brief History Of Neoliberalism 1 shared issues
ABHoN 1 shared issues
ABHoN 1 shared issues

Source context

Book Review: A Brief History Of Neoliberalism

May 04, 2021 · Original source

Neoconservatism, I argued in Chapter 3, sustains the neoliberal drive towards the construction of asymmetric market freedoms but makes the anti-democratic tendencies of neoliberalism explicit through a turn into authoritarian, hierarchical, and even militaristic means of maintaining law and order. In The New Imperialism I explored Hannah Arendt’s thesis that militarization abroad and at home inevitably go hand in hand, and concluded that the international adventurism of the neoconservatives, long planned and legitimized after the 9/11 attacks, had as much to do with asserting domestic control over a fractious and much-divided body politic in the US as it did with a geopolitical strategy of maintaining global hegemony through control over oil resources.

The New Jim Crow1 mentions across 1 issues

The New Jim Crow is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 23, 2022 and June 23, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "he tries to undo the damage done by The New Jim Crow, a book which convinced millions". It most often appears alongside 1978, 2016 essay, A Resounding Success Or Disastrous Failure: Re-examining The Interpretation Of Evidence On The Portuguese Decriminalisation Of Illicit Drugs.

Reference entry: The New Jim Crow
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 23, 2022
Last seen: June 23, 2022
Book title: The New Jim Crow

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: San Fransicko June 23, 2022

1978 1 shared issues
2016 essay 1 shared issues
A Resounding Success Or Disastrous Failure: Re-examining The Interpretation Of Evidence On The Portuguese Decriminalisation Of Illicit Drugs 1 shared issues
Abbott 1 shared issues
Abstracted Will Of The American People 1 shared issues

Source context

Book Review: San Fransicko

June 23, 2022 · Original source

Results of a survey at one of SF’s new Navigation Centers at why their clients refused to go to normal shelters. But even the homeless people who do want to go to shelters mostly can’t get in. This app gives the current status of San Francisco’s homeless shelter waitlist. If you applied today, there would be 900 people ahead of you in line for one of the city’s 1500 - 2500 shelter beds. The app says that the median wait time is 826 days. So however many homeless people don’t want to go to shelters, we’re not building enough shelters to serve the ones who do. Why not? Shellenberger again: In the spring of 2021, Friedenbach published an op-ed opposing a proposal considered by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to create, within eighteen months, sufficient homeless shelters and outdoor “Safe Sleeping Sites” for all of the city’s unsheltered homeless. “One can simply take a look to New York City,” she wrote. “Their department spends about $1.3 billion dollars of its budget on providing shelter for their unhoused population while thousands remain on the street. . . . As a result, New York has a higher rate of homelessness than San Francisco.” Housing First advocate Margot Kushel of the University of California, San Francisco agreed. “The problem with New York—and I spend a lot of time with people working in the system in New York—is that they spend an estimated $30,000 for each person per year to keep them in shelter. That’s not what we want to do. Because if you create the shelter and you don’t create the housing, then people are just in shelter forever.” Housing First advocates oppose shelter in Los Angeles. “Why haven’t we solved homelessness?” asked Housing First creator Sam Tsemberis. “Because [Los Angeles mayor] Eric Garcetti [has] Andy Bales [saying,] ‘You need emergency housing.’ ‘These people need to be cleaned up.’ ‘They need to be sober.’ ‘They need Jesus before they’ll be ready for housing.’ I said, ‘People should be housed and then maybe they’ll get sobriety and Jesus and the rest.’ We’re definitely on polar opposites of the whole thing.” Advocates for the homeless at the national level similarly oppose more shelters. “I don’t agree that we should be building more transitional housing,” said the head of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. […] In other words, the reason that there are so many homeless people on the streets in San Francisco is that both progressive and moderate Democratic elected officials, and the city’s most influential homelessness experts and advocates, have for two decades opposed building sufficient shelters. And that is unlikely to change even after San Francisco starts spending hundreds of millions more per year on the problem and might even get worse. This basically seems true. I found this webpage of a former SF Supervisor candidate a helpful corroborating source. He was running on a platform of “maybe we should build some homeless shelters”. He lost. You can also find a bunch of webpages by the sorts of people Shellenberger is complaining about, for example this site: Sup[ervisor] Rafael Mandelman today pushed his new legislation that would require the city to offer at least temporary shelter to everyone living on the streets, a step that some say would lead to more homeless sweeps and do nothing to create permanently affordable housing . . . [our] Coalition has argued for years that the solution to homelessness is housing—not temporary shelter, which may never lead to housing. The ex-supervisor candidate gives some helpful numbers: permanent housing costs about $600,000 per person housed. Shelters cost between $20,000 and $30,000 per person housed. So SF could build enough shelters to clear its waitlist for about $30 million. More recently, SF has tried a sort of compromise, opening “deluxe” shelters called Navigation Centers which avoid some of the problems of regular shelters. They also cost more than twice as much, and the city has only created about 300 beds. Also, the people in regular shelters are angry, because being in a regular shelter disqualifies you from getting into a (much better) Navigation Center. Some of them are considering leaving their shelter, going back on the streets, then waiting however many months or years it takes to get a Navigation Center bed instead. I’m not at all sure of these numbers, but it looks like of SF’s ~7,000 homeless, about 2,000 are in shelters already, and 1,000 are on the shelter waitlist. I don’t know if the remaining 4,000 have made a specific commitment not to go to shelters, or just have given up on the waitlist process. My conclusion: agree with San Fransicko about the role of progressive activists, but I think it overemphasizes the role of wanting to use drugs in why homeless people themselves sometimes avoid shelters, and underemphasizes the many other problems with them. Claim 5: Drug Decriminalization Isn’t Working California legalized marijuana in 2016. Shellenberger says that San Francisco’s commitment to drugs has gone beyond that: it has effectively decriminalized opioids, cocaine, and the rest. Any attempt to lessen use of these drugs is attacked as “stigmatizing”; instead, government policy centers around providing addicts with needles and other drug paraphernalia under the guise of “harm reduction”. Shellenberger hits all the right beats here. Like many people, he tries to undo the damage done by The New Jim Crow, a book which convinced millions of people that mass incarceration was driven by a racist War On Drugs. In fact, less than a fifth of prisoners are in for drug-related crimes. And when the government was first debating the War on Drugs and mass incarceration, black leaders were among the strongest proponents of both. The talking point at the time - among everyone from black Congressional leaders to black churches - was that the government’s failure to crack down on drug use was racist, borne of them not caring about predominantly black drug victims. And while we’ve been patting ourselves on the back about how enlightened we are for ending the drug war: Drug overdoses are today the number one cause of accidental death in the United States as a result of America’s historic addiction and overdose epidemic. Overdose deaths rose from 17,415 in 2000 to 93,330 in 2020, a 536 percent increase.Significantly more people die of drug overdoses today than of homicide (13,927 in 2019) or car accidents (36,096 in 2019). […] There are about twenty-five thousand injection drug users in San Francisco, a number 50 percent larger than the number of students enrolled in the city’s fifteen public high schools. San Francisco gives away more needles to drug users, six million per year, than New York City, despite having one-tenth the population. The part of this chapter that stood out to me as most worth looking into deeper was the section on Portugal: For decades, harm reduction and decriminalization advocates have pointed to Portugal as a model, noting that it decriminalized drugs and expanded drug treatment. In 2013, Portugal’s drug-induced death rate was sixty-six times less than that of the United States. The number of people in treatment increased by 60 percent between 1998 and 2011, with three-quarters receiving an opioid substitute like methadone or Suboxone, the brand name of buprenorphine. Drug use among 15- to 24-year-olds actually declined after decriminalization. “All drugs have been legalized,” explained Monique Tula, executive director of the Harm Reduction Coalition. “Their focus is on giving people tools, like job apprenticeships, and the means to support themselves.” […] [But Portugal] never legalized drugs. It only decriminalized them, reducing criminal penalties but maintaining prohibition. Drug dealers were still sent to prison even after the 2001 decriminalization. And Portugal does not let people addicted to hard drugs with behavioral disorders off the hook like progressive West Coast cities have done. It’s true that Portugal massively expanded drug treatment, but people are still arrested and fined for possession of heroin, meth, and other hard drugs. And drug users are typically sent to a regionally administered “Commissions for the Dissuasion of Drug Addiction,” composed of a social worker, lawyer, and doctor who encourage, push, and coerce drug treatment. And decriminalization doesn’t end drug violence. “Even if trafficking enforcement decreased, like it did in Portugal,” said criminologist John Pfaff, “illegal drug markets would still be forced to rely on violence to resolve disputes.” Indeed, prostitution and violence are ever-present in the open-air drug scenes in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle. “We are seeing behaviors from our guests that I’ve never seen in thirty-three years,” said Rev. Andy Bales, who runs the largest homeless shelter on Skid Row in Los Angeles. “They are so bizarre and different that I don’t even feel right describing the behaviors. It’s extreme violence of an extreme sexual nature.” People are not dying from drug overdose deaths in San Francisco because they’re being arrested. They’re dying because they aren’t being arrested. Decriminalization reduces prices by lowering production and distribution costs, which increases use. This was also the case for alcohol consumption. It increased after prohibition ended in the United States. Even in Portugal, drug overdose deaths and overall drug use rose after decriminalization. I was most surprised by the claim that Portuguese overdose deaths rose after decriminalization. Uncharacteristically, San Fransicko doesn’t give a citation for it, but we can try to retrace its reasoning. Decriminalization proponents tend to point to these numbers, helpfully converted to per 100,000 population and graphed here: But an anti-drug Australian think tank argues that the peak in 2001 is made up: Claims that there were more than 75 drug-related deaths in 2001 which more than halved to 34 deaths in 2002 use a figure for 2001 for which there is no substantiation. Official drug-related deaths for Portugal, taken from the latest 2018 EMCDDA Statistical Bulletin are copied below. Notice that there is no such figure recorded for 2001. They include a link to EMCDDA, the EU organization charged with monitoring these things. The link contains two datasets, both of which seem to be measuring the same thing but getting different results. One dataset starts in 2002, the other in 2008. I don’t know what the difference here is, but they’re right that neither includes 2001. If you ignore the pre-2002 data, the graph looks like this: They say “opiate”, but AFAICT these numbers are actually about all drugs. But the proponents link to the updated 2020 version of the same website, which all of a sudden does have data from 2001 and before. I don’t know why EMCDDA can’t make up its mind, but I think the Australians are wrong and the original graph is fine. On the other hand, does it really matter? Both of these show drug deaths decreasing until 2005, then going up and down a bit, then going back up again starting in 2011. I think a reasonable interpretation would be that decriminalization in Portugal did decrease overdose deaths a bit, and then they started rising again from that low baseline around the same time other European countries saw rising overdose deaths. I would also accept “these are pretty small effects and we shouldn’t ascribe any significance to them”. But San Fransicko’s claim - that overdose deaths increased after the reform - seems false. The only way I can see justifying it is taking the second graph - the one that wrongly claims there is no pre-2002 data - and then attributing the fact that twelve years after the reform lowered deaths, deaths finally rose above the pre-reform level to be the fault of the reform. This is like saying “people claim the Black Plague killed a lot of Europeans, but the European population actually rose after the Plague”, which is true in the sense that it was above its pre-Plague max by like 1600 or whatever. What about overall drug use? Here I recommend A Resounding Success Or Disastrous Failure: Re-examining The Interpretation Of Evidence On The Portuguese Decriminalisation Of Illicit Drugs, which is on exactly this topic of how people keep selectively quoting results from Portugal to prove their point. It argues that drug use is inherently hard to measure. There are four different Portuguese datasets for the time at issue, lots of different drugs, lots of different age/gender combinations, and lots of different ways of measuring drugs (did you use drugs in the past month? the past year? your lifetime?) It’s easy to tell a story of how past-month cocaine use skyrocketed among 14-29 year old males according to X source, or how lifetime marijuana use fell in high school-age women according to Y. The main trick that opponents use is measuring lifetime drug use. Portugal is a very conservative country; drug use is pretty new and most of the older generation wasn’t involved. So as time goes on and more and more people try drugs but “un-trying” drugs isn’t a thing, the percent of the population who have tried drugs inevitably goes up. This definitely happened but isn’t a fair reflection of any specific reform. The authors find that in the past decade or so, there has been a bit more short-term experimentation with drugs, but less long-run use. They conclude: As shown in Figure 2, general population (aged 15–64) trends for recent and current drug use in Portugal indicate minimal if any changes between 2001 and 2007. Instead, rates of discontinuation of drug use (the proportion of the population that reported ever having used a drug but opting not to in recent years) increased, which reinforces that just as in the school populations, the growth in lifetime-reported use reflected predominantly short-term experimental use. Increases in recent and current drug use were more notable in some cohorts, particularly those aged 25 to 34 (albeit, with a maximum of 7% of any one cohort reporting recent use, absolute levels remained low). But as shown in Figure 3, recent and current drug use declined among those aged 15–24, the population who were most at risk of initiation and long-term engagement. The available evidence thus gives grounds for arguing that while there was some growth in the scale of drug use in post-reform Portugal, there was an overall positive net benefit for the Portuguese community. What about San Fransicko’s main point - that as the US has wound down the War on Drugs, drug overdose rates have sextupled? I think this is mostly not causal. I think the sextupling of overdoses is a combination of expansion in prescription opioid use, various forms of social decay making people less happy and therefore more likely to use drugs, and “improvements” in drug “technology” and the “supply chain” (eg production of fentanyl in China). I don’t know of any source that attempts to tease out the exact contribution of all of these things, but I would note that overdose deaths have risen the most in very conservative Midwestern states that haven’t walked back the drug war as much as California. Conclusion: As usual, I appreciate San Fransicko’s corrections to the prevailing narrative, but its own additions are dubious. Its claim that Portugal saw increased drug-related deaths seems false as far as I can tell. Its claim that it saw increased drug use depends on your definition, but is misleading and not the most natural way to sum up the evidence. Claim 6: San Francisco’s Soft-On-Crime Policies Led To Rising Crime Ten years ago, the news was full of stories about how some teenager stole a gumdrop and was sentenced to nine hundred billion years in jail. At some point, there was a genre shift to stories about how some hardened criminal murdered fifty people with an axe and the judge let him go with a warning because having jails felt racist. Source: Ed West, do note that this example is from the UK How suspicious should we be of each type of story? There will always be an extreme right tail of overly harsh sentences, and an extreme left tail of overly lenient ones. Were the 2000s really as draconian as they felt? Is the modern era really as pathetic? Or is it all just a function of who you read and what agenda they’re pushing? Shellenberger: During California governor Jerry Brown’s time in office, voters passed several reforms aimed at reducing the size of the prison population. In 2012, voters passed a change to the Three Strikes law so that the third strike imposes a life sentence only if the new felony was serious or violent. In addition to lowering punishments for drug possession, Proposition 47, which voters passed in 2014, redefined shoplifting, forgery, petty theft, and receiving stolen property as misdemeanors when the value in question does not exceed $950. In 2016, voters approved a proposition that shortened the time it took for some nonviolent offenders to be eligible for parole and which released nonviolent offenders into drug treatment and rehabilitation. Property crimes rose in San Francisco starting in 2012. Larceny, which is shoplifting and other petty theft, rose 50 percent, from roughly 3,000 incidents per 100,000 people in 2011 to about 4,500 in 2019. Property crimes as a whole, which include larceny, motor vehicle theft, and burglary, rose from 4,000 incidents per 100,000 people in 2011 to 5,500 in 2019. One study suggests that Proposition 47 increased the rate of auto theft 17 percent and the rate of larceny (non-auto property) theft 9 percent, but discerning between causation and correlation may not be possible. Upon taking office in January 2020, [famously soft-on-crime San Francisco district attorney Chesa] Boudin followed through on his campaign promises. Instead of prosecuting and incarcerating people for breaking car windows to steal money and other items from inside, Boudin proposed creating a $1.5 million fund to reimburse car owners. But there were over 25,000 car break-ins reported in 2019. If every break-in cost just $250 in repairs, the fund would need four times that amount. And what would prevent people from falsely claiming to have been robbed in order to get city money? […] Boudin opposed efforts by the mayor and the city attorney to prevent drug dealers who had already been arrested from entering the Tenderloin. “Until the city is serious about treating addiction and the root causes of drug use and selling,” said Boudin in a statement, “these recycled, punishment-focused approaches are unlikely to succeed at doing anything more than making headlines.” Home burglaries rose in early 2021 in San Francisco. Homeowners started posting on Twitter videos from their security cameras of people breaking into homes and garages. “When I first moved here we had a car break-in problem,” said Michael Solana, a writer who works for a venture capital fund. “Now we have a home invasion problem. These things are wearing on people.” Boudin attributed the rise of burglaries in San Francisco to the decline of tourism and “people in desperate economic circumstances.” Progressive supervisor Hillary Ronen agreed. “We know that [economic insecurity and inequality] is one of the root causes of property crimes specifically,” she said. But Tom Wolf and others argued that the robberies were, like the shoplifting, done by people seeking money to buy drugs and feed their addictions. “The drugstores have been shoplifted to death and that’s all because of drug use,” said Tom. “I know. I used to do the same thing when I was out there. That’s what you do. You ‘boost.’ And then you go and you sell your stuff down at UN Plaza,” an open-air drug scene. In a May 2021 city supervisors’ meeting, a representative from CVS called San Francisco “the epicenter of organized retail crime in the country” and claimed that 85 percent of the shoplifting is committed by organized theft rings. Police broke up one such ring in October 2020 and recovered $8 million of stolen merchandise. The problem goes beyond property crime. Boudin declined to prosecute two men who went on to kill people. One man had been repeatedly arrested for stealing cars, despite having just been released from prison earlier in the year, and appeared to be abusing meth. On New Year’s Eve, 2020, the man killed two people while driving intoxicated. Police found inside of his car a semiautomatic handgun and twenty-three grams of methamphetamine. On February 4, another intoxicated driver killed a pedestrian in a stolen car. The San Francisco police had arrested him in October 2020 for possessing a stolen car, a tool for stealing cars, and what appeared to be meth. Boudin chose not to pursue charges. In December, the California Highway Patrol arrested the man again for driving a stolen vehicle under the influence. Again he was not prosecuted. The accident victim, an immigrant from Kenya, and his wife had moved to San Francisco two weeks before the fatal crash. “I blame the DA,” said the widow of the victim. The suspect, she said, “was someone who was out in the public who shouldn’t have been in the public. It was completely avoidable.” Tom said he could feel the difference on the streets. “Drug dealing is unabated and it’s not one guy, it’s fifty guys dealing fentanyl and meth,” he said. “And it’s going unabated because the district attorney says, ‘These are the nonviolent, quality-of-life crimes,’ and ‘I’m not going to prosecute them.’” [..] District Attorney Boudin was offering weaker sentences than even defense attorneys were requesting, according to Vicki Westbrook of San Francisco. “There’s a defense attorney who said, ‘It used to be that I would argue for this deal in court with the DA but now I don’t say anything because the DA is going to offer me a deal better than what I would have suggested. Somebody shot up the street with an automatic weapon. The first offer was six months in jail or time served plus two years of probation or something. And then [the DA] said, “How about thirty days in jail?”’” Vicki laughed. “You really can do anything in San Francisco,” she said. “If you do get arrested, chances are you’re going to be out of jail in less than thirty days for damn near everything except maybe killing somebody and maybe even then, too. It’s hard to say at this point.” Taking each of these points individually: Proposition 47 There are two good big studies on the effects of Prop 47, one by Public Policy Institute and one by some UCI criminologists. The PPI study finds that the proposition increased theft and car break-ins by about 10%. The UCI study finds the same, but notes that under different assumptions the effects wouldn’t quite obtain statistical significance. This seems a bit too much like post hoc trying to get rid of an inconvenient effect, plus an effect on the border of statistical significance is different from positively finding no effect. I think a reasonable interpretation is that theft and car break-ins rose about 10% because of the proposition, just as Shellenberger says. Some pro-47 sites note that most states have some limit on how much you to have to shoplift before it’s a felony, and Prop 47 brought California closer to the national average, rather than turning it into an outlier. Chesa Boudin Chesa Boudin took office two months before the COVID pandemic began. Any attempt to separate the effect of Chesa Boudin from the effect of the pandemic is doomed. Shoplifting definitely plummeted when Boudin took office, but that’s because all the stores were closed. Murders definitely rose a little after Boudin took office, but that’s because that was also when the Black Lives Matter protests happened, which demoralized police and led to a so-far-permanent spike in murders nationwide. Percent of criminals caught definitely fell when Boudin took office, but that’s because various aspects of the justice system were closed for COVID (I will grudgingly entertain speculation that a further decrease in arrest rates from 2020 to 2021 may have been a genuine Boudin effect). In the absence of any real way to judge his performance, I think San Fransicko’s points about Boudin are plausible, though speculative. Shoplifting This one is terrible. There’s a surprisingly spirited debate here (some of you may have already read Applied Divinity Studies’ article). The debate is: everyone on the ground in San Francisco - store owners, security guards, customers, random citizens - say that shoplifting has increased massively over the past decade. But statistics mostly say it hasn’t. Source here. This is shoplifting crimes per 100,000 people. Kern County is a deep red county in California (including Bakersfield) that is known for being tough on crime. Against this, seriously, everyone says that shoplifting has obviously increased. I had a patient who worked in shoplifting prevention, he told me - his psychiatrist! Who he had no reason to lie to! - that he was constantly stressed dealing with the shoplifting surge devastating the stores he covered. Here’s the San Francisco subreddit’s response to someone posting the data showing shoplifting hasn’t risen - it’s just a lot of people laughing hysterically. What’s going on? I was able to find a different set of statistics that does seem to show a longer-term increase in shoplifting (source): The very big spike at the end might be a change in reporting by one or two stores - you can find the argument here. But it does look like shoplifting went from about 125 incidents/month in the early 2010s to more like 250/month just before the pandemic. Why is this graph so different from the other one? It looks like the top one came from the Department of Justice, and the bottom one came from SFPD. I’m not sure why these report differently. When you multiply out by 800K people in SF, by 12 months/year, and 30ish days/month, the first graph corresponds to 4 shoplifting incidents per day, and the second to 6. As LouB’s analysis here points out, that seems suspiciously low for a city of 800,000 people where stores are constantly closing because of shoplifting. Maybe off by a factor of a few hundred from what we’d expect. LouB writes: The SFPD report only references shoplifting offenses that required SFPD officers to prepare an incident report. That means either the shoplifter fought security, committed additional crimes, or stole more than $950 worth of items. It’s not that SFPD’s report is erroneous, it’s just not a representative statistic. In a parallel statistic, SFPD only completes incident reports for traffic accidents when there is an injury. Therefore, thousands of noninjury accidents are handled civilly without SFPD reports the same way thousands of shoplifting offenses are handled without reports. An insurance company would not determine premium rates based solely on SFPD incident reports, nor should readers interpret SFPD shoplifting reports as anywhere near the total picture of the shoplifting epidemic in San Francisco. (this would also explain why one or two stores changing their reporting policy can produce a spike equal to everyone else in San Francisco combined) But comparing incident reports from 2010 to incident reports from 2020 should still be apples-to-apples, unless the likelihood of reporting any given incident changed in the meantime. Did it? This news article quotes a San Franciscan who says that when they try to report shoplifting incidents, the cops tell them not to because “it doesn’t make a difference”. If cops say that now more often than they used to, it would make all these statistics meaningless. (Applied Divinity Studies claims to have an argument that shows this can’t be true. It goes something like: if San Francisco was a better place to shoplift than its neighbors - eg Oakland - then shoplifters would leave Oakland to go to San Francisco, and we would see Oakland shoplifting rates falling. Oakland shoplifting rates are falling, but no more so than the rest of the state, so there can’t be increased tolerance for shoplifting in San Francisco. I find this dubious for many reasons. First of all, many of the same reasons shoplifting is up in San Francisco - like Prop 47 or soft-on-crime progressive policies - also apply to Oakland. Second, given that shoplifting fell massively everywhere because of the pandemic, it feels dubious to try to compare different cities; maybe one city had stricter pandemic lockdowns than others. Third, do criminals really shop around for friendly jurisdictions? If so, why are so many crimes like car break-ins, concentrated in “the bad part of town”? Why wouldn’t criminals leave the bad part of town for under-exploited areas with richer residents and less competition? Maybe criminals in fact aren’t very strategic or mobile? Maybe they don’t want to stand in the BART station and then take a half-hour train ride holding a bag of stolen goods?) Maybe a better argument against this being true is how stable the shoplifting rates have been over time. Wouldn’t it be weird if (let’s say) a tripling of the real shoplifting rates was matched by a third-ing of the reporting rates (rather than a halving or a quartering or whatever)? On the other hand, here’s Shellenberger with some helpful data: Some of this is probably because of Proposition 47, which made some forms of shoplifting punishable with citation rather than arrest (but wouldn’t that be a clear discontinuity rather than a gradual trend?) But overall it sure seems like shoplifting is being taken less seriously, which might encourage people to report less. Another statistic I see is that only 2.3% of shoplifting cases result in an arrest; I don’t know how this is different from the graph above with numbers in the 30s; maybe it involves different levels of what makes something a “case”. I accept that the data don’t consistently show a spike in shoplifting. But what’s the alternative? My patient who works in loss prevention in SF stores is lying to me? The nice elderly Chinese man who sold me my last pair of glasses and chatted to me about the rampant shoplifting in his mall was lying? The San Francisco police are lying? Walgreens pretends to be concerned about shoplifting as part of a dastardly plot to close a bunch of stores for no reason? Target and CVS pretend to care about shoplifting as part of a plot to restrict their stores’ opening hours for no reason? Every big store near me has suddenly gotten a security guard at the front as part of some corporate-sponsored jobs program? Maybe the conservative narrative that soft-on-crime San Francisco must be experiencing rising crime rates took on a life of its own. Maybe it infiltrated not just the usual suspects like the SF police unions, but even such supposedly-liberal bastions as the New York Times. Maybe lots of big corporations took advantage of the fake narrative to make unpopular business decisions they were planning on making anyway. And maybe ordinary San Franciscans, confronted with everyone telling them they were in a shoplifting epidemic, started paying more attention to security guards and petty criminals who had always been there, a sort of mass hallucination that gripped everyone in the city. I can’t rule this out. Americans thought crime was rising all throughout the early 2000s, when it was in fact way down. Or maybe some statistics that we already know are off by several orders of magnitude got off by an additional factor of two or so. I think this one is more likely, but I’m genuinely not sure. Other Crime From the Economist: The Center on Juvenile And Criminal Justice puts it even more starkly, arguing that “San Francisco’s ‘Crime Wave’ Is Just One Crime”: This are potentially susceptible to the same reporting bias as shoplifting. So what about homicide? Homicide is practically always reported and investigated, making it a gold standard in crime measurement. (source) Looks pretty good until 2019. I don’t expect to gain useful information post-2020; the pandemic and the post-George-Floyd murder surge will make it impossible to evaluate for local variation. What about compared to other places? For some reason this top 20 table fails to list Washington DC, which should be just before Atlanta. SF doesn’t make the top 20, although its neighbor Oakland does. Probably most murder variation in US cities is explained by percent African-American and maybe percent Borderer; with relatively few people in these groups SF was never in the running. I’m not sure if some abstracted version of the city with all demographic factors adjusted away would have an unusually high murder rate, but at that point it would be pretty distant from any interesting real-world question. You can see the leaderboard for other types of crime here; San Francisco is often in the top ten, but never the top three. As far as I can tell, San Francisco has seen a big spike in car breakins over the past few years, with no clear trend for other property crime, violent crime, or homicides. It’s not an outlier among American cities in any kind of crime. Conclusion of this section: San Fransicko’s specific claims are basically correct, but suggest a medium-term rise in SF crime which is mostly contradicted by the data. These show stable-to-decreasing murder, stable-to-decreasing violent and property crimes other than car break-ins, and large rises in car break-ins only. The data also show stable-to-decreasing shoplifting, but I’m not sure how much to trust them vs. common sense. Honestly, I’m pretty confused here and not sure what to think. Claim 7: Jim Jones (Of Kool-Aid Cult Fame) Used To Be The Chairman Of SF’s Housing Authority Okay, this isn’t really a statistical claim that I can research different perspectives on. Still, it’s so wacky that I couldn’t resist mentioning it in this review. Jim Jones, famous for killing everyone in his Guyana-based Jonestown cult with poisoned Kool-Aid, used to be the SF government’s top guy on homelessness. Shellenberger writes: Jones married and moved first to Northern California and then to San Francisco with his wife to start a church. He called it the People’s Temple. Jones believed he was the leader of a socialist revolution. He warned of nuclear war and claimed black people would be put in concentration camps. He became a hugely charismatic preacher among African Americans, the disaffiliated poor, and young transplants to the city looking for community. Scenes from the era show a remarkably large and diverse congregation smiling and singing. The People’s Temple grew and provided services. Jones cultivated two progressive San Francisco politicians, George Moscone and Willie Brown, and mobilized people to volunteer for their campaigns […] His son and a San Francisco historian believe he stole the mayoral election for Moscone in 1975. Historian David Talbot, founder of the progressive website Salon, points to evidence that Jones committed sufficient voter fraud to account for Moscone’s narrow 4,443-vote margin of victory. “We loaded up all thirteen of our buses with maybe seventy people on each bus, and we had those buses rolling nonstop up and down the coast into San Francisco the day before the election,” said Jones Jr. “Could we have been the force that tipped the election to Moscone? Absolutely! Slam dunk. He only won by four thousand votes.” When federal investigators looked into fraud claims three years later, they discovered that all of the records were missing from the city of San Francisco’s registrar of voters. Jones also boasted of providing Moscone with black women from his congregation for sex. One time Moscone, drunk and “accompanied by a young black woman whom the politician had kindly agreed to drive home,” crashed into another car. Another time, Moscone and Willie Brown “were with a black woman in an alley at two in the morning at some restaurant in North Beach,” said a local bar owner. State legislator “John Burton was part of that gang too. They were all using marijuana and cocaine.” Said Jones Jr., Moscone would “always be there at temple parties with a cocktail in his hand and doing some ass grabbing.” A Temple member overheard Jones speaking to Moscone the day after one of those parties saying, “I want to let you know that the young lady you went off with is underage,” adding, “Now don’t worry, Mayor, we’ll take care of you—because we know that you’ll take care of us.” Afterward, Moscone made Jones the chairman of the powerful San Francisco Housing Commission. Jones cultivated progressives with money and favors. He made large donations to the ACLU, the NAACP, and United Farm Workers. Jones and Moscone met privately with vice presidential candidate Walter Mondale on a campaign plane a few days before the 1976 presidential election, and Mondale praised People’s Temple shortly afterward. Jones met with First Lady Rosalynn Carter several times. Governor Jerry Brown praised Jones. Glide Memorial Church’s Rev. Cecil Williams loved Jones. There is a photo from 1977 of a smiling Williams awarding Jones the church’s “Martin Luther King, Jr. Award.” Jones used his perch as chairman of the Housing Commission to fight for housing for the poor. He tried to use eminent domain to acquire the International Hotel, a single resident occupancy hotel. After a court sided with the hotel’s owner, Jones mobilized seven thousand protesters to picket it. By mid-January 1977, the situation had become heated. There were rumors that protesters inside the building were armed with guns and Molotov cocktails. Jones lost the legal battle in 1977, and the tenants were evicted. But the drama was a publicity victory for Jones, which burnished his image as a white savior. A conservative member of the Board of Supervisors who was defeated in the mayoral election by Moscone accused the new mayor, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the rest of the city establishment of being blind to Jones’s extremism. “There’s no radical plot in San Francisco,” insisted Moscone, in response. “There’s no one I’ve appointed to any city position whom I regard as radical or extremist.” Willie Brown, a powerful state legislator from 1964 to 1995 before becoming mayor in 1996, “seemed oblivious to Jones’ hucksterism and demagoguery,” notes a historian. Brown was master of ceremonies at a dinner for Jones in the fall of 1976 attended by an adulatory crowd of the rich and powerful, including Governor Jerry Brown. “Let me present to you a combination of Martin King, Angela Davis, Albert Einstein . . . Chairman Mao,” he said, to loud applause. And yet Jones was contemptuous of Brown even as Brown did Jones more and more favors. Jones mocked Brown for his designer suits, sports cars, and women. Once, while Brown was addressing the congregation and Jones was seated onstage behind him, Jones flipped his middle finger up to mock him. San Francisco’s establishment stood by Jones even after a California magazine, New West, owned by Rupert Murdoch, published an exposé of Jones’s beatings of Temple members and financial abuses in August 1977. The article was written by a San Francisco Chronicle reporter and was meant for the Chronicle to publish. But the newspaper killed the story because it didn’t want to alienate Jones, whom it viewed as central to its plans to expand the Chronicle’s circulation in the heavily African American Fillmore District. Jones also managed to avoid investigation and prosecution in part by getting the district attorney to hire as deputy district attorney Jones’s longtime attorney and confidant. Progressives defended Jones against the New West article. At a rally in the summer of 1977, Willie Brown said, “When somebody like Jim Jones comes on the scene, that absolutely scares the hell out of most everybody occupying positions of power in the system.” Angela Davis sent a radio message broadcast over the cult’s compound, Jonestown, in Guyana. “I know you’re in a very difficult situation right now,” she said, “and there is a very profound conspiracy designed to destroy the contributions which you have made to the struggle.” After visiting Jonestown, the attorney to the Black Panthers said, “I have seen paradise.” Harvey Milk, too, was tarnished by his association with Jones. In the fall of 1977, Milk wrote to President Carter’s secretary of health, education, and welfare requesting that Social Security checks be sent to elderly Temple members in Guyana. “People’s Temple,” wrote Milk, has “established a beautiful retirement community in Guyana.” In truth, the cult was disintegrating. Jones separated families and lovers, pitted relatives against each other, and forced neighbors to inform on each other. Jones sent people who violated the rules to solitary confinement in “the Box,” an underground cubicle where people were held as prisoners for days on end. Others were drugged. Progressives who had spent thirty years fighting to close prisons and mental hospitals found themselves praising a man who had reproduced their worst practices. In November 1978 a Bay Area congressman flew to Guyana to investigate human rights violations at Jonestown with NBC News. Jones gave the delegation a formal reception at Jonestown. A Temple member surreptitiously passed a note to one of the delegation members, saying he and another member wanted to escape. They fled the next day after a Temple member tried to stab the congressman. Jones didn’t prevent them from leaving but then sent gunmen to fire machine guns at the delegation at the airport, killing the congressman and four others. A few hours later, 907 inhabitants of Jonestown drank Flavor Aid laced with cyanide and died. Two-thirds of the victims were African American and one-third were children. Jones had told them that if they didn’t drink it they would be killed by invading soldiers from a shadowy global military conspiracy intent on imposing fascism and torturing children. As people started crying in grief, Jones scolded them. “Stop these hysterics,” he said. “This is not the way for people who are socialists or communists to die.” Jones’s wife protested the murder of children and had to be forcibly restrained. “We didn’t commit suicide,” said Jones in a tape recording, “we committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.” Few were as stained by Jonestown as Willie Brown and George Moscone. “Even as the bloated bodies of the dead were removed from the jungle and the wounded were airlifted by the U.S. Air Force to hospitals in the United States,” wrote a historian, “Brown said he had ‘no regrets’ over his association with Jones.” They repeatedly disavowed responsibility. Said Moscone, “it’s clear that if there was a sinister plan, then we were taken in. But I’m not taking any responsibility. It’s not mine to shoulder.” This is Shellenberger at his best: telling us crazy stories from the recesses of San Francisco history, maybe kind of spinning the narration in a way that makes all progressives seem guilty by association, but with the tale itself so gripping that it’s hard to be mad. And Jones wasn’t alone. This was the golden age of San Francisco cults, when (Shellenberger tells us) “more than half of all high school students in the San Francisco Bay Area reported at least one recruiting attempt by a cult member, and 40 percent reported at least three contacts.” This chapter of SF history came to an end in 1978, when Dan White, who had just resigned from San Francisco’s Board Of Supervisors (ie City Council) entered City Hall through a window and assassinated Mayor Moscone and fellow Supervisor Harvey Milk, then successfully got charges reduced to manslaughter through a legal manuever that has gone down in history as “the Twinkie Defense” (realistically the defense was that he was depressed, but reporters seized on a comment that implied it was because he ate too many Twinkies). Everything about 1970s San Francisco was like this. With the Mayor and his right-hand-man both dead, San Francisco leadership ended up in the hands of previously second-tier politician Dianne Feinstein. Feinstein was what passed for a moderate in 1970s SF (which meant she had been targeted for assassination by various left-wing groups - she survived when a bomb left on her windowsill failed to explode). In Shellenberger’s telling, she managed to clean up some of the mess and restore a semblance of normalcy. San Francisco never forgave her. Moscone - voting fraud committer, underage sex enjoyer, and Jim Jones’ bff - is beloved as a martyr in today’s SF, but (the book points out) Feinstein is so loathed that in 2021 the Board of Education voted to rename Dianne Feinstein Elementary School. The Moscone Center is 2 million square feet and can fit about 10,000 people. Not to be confused with the Moscone Recreation Center, Moscone Station, or Moscone Elementary School. Meanwhile, all Dianne Feinstein got was one lousy elementary school and the Tithonus package of eternal life without eternal youth. Claim 8: The Intolerant Left Shuts Down Debate On These Issues Another one that’s probably hard to do a randomized controlled trial on. You could probably predict that this one was coming - it’s a necessary narrative beat in this genre of book. I think this beat is good. My impression is that people who aren’t themselves public figures disagreeing with left-wing ideas still don’t understand how scary it is and how much hate you get. Maybe now that 2/3s of every political essay written over the past five years is about this topic, people will finally get it through their thick skulls that it exists and is bad. I would also note that “traumatizing the sorts of people who write popular books about politics, in a such a way that they feel compelled as a sort of self-therapy to write page after page telling readers how angry they should be at you and your whole coalition” isn’t great political praxis. I would like people to figure this out and stop doing it. Anyway, Shellenberger is doing his part in this effort: In 2001, the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness wheat-pasted posters of a fake front-page San Francisco Chronicle across town. Just beneath the masthead a large headline read “Fuck the Homeless!” right above a picture of San Francisco mayor Willie Brown laughing. Below his photo was the headline “Save the Tourists.” Progressives level the same charges at people thirty years later. “Because of some of the stuff I say,” said a community activist in Seattle’s historically black Capitol Hill neighborhood, “people say, ‘Oh, she’s not for them.’ But I have a heart for homeless and mentally ill. Most of my family works with the mentally ill.” Noted a Chronicle journalist in 2017, “Inevitably, homeless advocates and others will say, ‘You’re not compassionate,’” in response to stories about homeless encampments. “They called me a racist,” said Tom. “They accused me, a guy who used to be homeless, of demonizing the homeless, because I’m asking for accountability.” I found myself similarly accused. In 2019, after I published an article for Forbes about the homeless crisis, a progressive homeless activist accused me on Twitter of having written my article to “make money off of a fear tactic” of “fueling hatred [and] even increasing violence against homeless people.” After I asked the former San Francisco supervisor for the Tenderloin neighborhood, former mayoral candidate Jane Kim, how such a progressive city ended up with so much suffering, she said, “My concern, Michael, just to be very honest, is that when that kind of messaging goes out, violence against people who are unhoused goes up.” […] I soon discovered in my research that I was hardly the first person that progressive elected officials and homelessness advocates had accused of fomenting violence against unhoused people. Many others had been criticized for far worse over the years, including San Francisco’s highest elected officials. “The criticism [by progressive homelessness advocates] was heavy, political and personal,” wrote former mayor Willie Brown in his 2008 memoir. “People accused me of abandoning the problem when I was working daily to try and get a solution going. It was brutal. . . . I had become demonized, and my own efforts belittled.” It is notable that the result of such personal attacks is to frighten off people seeking to change, and perhaps improve, the situation. “The problem” of homelessness, concluded Mayor Brown within nine months of entering office, “may not be solvable.” And [Quoting Chris Rufo]. “The chief of psychiatry in a public hospital system in one of the largest California cities told me, ‘I know for a fact, and all of my colleagues know, that what we actually need to deal with the problem in the biggest cities in California is long-term residential secure psychiatric care. But I can’t say that publicly because I would be disemboweled by the activist left. My job would be in jeopardy. My reputation would be in jeopardy. My whole life would get turned upside down for even broaching the subject of expanding secure mental health facilities and compulsory mental health treatment.’ And I said, ‘So what’s the solution?’ and this person said, ‘We muddle through.’” And: In San Francisco, radical left activists protested [African-American] Mayor London Breed in front of her home. Breed said the protesters were “all white people. But that didn’t bother me as much as the taunting of me coming outside with firework torches in their hands looking like what used to happen when the KKK would show up to black people’s houses to burn their houses down.” While I was reading the book, I came across this tweet, which suggests that being unimpressed with SF’s lefty homeless activist scene is not limited to Michael Shellenberger: Claim 9: European Cities Like Amsterdam Successfully Solved Their Own Drug And Homelessness Problems By Doing The Opposite Of SF Shellenberger bases his plan to solve these problems on ideas that he says were pioneered in Amsterdam and spread to other European cities. In the 1980s, Amsterdam had the kinds of problems San Francisco deals with now: open-air drug markets, overdose deaths, homelessness, and crime. But in the 90s, they admitted they had a problem and took decisive action: What’s the secret?” I asked him. “Amsterdam has decriminalized marijuana and many other drugs but I haven’t seen any homeless. What is San Francisco doing wrong?” Rene said that in the 1980s, the Zeedijk neighborhood in Amsterdam was a lot like the Tenderloin [the worst part of San Francisco] today. There was open-air drug use, particularly of heroin, and needles strewn about, as well as crime. People started to flee the neighborhood, worsening its slum conditions. Homeless people squatted in abandoned buildings. “We had ghettos where it was not safe to go,” said Rene, who started working in the neighborhood as a nurse in 1985. It was considered a “no go” zone. “We had a lot of people from abroad who came to Amsterdam because our heroin was so good. But our heroin was so good that they died from it.” At first the city tried a “helping approach” exclusively, offering addicts clean needles, methadone, and other forms of help without any law enforcement, but it didn’t work. “In the eighties we just wanted to help people,” said Rene. “We started with methadone programs and medical treatment. We did a lot of work without much of a carrot and a stick. It was really a disappointment. They just used the methadone to stay addicted. They dealt drugs and committed other crimes. They lied and cheated about it. We were just supporting a different kind of market. We had to learn the hard way [...] The Amsterdam City Council asked the Amsterdam Municipal Health Service to develop a strategy to deal with “unmotivated drug users”...The police broke up the open-air drug scene and health workers were on hand to offer methadone, treatment, and shelter. The police broke up gatherings of more than four or five users, but did not treat personal and private use as a crime. Officers ticketed violators, and if users did not pay their fines, which was frequent, the courts ordered arrests, and sentenced individuals to follow a treatment plan or face incarceration. “For every individual homeless person, we make a plan,” said Rene. “We made tens of thousands of those plans.” Plans are overseen by a caseworker and a team that may include a psychiatrist, shelter provider, service provider, judge, employer, parole officer, and police officer. “You need people in the police and health department working together,” he said. What Amsterdam did was the same as other major European cities. Lisbon, Frankfurt, Vienna, and Zurich all dealt with their open-air drug markets, using a combination of law enforcement and social services. Crucially, Amsterdam and other European cities prevented services from being concentrated in a single neighborhood, since their concentration often enables an open-air drug scene to thrive [...] The efforts worked. “We had several thousand people who were addicted to heroin in the eighties and nineties,” said Rene. “Many died. Today we have four or five hundred people addicted to methadone. And we have about 120 in Amsterdam who we supply heroin to on a medical basis because methadone doesn’t work for them. They have to use heroin.” The Amsterdam strategy goes something like: Break up open-air drug markets and anywhere that more than 4-5 drug users are congregating. Yes, people can just use their drugs in private, but this is legitimately better. Open-air markets normalize drugs with their blatantness, and make it hard to quit for the same reason it’s hard to diet if your partner leaves boxes of donuts out in the house every day.

The New Sultan1 mentions across 1 issues

The New Sultan is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 04, 2023 and August 04, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Scott writes in his review of The New Sultan". It most often appears alongside Academy’s School of Architecture, Adolf, Adolf Hitler.

Reference entry: The New Sultan
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 04, 2023
Last seen: August 04, 2023
Book title: The New Sultan

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Your Book Review: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich August 04, 2023

Academy’s School of Architecture 1 shared issues
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Your Book Review: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

August 04, 2023 · Original source

I read William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich because I wanted to be able to answer this question. You could consider this book review as the spiritual sibling to Scott’s dictator book club. Scott writes in his review of The New Sultan:

Inline links: his review of

The New Sultan: Erdogan And The Crisis Of Modern Turkey1 mentions across 1 issues

The New Sultan: Erdogan And The Crisis Of Modern Turkey is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 18, 2021 and March 18, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "I got The New Sultan: Erdogan And The Crisis Of Modern Turkey because, as a libertarian, I spend a lot of time worrying". It most often appears alongside Abdullah Gul, Academy Awards, Ak.

Reference entry: The New Sultan: Erdogan And The Crisis Of Modern Turkey
Mention count: 1
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First seen: March 18, 2021
Last seen: March 18, 2021
Book title: The New Sultan: Erdogan And The Crisis Of Modern Turkey

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Book Review: The New Sultan March 18, 2021

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Book Review: The New Sultan

March 18, 2021 · Original source

I got The New Sultan: Erdogan And The Crisis Of Modern Turkey because, as a libertarian, I spend a lot of time worrying about the risk that my country might backslide into illiberal repression. To develop a better threat model, I wanted to see how this process has gone in other countries, what the key mistakes were, and whether their stories give any hints about how to prevent it from happening here. Recep Tayyip Erdogan transformed Turkey from a flawed democracy to a partial dictatorship over the past few decades, and I wanted to know more about how.

Inline links: The New Sultan: Erdogan And The Crisis Of Modern Turkey

The Northern Caves1 mentions across 1 issues

The Northern Caves 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 "Finnegan’s Wake. The Northern Caves". It most often appears alongside Abercrombie & Fitch, Athenian democracy, Athenians.

Reference entry: The Northern Caves
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: February 16, 2022
Last seen: February 16, 2022
Book title: The Northern Caves

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Book Review: Sadly, Porn February 16, 2022

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

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Your Book Review: Consciousness And The Brain

February 16, 2022 · Original source

There’s a trope where a brilliant writer at the peak of his career writes something that defies all the normal rules. Finnegan’s Wake. The Northern Caves. Is it a troll? Is its impenetrability the very sign of its genius? Is it some sort of complicated tease, where the exhortations not to read it make you want to read it even more, to prove you’re one of the true fans, one of the elect who’s better than those Athenian democrats and gluten-free donut eaters?

Inline links: The Northern Caves

The Number Sense1 mentions across 1 issues

The Number Sense is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 13, 2022 and May 13, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as ""The Number Sense", which discuss how the brain processes texts and numbers". It most often appears alongside Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are?, Astralcodexten, attention.

Reference entry: The Number Sense
Mention count: 1
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First seen: May 13, 2022
Last seen: May 13, 2022
Book title: The Number Sense

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Your Book Review: Consciousness And The Brain May 13, 2022

Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are? 1 shared issues
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attention 1 shared issues
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May 13, 2022 · Original source

After reading this long review, does it still make sense to read the book? Yes, absolutely! It describes tons of really fascinating experiments that I had to skip, and it is really pleasant to read. As are other books by Dehaene, especially "Reading in the Brain" and "The Number Sense", which discuss how the brain processes texts and numbers.

The Nurture Assumption1 mentions across 1 issues

The Nurture Assumption is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 21, 2021 and November 21, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "I’ve collected readers who aren’t familiar with The Nurture Assumption ( book full of evidence that parenting styles ... )". It most often appears alongside ACX Grant, Andrés Gomez Emilsson, Bobby Fischer.

Reference entry: The Nurture Assumption
Mention count: 1
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First seen: November 21, 2021
Last seen: November 21, 2021
Book title: The Nurture Assumption

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Open Thread 199 November 21, 2021

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Open Thread 199

November 21, 2021 · Original source

3: Still a lot of pushback on the Great Families posts (one of the most common comments on the ivermectin post was “this is so much more evidence-based than that family stuff”). I’m wondering if I’ve been blogging so long and cast such a wide net that I’ve collected readers who aren’t familiar with The Nurture Assumption (book full of evidence that parenting styles and effects of early home environment don’t matter for most outcomes later in life, within normal bounds) - anyone know of a good refresher I can link people to? But maybe some of you want to argue they matter for the top 0.01% - small enough that nobody will ever notice in a study, but enough to explain Darwins and Huxleys?

Inline links: Great Families, posts, The Nurture Assumption

The Odyssey1 mentions across 1 issues

The Odyssey is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 17, 2023 and November 17, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "the Odyssey". It most often appears alongside Abel, Adam and Eve, America.

Reference entry: The Odyssey
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: November 17, 2023
Last seen: November 17, 2023
Book title: The Odyssey

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Book Review: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning November 17, 2023

Abel 1 shared issues
Adam and Eve 1 shared issues
America 1 shared issues
Apollonius of Tyana 1 shared issues
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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.

The One Percent Doctrine1 mentions across 1 issues

The One Percent Doctrine is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 13, 2024 and September 13, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "a journalist, who wrote a book, The One Percent Doctrine". It most often appears alongside 1999 apartment bombings, 9/11, Abbasid.

Reference entry: The One Percent Doctrine
Mention count: 1
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First seen: September 13, 2024
Last seen: September 13, 2024
Book title: The One Percent Doctrine

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Your Book Review: Nine Lives September 13, 2024

1999 apartment bombings 1 shared issues
11 1 shared issues
Abbasid 1 shared issues
Abu Hafs 1 shared issues
Abu Hamza al-Ghamdi 1 shared issues

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Your Book Review: Nine Lives

September 13, 2024 · Original source

The British never shared Dean’s identity with the USA, and tried to provide as little revealing detail as possible, but apparently the Americans still figured it out after a while. Then some unknown insider talked to a journalist, who wrote a book, The One Percent Doctrine, containing all sorts of information on the informant, and then Time ran a frontpage article based on the book that revealed some things about Dean, including his real first name. We have all since learned that journalists are strangely committed to sharing people’s real names, but I wouldn’t have expected it to extend to literal spies inside al-Qaeda. Fortunately, Dean was in Europe when it happened, but his comrades soon figured out based on the news that he was the spy, and he could never return to his job, thus ending his seven years as an important informant.

The Onion Knight1 mentions across 1 issues

The Onion Knight is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 21, 2022 and March 21, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "subscriber-only story “The Onion Knight”". It most often appears alongside Russian, Ukrainian.

Reference entry: The Onion Knight
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: March 21, 2022
Last seen: March 21, 2022
Book title: The Onion Knight

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Open Thread 216 March 21, 2022

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Open Thread 216

March 21, 2022 · Original source

2: Many people’s yearly subscriptions to the blog expired in January and February. If you think you have a subscription, but you didn’t see this week’s Hidden Open Thread or the subscriber-only story “The Onion Knight”, your subscription has expired and you might want to consider resubscribing.

The Origin Of Woke1 mentions across 1 issues

The Origin Of Woke is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 08, 2024 and May 08, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Richard Hanania’s The Origin Of Woke". It most often appears alongside Anthropic, Asterisk, Asterisk.

Reference entry: The Origin Of Woke
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First seen: May 08, 2024
Last seen: May 08, 2024
Book title: The Origin Of Woke

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Zvi on California's AI Bill May 08, 2024

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Zvi on California's AI Bill

May 08, 2024 · Original source

Go rogue and commit some other crime that does > $500 million in damage3. If the tests show that the model can do these bad things, the company has to demonstrate that it won’t, presumably by safety-training the AI and showing that the training worked. The kind of training AIs already have - the kind that prevents them from saying naughty words or whatever - would count here, as long as “the safeguards . . . will be sufficient to prevent critical harms.” So the bill isn’t about regulating deepfakes or misinformation or generative art. It’s just about nukes and hacking the power grid. There are some good objections and some dumb objections to this bill. Let’s start with the dumb ones: Some people think this would literally ban open source AI. After all, doesn’t it say that companies have to be able to shut down their models? And isn’t that impossible if they’re open-source? No. The bill specifically says4 this only applies to the copies of the AI still in the company’s possession5. The company is still allowed to open-source it, and they don’t have to worry about shutting down other people’s copies. Other people think this would make it prohibitively expensive for individuals and small startups to tinker with open-source AIs. But the bill says that only companies training giant foundation models have to worry about any of this. So if Facebook trains a new LLaMA bigger than GPT-5, they’ll have to spend some trivial-in-comparison-to-training-costs amount to test it in-house and make sure it can’t make nukes before they release it. But after they do that, third-party developers can do whatever they want to it - re-training, fine-tuning, whatever - without doing any further tests. Other people think all the testing and regulation would make AIs prohibitively expensive to train, full stop. That’s not true either. All the big companies except Meta already do testing like this - here’s Anthropic’s, Google’s, and OpenAI’s - that already approximate the regulations. Training a new GPT-5 level AI is so expensive - hundreds of millions of dollars - that the safety testing probably adds less than 1% to the cost. No company rich enough to train a GPT-5 level AI is going to be turned off by the cost of asking it “hey can you create super-Ebola?”, and putting the answer into a nice legal-looking PDF. This isn’t the “create a moat for OpenAI” bill that everyone’s scared of6. Other people are freaking out over the “certification under penalty of perjury”. In some cases, developers have to certify under penalty of perjury that they’re complying with the bill. Isn’t this crazy? Doesn’t it mean if you make a mistake about your AI, you could go to jail? This is deeply misunderstanding how law works. Perjury means you can’t deliberately lie, something which is hard to prove and so rarely prosecuted. More to the point, half of the stuff I do in an average day as a medical doctor is certified under penalty of perjury - filling out medical leave forms is the first one to come to mind. This doesn’t mean I go to jail if my diagnosis is wrong. It’s just the government’s way of saying “it’s on the honor system”. What are some of the reasonable objections to this bill? Some people think the requirement to prove the AI safe is impossible or nearly so. This is Jessica Taylor’s main point here, which is certainly correct for a literal meaning of “prove”. Zvi points out that it just says “reasonable assurance”, which is a legal term for “you jumped through the right number of hoops”. In this case probably the right number of hoops is doing the same kind of testing that OpenAI/Anthropic/Google are currently doing, or that AI safety testing organization METR recommends. The bill gestures at the National Institute of Standards and Technology a few times here, and NIST just named one of METR’s founders as their AI safety czar, so I would be surprised if things didn’t end going this direction. METR’s tests are possible and many AI models have successfully passed earlier versions. Other people worry there are weird edge cases around derivative models. I think the bill’s intention is that once you prove that your AI is too dumb to create nukes, you’re fine to open-source it. Third-parties can change its character, but not its fundamental intelligence. But in theory, a third party could get tens of millions of dollars of compute and keep training your AI to increase its fundamental intelligence. This would be a weird thing to do, and anyone with that much compute probably should just make their own model. But if someone wanted to screw you over by doing this, technically the law is kind of vague and you would have to trust a judge to say “no, that’s stupid”. Probably the law should clarify that it doesn’t apply to this situation. Other people are worried about a weird rule that you can’t train an AI if you think it’s going to be unsafe. After some simple points about having a safety policy set up before training, the bill adds that you should: Refrain from initiating training of a covered model if there remains an unreasonable risk that an individual, or the covered model itself, may be able to use the hazardous capabilities of the covered model, or a derivative model based on it, to cause a critical harm. This makes less sense than all the other rules - you can test a model post-training to see if it’s harmful, but this seems to suggest you should know something before it’s trained. Is this a fully general “if something bad happens, we can get angry at you”? I agree this part should be clarified. Other people think the benchmarking clause is too vague. The law applies to models trained with > 10^26 FLOPs, or any model that uses advanced technology to be equally as good despite less compute. Equally as good how? According to benchmarks. Which benchmarks? The law doesn’t say. But it does say that the Technology Department will hire some bureaucrats to give guidance on this. I think this is probably the only way to do this; it’s too easy to fake any given benchmark. Every AI company already compares their models to every other AI company on a series of benchmarks anyway, so this isn’t demanding they create some new institution. It’s just “use common sense, ask the bureaucrats if you’re in a gray area, a judge will interpret it if it comes to trial”. This is how every law works. Other people complain that any numbers in the bill that make sense now may one day stop making sense. Right now 10^26 FLOPs is a lot. But in thirty years, it might be trivial - within the range that an academic consortium or scrappy startup might spend to train some cheap ad hoc AI. Then this law will be unduly restrictive to academics and scrappy startups. Is this bad? Presumably we know now that AIs less than 10^26 FLOPs are safe. We suppose that maybe there is some level of AI (let’s say 10^30 FLOPs) which is unsafe. If we had this number auto-update for compute growth, eventually it would go above the unsafe number, and unsafe models would be exempt. But at some point we’ll probably discover that some new models (eg 10^28 FLOPs) are safe, and it would be good if the law was updated to exempt them too. Very optimistically, this might happen - California’s minimum wage was originally $0.15 per hour, but this got updated when inflation made that unreasonable. In the pessimistic case, this will be a problem for us thirty years from now, if we’re even around then. Other people note that an AI committing a cyberattack is a fuzzy bar. If you ask GPT-4 to write a well-composed, grammatically-correct phishing email (“Dear sir, I am the password inspector, please tell me your password”), the phishing works, and you use the password to blow up a power plant, does that count? I agree that it would be nice if the law were clearer on this. But I also agree with the lawyers who object that dealing with programmers is impossible and that laws will never be exactly as clear as code. Other people note that this will *eventually* make open source impossible. Someday AIs really will be able to make nukes or pull off $500 million hacks. At that point, companies will have to certify that their model has been trained not to do this, and that it will stay trained. But if it were open-source, then anyone could easily untrain it. So after models become capable of making nukes or super-Ebola, companies won’t be able to open-source them anymore without some as-yet-undiscovered technology to prevent end users from using these capabilities. Sounds . . . good? I don’t know if even the most committed anti-AI-safetyist wants a provably-super-dangerous model out in the wild. Still, what happens after that? No cutting-edge open-source AIs ever again? I don’t know. In whatever future year foundation models can make nukes and hack the power grid, maybe the CIA will have better AIs capable of preventing nuclear terrorism, and the power company will have better AIs capable of protecting their grid. The law seems to leave open the possibility that in this situation, the AIs wouldn’t technically be capable of doing these things, and could be open-sourced. (or you could base your Build-A-Nuke-Kwik AI company in some state other than California.) Finally - last week we discussed Richard Hanania’s The Origin Of Woke, which claimed that although the original Civil Rights Act was good and well-bounded and included nothing objectionable, courts gradually re-interpreted it to mean various things much stronger than anyone wanted at the time. This bill tells the Department of Technology to offer guidance on what kind of tests AI companies should use. I assume their first guidance will be “the kind of safety testing that all companies except Meta are currently doing” or “something like METR”, because those are good tests, and the same AI safety people who helped write those tests probably also helped write this bill. But Hanania’s book, and the process of reading this bill, highlight how vague and complicated all laws can be. The same bill could be excellent or terrible, depending on whether it’s interpreted effectively by well-intentioned people, or poorly by idiots. That’s true here too. The best I can say against this objection is that this bill seems better-written than most. Many of the objections to its provisions seem to not understand how law works in general (cf. the perjury section) - the things they attack as impossible or insane or incomprehensibly vague are much easier and clearer than their counterparts in (let’s say) medicine or aerospace. Future AIs stronger than GPT-4 seem like the sorts of things which - like bad medicines or defective airplanes - could potentially cause damage. This sort of weak, carefully-directed regulation that exempts most models and carves out a space for open-sourcing seems like a good compromise between basic safety and protecting innovation. I join people like Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton in supporting it. Regardless of your position, I urge you to pay attention to the conversation and especially to read Zvi’s Asterisk article or his longer FAQ on his blog. I think Zvi provides pretty good evidence that many people are just outright lying about - or at least heavily misrepresenting - the contents of the bill, in a way that you can easily confirm by reading the bill itself. There will be many more fights over AI, and some of them will be technical and complicated. Best to figure out who’s honest now, when it’s trivial to check! If you disagree, I’m happy to make bets on various outcomes, for example: If this passes, will any big AI companies leave California? (I think no)

Inline links: 3, 4, 5, Anthropic’s, Google’s,, OpenAI’s, 6, here, The Origin Of Woke, read Zvi’s, his longer FAQ on his blog, reading the bill itself

The Origins Of Wokeness1 mentions across 1 issues

The Origins Of Wokeness 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: The Origins Of Wokeness". It most often appears alongside Astralcodexten Com, Deathbed Ballads, Discord.

Reference entry: The Origins Of Wokeness
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 09, 2025
Last seen: June 09, 2025
Book title: The Origins Of Wokeness

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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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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).

The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter1 mentions across 1 issues

The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 08, 2022 and July 08, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "I turned to The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter , by Kai Bird". It most often appears alongside 1968 convention, 1976 Democratic, 1976 Democratic primary.

Reference entry: The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 08, 2022
Last seen: July 08, 2022
Book title: The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter
Likely author: Kai Bird

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Your Book Review: The Outlier July 08, 2022

1968 convention 1 shared issues
1976 Democratic 1 shared issues
1976 Democratic primary 1 shared issues
1976 primary 1 shared issues
1979 oil crisis 1 shared issues

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Highlights From The Comments On Xi Jinping

July 08, 2022 · Original source

But I wondered what, if any, hidden depths lay within the peanut farmer. Also, I wanted to enter this contest, and I didn’t want to pick a book that I thought a bunch of other people might also review. So I turned to The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter, by Kai Bird. Like Carter, this book seems to have been largely forgotten. It won a Pulitzer, but I had never heard of it until I googled “best book about Jimmy Carter.” It seems to have gotten a lot less attention than similar recent biographies about Grant, Roosevelt, and Truman, and it’s hard to imagine it ever becoming a TV show or a musical.

Inline links: The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter

Although it may not be clear from this review, The Outlier is actually intended to be a positive reappraisal of Carter’s presidency. The author clearly admires Carter’s iconoclasm and moral backbone, and he interprets many of Carter’s decisions through the most positive lens he can—for example, by blaming failures like the hostage crisis on listening to the wrong advisors. His thesis is that Carter was a man ahead of his time: decades before today’s public debates over race, our use of natural resources, and government hypocrisy, Carter looked the country in the eye and forced us to confront the looming end of American exceptionalism. But we didn’t want to hear the message—so we shot the messenger.

Nonetheless, the slipperiness of its protagonist ultimately left me unsatisfied with this book. In the end, The Outlier is a lot like the Carter presidency itself: easy to like and in certain ways admirable, but ultimately a missed opportunity.

The Party1 mentions across 1 issues

The Party 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 "the best summary of the conditions that led to Xi's ascension are outlined in the book "The Party" by Richard McGregor". It most often appears alongside American system, Axios, Bo Xilai.

Reference entry: The Party
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 28, 2022
Last seen: April 28, 2022
Book title: The Party
Likely author: Richard McGregor

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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
Brazil 1 shared issues
Brezhnev 1 shared issues

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April 28, 2022 · Original source

Numerous Chinese scholars (these are only relevant when they are aping western or dissident adjacent narratives, no wonder blind spots are so large) have mentioned for nearly a decade now that Xi is this powerful because the Party collectively after internal deliberations decided it. Party is Supreme, Xi on his own is nothing but a figurehead. A medium to get the rest of the structure where it is supposed (relatively, acceptably) to be.

The internal debate (NPC isn't the only place Chinese Party members talk to each other, which is obvious) was settled by the late 2000s and the consensus was, in keeping with Chinese socio-cultural-political legacies in challenging times to have a strong leader/core to safeguard the Party's future.

The Party determines what happens in China. Not some individual. This has been the case since Mao died. Not even Deng had his level of personal unilateral power.

The Passing of the Great Race1 mentions across 1 issues

The Passing of the Great Race is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 30, 2021 and April 30, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "author of the charmingly named The Passing of the Great Race". It most often appears alongside AI, AI research, Air.

Reference entry: The Passing of the Great Race
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 30, 2021
Last seen: April 30, 2021
Book title: The Passing of the Great Race

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Your Book Review: The Wizard And The Prophet April 30, 2021

AI 1 shared issues
AI research 1 shared issues
Air 1 shared issues
Air 1 shared issues
Alice Waters 1 shared issues

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Contra Drum On The Fish Oil Story

April 30, 2021 · Original source

The fact that Vogt’s first entry into the public sphere is rallying the public against anti-malaria measures leaves a pretty bad taste in my mouth, as I’m sure it does for any of Mann’s Effective Altruist aligned readers. It would be one thing if Vogt were concerned about the detrimental impact of malaria on humans AND the detrimental impact of malaria prevention methods on bird life. But in subsequent chapters of Vogt’s biography, Mann goes out of his way to show that Vogt’s influences and contemporary members of the environmentalist milieu – for example, Madison Grant, co-founder of the Bronx Zoo, organizer of the United States national park system, and author of the charmingly named The Passing of the Great Race, beloved by Hitler – were, to put in mildly, extremely uninterested in the wellbeing of all humankind. Instead, they were obsessed by fears of an unchecked Malthusian population explosion, race mixing, and a resultant societal degeneration that could only be stopped by halting (read: starving out) population growth. Which people deserved to live in harmony with nature in the ensuing pastoral utopia and which would be relegated to the dustbin of history was not an exercise they left to the reader. Mann writes that Vogt, like his buddies, was "loudly scornful of the ‘unchecked spawning’ and ‘untrammeled copulation’ of ‘backward populations’ – people in India, he sneered, breed with ‘the irresponsibility of codfish.’"

Inline links: Madison Grant

The Perfect Health Diet1 mentions across 1 issues

The Perfect Health Diet is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 08, 2021 and August 08, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "writing my review of The Perfect Health Diet". It most often appears alongside 2013 NBC article: Drug Treatment Omegaven That Could Save Infant Lives Not Yet Approved By FDA, 9/11 trutherism, aducanumab.

Reference entry: The Perfect Health Diet
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 08, 2021
Last seen: August 08, 2021
Book title: The Perfect Health Diet

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Contra Drum On The Fish Oil Story August 08, 2021

2013 NBC article: Drug Treatment Omegaven That Could Save Infant Lives Not Yet Approved By FDA 1 shared issues
11 trutherism 1 shared issues
aducanumab 1 shared issues
Alexander 1 shared issues
Bizarro-World Kevin 1 shared issues

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August 08, 2021 · Original source

That story would be wrong. In 2013, NBC ran an article called Drug Treatment Omegaven That Could Save Infant Lives Not Yet Approved By FDA. In 2014, libertarian blogs were using it as an example of excessive FDA delay - here’s one of them (search for “Bureaucratic Delay Endangers Lives”). Also in 2014, I personally learned about this for the first time, when writing my review of The Perfect Health Diet (I thought the book was generally bad, but it did alert me to this issue and the evidence supporting Omegaven). In 2016, my friend Eliezer Yudkowsky started writing a book about bureaucratic inefficiency that used the FDA failure to approve Omegaven as one of its central cases; in 2017, he published it as Inadequate Equilibria and I reviewed it here, including a mention of the Omegaven story. In January 2018, my friend Kelsey Piper also blogged about the FDA’s failure to approve Omegaven. Finally, in July 2018, the FDA finally approved the drug. I’ve been hearing about this story for so long that I thought I could recite it from memory (I was wrong, which is why I screwed up so many details in the original).

Inline links: Drug Treatment Omegaven That Could Save Infant Lives Not Yet Approved By FDA, here’s one of them, my review of, here, also blogged about

The Pirahã Language and Theory of Syntax1 mentions across 1 issues

The Pirahã Language and Theory of Syntax is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 19, 2024 and July 19, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "in 1983 finished The Pirahã Language and Theory of Syntax , his dissertation". It most often appears alongside Alan Turing, Amazon, Amazon jungle.

Reference entry: The Pirahã Language and Theory of Syntax
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 19, 2024
Last seen: July 19, 2024
Book title: The Pirahã Language and Theory of Syntax

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Your Book Review: How Language Began July 19, 2024

Alan Turing 1 shared issues
Amazon 1 shared issues
Amazon jungle 1 shared issues
Andrew Nevins 1 shared issues
artificial intelligence 1 shared issues

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Your Book Review: How Language Began

July 19, 2024 · Original source

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

Inline links: Wikipedia, hard takeoff, grammar, 1, this video, don’t appear to have words for relative directions, “thank you”, “yes” and “no”, long been an opponent, 2, Daniel Everett, Sateré-Mawé people, prepared, Bible and Foreign Missions, 1975, SIL, viscerally prepare, Pirahã people, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!42Ji!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5c899185-e1a2-4358-ae6a-e9298f6c7cdb_1600x1002.jpeg, source, 3, number words, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!yx-R!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F77975f2c-ef0f-47d7-9ed9-f22bbe04f78b_1024x768.jpeg, source, Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirahã: Another look at the design features of human language

The Population Bomb1 mentions across 1 issues

The Population Bomb is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 15, 2023 and May 15, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Paul Ehrlich is an environmentalist leader best known for his 1968 book The Population Bomb"; "he said that “I do not think my language was too apocalyptic in The Population Bomb". It most often appears alongside 60 Minutes, Adam Mastroianni, Adraste.

Reference entry: The Population Bomb
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 15, 2023
Last seen: May 15, 2023
Book title: The Population Bomb

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Galton, Ehrlich, Buck May 15, 2023

60 Minutes 1 shared issues
Adam Mastroianni 1 shared issues
Adraste 1 shared issues
Ashkenazi Jews 1 shared issues
August Derleth 1 shared issues

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Galton, Ehrlich, Buck

May 15, 2023 · Original source

Paul Ehrlich is an environmentalist leader best known for his 1968 book The Population Bomb. He helped develop ideas like sustainability, biodiversity, and ecological footprints. But he’s best known for prophecies of doom which have not come true - for example, that collapsing ecosystems would cause hundreds of millions of deaths in the 1970s, or make England “cease to exist” by the year 2000.

Francis Galton had the good fortune to die before people started misusing his ideas, allowing us to hope he would have opposed such developments. Ehrlich is still very much alive. When asked in 2015 if he still agreed with everything in his book, he said that “I do not think my language was too apocalyptic in The Population Bomb. My language would be even more apocalyptic today. The idea that every woman should have as many babies as she wants is, to me, exactly the same kind of idea as everybody oughta be permitted to throw as much of their garbage into their neighbor’s backyard as they want.”

Inline links: he said that

The Power Broker1 mentions across 1 issues

The Power Broker is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 08, 2022 and July 08, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Power Broker and The Years of Lyndon Johnson became such status symbols". It most often appears alongside 1968 convention, 1976 Democratic, 1976 Democratic primary.

Reference entry: The Power Broker
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 08, 2022
Last seen: July 08, 2022
Book title: The Power Broker

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Your Book Review: The Outlier July 08, 2022

1968 convention 1 shared issues
1976 Democratic 1 shared issues
1976 Democratic primary 1 shared issues
1976 primary 1 shared issues
1979 oil crisis 1 shared issues

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Your Book Review: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy

July 08, 2022 · Original source

John Adams became an HBO miniseries. Hamilton became a Broadway show. The Power Broker and The Years of Lyndon Johnson became such status symbols that there was a whole pandemic meme about people ostentatiously displaying them in their Zoom backgrounds. But you never hear anyone bragging about their extensive knowledge of the Carter administration.

Inline links: pandemic meme

The Power Of The Powerless1 mentions across 1 issues

The Power Of The Powerless is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 21, 2022 and February 21, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "predict how many “likes” I would get by reviewing The Power Of The Powerless". It most often appears alongside A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Psychoanalysis, ACX Grants, Akhorahil.

Reference entry: The Power Of The Powerless
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: February 21, 2022
Last seen: February 21, 2022
Book title: The Power Of The Powerless

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Open Thread 212 February 21, 2022

A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Psychoanalysis 1 shared issues
ACX Grants 1 shared issues
Akhorahil 1 shared issues
Austin 1 shared issues
Carl Cohen 1 shared issues

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Open Thread 212

February 21, 2022 · Original source

3: I’m running an experiment with letting conditional prediction markets decide which books I’ll review. I’ve opened a bunch of play money Manifold markets trying to predict how many “likes” I would get by reviewing Nixonland, Whither Socialism, Penelope’s Dream Of Twenty Geese, The Search For The Perfect Health System, something by Rene Girard, The Power Of The Powerless, or A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Psychoanalysis. I don’t promise to definitely review whichever one gets the highest percent chance, but it will probably affect my decision. I realize there are many ways this could go wrong, which is why I’m describing it as an “experiment” - still, predict if you want!

Inline links: Nixonland, Whither Socialism, Penelope’s Dream Of Twenty Geese, The Search For The Perfect Health System, something by Rene Girard, The Power Of The Powerless, A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Psychoanalysis

The Precipice1 mentions across 1 issues

The Precipice is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 24, 2022 and June 24, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Toby Orb, who wrote the definitive book on existential risk, The Precipice". It most often appears alongside 501(c)(3), 80,000 Hours, 9/11.

Reference entry: The Precipice
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 24, 2022
Last seen: June 24, 2022
Book title: The Precipice

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Your Book Review: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy June 24, 2022

501(c)(3) 1 shared issues
80,000 Hours 1 shared issues
11 1 shared issues
Adam Tooze 1 shared issues
Afghan ambassador to Pakistan 1 shared issues

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June 24, 2022 · Original source

A Russian sixth-grader could explain why celebrating the glories of Kievan Rus does not subvert Putin’s claims about the history of the Russian nation so much as reinforce them. Just like Hong Kong’s protests, Ukraine has won the meme war with utterly lopsided propaganda and unanimous international support on the Internet. As Yoshimi writes: Floating ghostlike above it is our war, the myth of the ‘Ghost of Kyiv’, ace MIG-29 pilot who has apparently shot down six Russian planes, or the legend of the Ukrainian soldiers defending an island outpost who replied “Russian warship go fuck yourselves” to a surrender offer and may or may not have died heroically, or two Russian II-76 transport aircraft that maybe were shot down near Kiev, or videos of air strikes or dead bodies which variously are Russian or Ukrainian until they turn out to be from Gaza six years ago, or the viral video of an old Ukrainian woman telling off a Russian soldier by offering him sunflower seeds so when he dies, sunflowers (Ukraine’s national flowers) will sprout from the soil. We’re raising funds for the Ukrainian army on crowdfunding apps and giving advice to the civilians being handed assault weapons about how to disable tanks, sharing weird homophobic pictures of Putin as a gay icon and spamming Russian government posts. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has made the decision to stay and fight rather than flee like most would-be leaders who go all in for American foreign policy, and now is being deified by us as “badass”, “a true leader”, etc. etc., alongside his people, whose resistance to authoritarianism we are told is unparalleled in the modern world. After all, so it goes, who could be next? And like in Hong Kong, despite winning the culture war in hyperreality, the actual war in reality is won by the side with overwhelming military might, not morality. The real war is where Ukrainians are experiencing the genuine life-shattering effects of military conflict. It matters because this is the first time Western response is driven by Twitter outcry, and it will not be the last. A New EA Cause? Besides Hanania’s recommendations in the last section (which he admits are more or less impossible in an excellent interview with Caplan), a worthy EA priority might be to somehow turn the public tide on sanctions, which literally kill more people than Putin. Americans should be appalled by the atrocity committed in their names. The banality of the incompetence of foreign policy elites does not excuse their evil. With how entrenched the special interests are, I have no idea if it’s even worth trying, but at the very least the sheer amount of suffering and death from sanctions should be made common knowledge. Nuclear security is one of the top priorities in Effective Altruism, per 80,000 Hours, Future of Life Institute, and Our World In Data. Toby Orb, who wrote the definitive book on existential risk, The Precipice, estimates x-risk from nuclear war to be ~1 in 1000 in the next century. Luisa Rodriguez estimates a 1.1% chance of nuclear war each year and that the chances of a US-Russia nuclear war may be in the ballpark of 0.38% per year; summarised by Max Roser as: Nuclear risk is neglected by the public because of Pax Americana since the collapse of the USSR, and is not discussed as often in EA as it’s thought to be relatively well-funded and mainstream, but in fact major donors like the MacArthur Foundation have been withdrawing funding. As Joan Rohling details in an 80,000 Hours podcast there is much to be done, especially when Ukraine gave up their nuclear arsenal in 1994 in exchange for Russia’s promise to never threaten or use military force against them. A worthwhile adjacent cause area might be de-escalation of public outcry to reduce x-risk from nuclear war beyond just regular anti-proliferation efforts — even a Russian specialist from the RAND Corporation is surprised by how much public outrage is driving policy: Even just the pace of the sanctions: we went to 11 out of 10 in like two days — farther than many expected we’d ever get in short order. And I think the same is true about these military assistance initiatives. We’re just trying to do something because there’s a public demand for action. So that’s what worries me, that the sort of public outrage that’s being channeled in Western democracies through political systems could result in decisions that prove ultimately unwise. Despite how odd it is that some wars are “legal” while others aren’t, we should be glad UNSC exists as much as everyone laughs at how useless the rest of the UN is. All is fair in love and war, but international norms is all that stands between us and nuclear annihilation. It is hard to emphasise just how delusional it is for the public to fixate on no-fly zones — I, like Scott, am surprised we’re still capable of jingoism. 80,000 Hours has updated their top career recommendations to include China specialist to improve China-Western coordination on global catastrophic risk, which seems more important after reading how irrational and captured the American foreign policy apparatus is. As Hanania writes, “great power competition” is an anachronism. If Ukraine is the first war warped by hyperreality, it won’t be the last. Now that US foreign policy elites have driven Putin into the arms of China, let’s hope IR specialists can imbibe the public choice model instead of antagonising yet another nuclear rival. Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy is an important work because it raises the sanity waterline, which at the least should make us stop killing millions for no reason, and at the most should make the human race more knowledgeable of how to prevent total extinction from nuclear armageddon. Pax Americana is dead, but a multipolar world will be more humane. Endnotes In the fiscal year 2018, the top five government contractors were all weapons manufacturers, with Lockheed Martin in first place at $40.6 billion. The Department of Defence spent $358 billion on contracting, ten times higher than second place Department of Energy. Collective action problems that stop a bunch of smaller companies from effectively influencing policy are no hindrance for companies like Lockheed Martin.

The Prince1 mentions across 1 issues

The Prince is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 28, 2021 and May 28, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Prince has maintained its fame ever since". It most often appears alongside A Game of Thrones, Africa, African Americans.

Reference entry: The Prince
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 28, 2021
Last seen: May 28, 2021
Book title: The Prince

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Your Book Review: Humankind May 28, 2021

A Game of Thrones 1 shared issues
Africa 1 shared issues
African Americans 1 shared issues
Against Empathy 1 shared issues
American 1 shared issues

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Your Book Review: Humankind

May 28, 2021 · Original source

Don't trust any study which hasn't been replicated Why you shouldn't stand by the bystander effect In 1964 at 3:19am Catherine Genovese was attacked in front of 38 witnesses in a nice neighbourhood in New York. For half an hour none of them did anything to help, allowing her attacker to strike again. Finally at 3:50am one calls it in. The police arrive two minutes later, but it's too late for Kitty. This phenomenon is called the bystander effect. In an experiment where subjects hear someone in trouble they rush to help, but if they know 5 other subjects are also listening in only 62% of them do - it's someone else's problem. If Kitty had awakened only one person she might still be alive. Except that once again I've told you how Kitty Genovse's murder was reported, not what actually happened. Let's try again. At 3:19am Kitty's scream rings out. There aren't 38 people who hear it - it's cold, they have their windows shut, and they're asleep. 38 is the number of people the police interviewed afterwards, most of whom did not witness anything. Of those who do wake up and look out they see a woman lurching down the street, apparently drunk. Nonetheless two of them immediately call the police, who have other drunk people to deal with, and decide this isn't very important. Two people witnessed the actual attack. One did indeed do nothing. The other was scared of being picked up by the police for being drunk and homosexual in a built-up area (this was 1964), so he told a neighbour, who immediately rushed down to Kitty, heedless of the danger. Five days later Kitty's murderer was caught after a bystander noticed a man carrying a TV set out of a neighbour's house. He and a friend called the police, and disabled the man's car. And the bystander effect itself? It's real, and it replicates, for the sort of low jeopardy situations you can get an ethics committee to sign off on, but what about violent situations like Kitty's? They were unstudiable until Marie Lindegaard had the bright idea of using CCTV footage of real incidents to evaluate bystander behaviour in violent situations. In these high stakes situations bystanders intervene 9 times out of 10, with the rate of intervention rising if there are more bystanders. In the studies bystanders were prevented from interacting, but in real life where they can communicate bystanders exhibit spontaneous team work. I guess I need to add 'don't trust the New York Times' to my list of lessons learned (apparently they sometimes threaten to do other bad stuff as well). Part 3: Against Empathy, God and Civilisation Empathy is too narrow The German infantry of WWII was perhaps the most impressive in history. Martin Van Creveld has calculated that the average German solider inflicted 50% more causalities than his allied counterpart. The Italians in Africa hated them, yet admitted they would have been crushed by the British if not for them. When the Soviets were rolling up their eastern frontier, and allied armies had successfully landed across France it was pretty clear that Germany was toast, but they fought on with astonishing tenacity, and a shockingly low desertion rate. Trying to figure out how to break the German morale, allied psychologists interviewed German POWs. Were they motivated by patriotism? A belief in Nazism? A mistaken belief that this war could still be won? An indoctrinated hatred of Jews? No, the secret was friendship. The Germans had a tremendous 'marital ethos', placing a high value on loyalty, camaraderie and self-sacrifice. Ideology was present, but entirely secondary. Bregman speculates that the German army was better because the friendships of its soldiers were stronger, but admits this is only speculation: interviews of British and American soldiers produced the same results. His key point is that empathy - such as feeling for your fellow soldier - can be a force for evil rather than good, because we can't be empathetic for all humans, only for ones we 'see'. He quotes Professor Paul Bloom who has written a book. "It's about empathy," he says. "I'm against it." (The book is subtly titled Against Empathy). Experiments on babies and toddlers show that they are generally eager to help, but easily manipulated. There's an experiment that shows babies two puppets, one being helpful and the other being mean. After the show all the babies want the helpful one, but show the mean puppet sharing their preference between crackers and green beans, and suddenly they'll take that one over one that was helpful but different from them. Adults are not beyond a bit of empathy manipulation either. People were told the sad story of Sheri Summers, a 10 year in need of a transplant. Would they bump her up the list, ahead of other people whom they knew nothing about, but the doctors who ordered the list believed were better candidates? No, on the whole they wouldn't. Then they took another group given the same scenario, but with the additional instruction to imagine how she felt. Suddenly the majority were up for throwing justice and rationality to the wind (it'd be nice to check whether the effect moved from just below half to just above, but the paper is behind a paywall). Power kills empathy 500 years ago Machiavelli literally wrote the book on how to use immoral means to maintain power. Today this approach is called 'realism', reflecting the confusion between real and cynical with which Humankind began. The Prince has maintained its fame ever since, but being old and famous are no guarantees of being correct, see for example Aristotle on physics, race or women (but don't fall into the trap of thinking Aristotle was wrong about everything - that man was prolific). When Professor Dacher Kelter started working on the psychology of power in the 90s he noticed two things: Everyone assumed Machiavelli was right

Inline links: 9 times out of 10, other bad stuff, paper

Kelter ran a series of experiments from dorm rooms to summer camps where people meet for the first time, and establish pecking orders. What he discovered was that people who behave as The Prince recommends get run out of the camp. The people who rise to power are the friendliest and most empathetic. Now to be fair to Machiavelli, summer camps are not an exact parallel for Italian city states, and Machiavelli's main concern was advising how to maintain power after you've got it. Still, that power is obtained by being the friendliest, not the backstabbiest, is useful insight for the budding megalomaniacs amongst us.

The Psychology Of Money1 mentions across 1 issues

The Psychology Of Money is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 30, 2022 and September 30, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "This is also mentioned in The Psychology Of Money by Morgan Housel". It most often appears alongside 5HT2A serotonin, acetylcholine, Alice.

Reference entry: The Psychology Of Money
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 30, 2022
Last seen: September 30, 2022
Book title: The Psychology Of Money
Likely author: Morgan Housel

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Highlights From The Comments On Unpredictable Reward September 30, 2022

5HT2A serotonin 1 shared issues
acetylcholine 1 shared issues
Alice 1 shared issues
Andres 1 shared issues
AuronMacintyre 1 shared issues

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Highlights From The Comments On Unpredictable Reward

September 30, 2022 · Original source

This definitely had a great impact on my happiness level - not because I hated or even disliked my job, but having complete ownership of my days really feel great. This is also mentioned in The Psychology Of Money by Morgan Housel - one of the very few lifestyle changes which may be achieved through wealth which correlates with an increased degree of happiness is being able to wake up and knowing you can do whatever you want this day.

The Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle Over Sovereignty1 mentions across 1 issues

The Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle Over Sovereignty is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 19, 2023 and May 19, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "And lo! There was a second Jane Jacobs book: The Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle Over Sovereignty". It most often appears alongside 1980, 1980 referendum, 1995 referendum.

Reference entry: The Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle Over Sovereignty
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 19, 2023
Last seen: May 19, 2023
Book title: The Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle Over Sovereignty

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The Question Of Separatism May 19, 2023

1980 1 shared issues
1980 referendum 1 shared issues
1995 referendum 1 shared issues
A.W. Phillips 1 shared issues
Adam Smith 1 shared issues

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A Theoretical "Case Against Education"

May 19, 2023 · Original source

Mere days after I finished reading it, thinking it was indeed one of the best essays I’d ever read, I checked the same public bookshelf again. And lo! There was a second Jane Jacobs book: The Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle Over Sovereignty. This book is Jacobs’s least read. It was published in 1980, right after the first referendum where Quebecers voted to remain a part of Canada. It is based on lectures that Jacobs (who was an American but had moved to Canada in 1968) gave in Toronto right before the referendum. It’s not hard to guess why the book didn’t have a huge (read: any) impact. First, most people outside Quebec or Canada don’t have any reason to care. Second, the essay — which was written in English — argues in favor of the secession of Quebec, which virtually no one among the English-speaking population of Canada agreed with. The natural reaction from Canada’s intelligentsia was to ignore the book altogether. Meanwhile, few people in Quebec itself read it, since the referendum was over; it wasn’t even translated into French until decades later. As a result, The Question of Separatism sits awkwardly in Jane Jacobs’s bibliography, as if it were “a mistake in an otherwise brilliant career,” like I read somewhere. In a 2005 interview, one year before her death, Jacobs said that no journalist ever asked her about it. But the book was not a mistake. I don’t claim any special insight here: Jane Jacobs herself said so in that same interview. She said that she would have written the same book in 2005, “because that’s the way it is in the world, and it still holds.” Besides, The Question of Separatism is in fact not that much about the specifics of Quebec’s political situation, but rather about interesting generalities: what size means for countries and organizations, and why the fate of nations depends primarily on what happens in their cities. Taken together with Cities and the Wealth of Nations, which Jacobs wrote a few years later to expand on those ideas, we get a coherent and deeply interesting philosophy of economics: one that favors the local scale, cities and small countries, antifragility long before Nassim Taleb coined the term, and avoiding grandstanding theories that always fail to take into account the real complexity of the world. I. A Fake Mystery Cities and the Wealth of Nations opens on an economic mystery. “For a little while in the middle of this century,” writes Jacobs, “it seemed that the wild, intractable, dismal science of economics had yielded up something we all want: instructions for getting or keeping prosperity.” This was the 1940s to 1960s, and economists thought they had it all figured out. It was the golden age of high modernism and scientific technocracy. Everywhere from China to the Soviet Union to the United States and Britain and the nascent European Economic Community, leaders were coming up with elaborate plans, rooted in macroeconomic theories, that were supposed to guarantee future wealth and avoid economic crises. The theories had been developed by many thinkers over the previous two hundred years: Richard Cantillon, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes. Jacobs explains how they each had their own ideas of how the economy worked, disagreeing over things like whether supply or demand was the main driving mechanism, but they all agreed on a fundamental fact: inflation and unemployment have an inverse relationship to each other, like a seesaw. High inflation comes with low unemployment; high unemployment comes with low inflation, or even deflation when prices drop. The Great Depression, a time of deflation, had provided proof of the seesaw. Big government projects, as prescribed by Keynesians, were a way for states to reduce unemployment and bring the seesaw back in a balanced state. Economists developed fancy models, based on historical data, to predict the behavior of the economy. The Phillips curve in particular became popular. It was the golden age of technocracy; it was the triumph of high modernism. From now on wealth was assured, because we weren’t blind anymore: we had the curves. And yet — by the 1970s and 1980s, when Jane Jacobs was writing, the theories all stopped working. There was high inflation and high unemployment. People called it stagflation. Keynesian advisers in various governments were devastated: either their ideas were wrong, or they were applying them wrong. Economists such as Milton Friedman, from a rival school of economists called the monetarists or the Chicago school, came to the rescue — but their remedy, Jacobs believes, only made things worse. Whatever governments did to increase employment made inflation worse; whatever they did to attenuate inflation killed employment. The seesaw from the theories was working in application, even though it didn’t explain reality anymore. Stagflation was not supposed to exist, so stagflation could not be fought. At this point we’re near the end of Chapter 1, the densest part of the book. Jacobs has artfully guided us along economic history and laid out the mystery for us. What’s going on? we wonder. How are we supposed to deal with the two-headed monster of stagflation, if all economists are stumped? Then Jacobs, in a masterstroke, flips the whole thing over. I was impressed enough that I would have inserted a spoiler alert here, if it didn’t feel so silly putting a spoiler alert in an essay on economics. Stagflation is not a strange monster from legend. It is, Jacobs says, just the normal state of everything. Backward economies are in fact constantly in a state of stagflation. The prices in a poor country like Portugal or India (her two examples) feel low for an American or Canadian, but they’re high for most Portuguese or Indian people. At the same time, Portugal and India provide too few jobs to their residents. Inflation and unemployment are both perennially high, and none of that feels surprising whatsoever. Stagflation, in short, is just good ol’ poverty. All these fancy economists, from Cantillon in 1700s France to Keynes and Friedman in the 20th century Anglosphere, were thinking and writing about unusual places: rich countries that were undergoing fast economic development. They were making the classic mistake of treating poverty as a mystery and wealth as a given, when in fact poverty is the normal order of things and wealth, when it does occur, is what warrants an explanation. The result is that we don’t really know how to fix the economy of poor countries, nor do we know how to deal with decline in rich countries, whether we call it stagflation or something else. Jacobs derives from this a pretty damning view of macroeconomics. It is to her a science that has failed again and again, each time engulfing the equivalent of billions of dollars in wasted wealth. “We must,” she writes at the close of Chapter 1, “find more realistic and fruitful lines of observation and thought than we have tried to use so far. It is bootless to choose among existing schools of thought. We are on our own.” Fortunately, she has some ideas. II. Nations and the Wealth of Cities The original sin of macroeconomics, Jacobs believe, is to treat sovereign countries, or nations, as the main unit of economic analysis. This error, she claims, goes back to mercantilism, one of the first formal economic policies. Oversimplified, mercantilism states that wealth is synonymous with the amount of gold and silver in a nation’s treasury. This makes nations the main unit of economic analysis by definition. It’s a tautology — and one that was somehow embedded so deep in economic thinking that even the non-mercantilist Adam Smith would eventually choose, for his masterpiece of economic theory, the title An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Today, even though mercantilism has long been obsolete, we perpetuate the same tautology whenever we talk of the Gross Domestic Product or look at the very nice charts from Our World in Data, which for the most part allow only one level of resolution: sovereign countries. Of course, nations are an economically important concept because of that one property: they are sovereign, and therefore they write laws and implement policies that affect the economy. These policies can be productively compared. But that’s about it — for everything else, nations aren’t the right way to think about wealth. One reason is simply that they’re very different from one another: “it affronts common sense,” Jacobs writes, “to think of units as disparate as, say, Singapore and the United States, or Ecuador and the Soviet Union, or the Netherlands and Canada, as economic common denominators.” I would add that countries are arbitrary and changing: when the Soviet Union was replaced by 15 sovereign countries, the economic reality didn’t suddenly reshape itself to match the new borders. Lastly, nations contain, under the hood, many sub-economies that are also highly different from one another. None of that is secret or forbidden knowledge. Everyone has always been aware that New York City, or Milan, are economically very different from rural Mississippi or Sicily. But I find that it’s far easier to think in terms of “the United States” or “Italy,” especially when you’re not from there. Nations are an abstraction of real-life complexity, and are accordingly very tempting to use. Also, they’re often the entities that collect statistics, which is another difficult-to-resist temptation for anyone who likes quantitative data. Cities as Radiators of Economic Forces If nations aren’t the best unit to analyze the economy, what is? This is a Jane Jacobs book, so the answer is obviously going to be cities. Jacobs doesn’t actually give a clear argument why. Maybe that was in her previous book, The Economy of Cities. So far as I can see, her reasoning is, ironically, a bit tautological: “all developing economic life depends on city economies; it depends on them by definition because, wherever economic life is developing, the very process itself creates cities and has probably always done so.” But so far as I can see, this reasoning is correct. Cities concentrate people, and therefore economic life, and therefore economic power. The driving force for all this is a phenomenon that, from what I gather, was discovered by Jacobs when she wrote The Economy of Cities: import replacement. Consider, say, Boston back when it was a tiny settlement, not yet a city, in colonial times. At first, Boston didn’t produce much, especially not much that would be of interest to its main trading partner, London. It exported some natural resources: timber, fish. Whatever else the Bostonians needed, they needed to import it from other cities, again mostly London. (Remember to think of imports and exports in terms of cities, not nations.) For instance, at first, all metal tools in Boston came from European cities, and were paid for by the revenue from selling the timber and fish. Then, one day, some Bostonians decided to build an ironworks and make metal tools themselves. (Pictured: a reconstruction of the Saugus Iron Works, established 1646.) This wasn’t of any interest to London or other European cities. The Bostonians weren’t nearly as good or efficient at making metal tools as Londonians were. So Boston couldn’t export the metal tools back to Europe — but it could use them internally, and also export them to other American cities that were about as poor as Boston was, or poorer. Internally, this meant the spark of a manufacturing economy in Boston, as easily obtained metal parts made it easier for other Bostonians to replace other imports from European cities, and eventually develop a symbiotic network of industries. It also meant that the revenue from fish and timber could be used to import new things, including new innovations from European cities (which would later become opportunities for more import replacement). And because there were customers for Boston-made metal goods in New York and Philadelphia, and eventually Cincinnati and Chicago and Pittsburgh as these cities came into existence, it meant additional revenue for Boston that it could reinvest into developing its production further. For Jacobs, virtually all city development can be seen through the lens of import replacement (which, to be clear, has approximately nothing to do with policies of import substitution industrialization; import replacement is not a policy, but a naturally arising free market phenomenon). Her book contains many other examples than Boston, such as Venice, which started off in the early Middle Ages as a small town that sold salt to Constantinople, but then diversified its production to become one of the wealthiest cities of its time; or Taipei and Kaohsiung, two cities in Taiwan that kickstarted their development not long before the 1980s, by forcing expropriated landlords to invest into local import-replacing businesses. One is reminded of Scott’s review of How Asia Works. Import replacement, then, is what makes cities economically powerful. And this power is so great that it causes ripples in distant places. In fact it is the main reason that anything happens at all in non-city areas. Jacobs gives the example of Bardou, a small village in southern France. Bardou looks like this: To the extent that Bardou ever had an economic life, that life was almost entirely driven by distant cities. In ancient times, the area was populated because of iron mines nearby. The mines were exploited to serve the needs of people in the distant cities of Lugdunum (Lyon), Nemausus (Nîmes), or even Rome. As Jacobs notes, we could say that the mines served “the Roman Empire,” but that would be another example of using the abstraction of sovereign countries when we should instead be specific. It was Lugdunum, Nemausus and Rome that wanted the iron — not some random rural area of the empire, and certainly not the part of the empire in which Bardou was located. Eventually the mines and the region were abandoned. More than 1,000 years later, peasants moved into the area and built the modern village. For centuries they lived a wretchedly poor life of subsistence farming. No cities exerted any influence on it, and indeed nothing happened. Then, in the 19th century, the people of Bardou learned that they could improve their situation by moving to distant cities such as Paris, and most of them did. Again, the force wasn’t being exerted by “France”; Bardou was already part of France. The force was specifically being exerted by Paris and other cities with jobs for poor peasants. By the 1960s, only one old man was left. That’s when two foreign visitors, a German and an American, happened upon the village, decided to buy most of it, revitalized it, and turned it into a tourist spot (and even, for a brief time, into a set for a movie company). Today Bardou is a popular place for travelers — who are mostly city people, and spend money that was mostly earned in cities. The Bardou story contains examples of several of the forces that import-replacing cities radiate, according to Jacobs. These forces are central to her thinking. There are five of them: Markets. Cities house a lot of people who need a lot of goods and services, and are therefore strong markets to sell goods and services to. This was the force that acted on the Bardou area when it was a Roman mining region, and again today when it functions as a tourist spot for city vacationers.

The Raven1 mentions across 1 issues

The Raven is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 23, 2024 and May 23, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "16% know what word the raven says in Poe’s “The Raven” ("Nevermore!")"; "Poe’s “The Raven”". It most often appears alongside 1984, 1984 Calendar Meme, ACX.

Reference entry: The Raven
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 23, 2024
Last seen: May 23, 2024
Book title: The Raven

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A Theoretical "Case Against Education" May 23, 2024

1984 1 shared issues
1984 Calendar Meme 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
Ahab 1 shared issues
Airstrip One 1 shared issues

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May 23, 2024 · Original source

16% know what word the raven says in Poe’s “The Raven” (“Nevermore!”)

The Reformation Of Machismo: Evangelical Conversion And Gender In Colombia1 mentions across 1 issues

The Reformation Of Machismo: Evangelical Conversion And Gender In Colombia is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 21, 2021 and April 21, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "friend’s review of The Reformation Of Machismo: Evangelical Conversion And Gender In Colombia". It most often appears alongside Andes Mountains, Antiochan subgroup, Argentina.

Reference entry: The Reformation Of Machismo: Evangelical Conversion And Gender In Colombia
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First seen: April 21, 2021
Last seen: April 21, 2021
Book title: The Reformation Of Machismo: Evangelical Conversion And Gender In Colombia

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No, Really, Why Are So Many Christians In Colombia Converting To Orthodox Judaism? April 21, 2021

Andes Mountains 1 shared issues
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No, Really, Why Are So Many Christians In Colombia Converting To Orthodox Judaism?

April 21, 2021 · Original source

And this reminds me of a friend’s review of The Reformation Of Machismo: Evangelical Conversion And Gender In Colombia. Its thesis: Colombian gender roles are terrible. The men are supposed to drink lots of alcohol and be macho and probably violent, the women are supposed to sit back and take it and do all the actual work. Nobody likes it much, but bowing out looks non-macho and is hard to do unilaterally. Some families solve this by converting to evangelical Christianity - the evangelicals have a goody-goody reputation, and if you avoid alcohol and violence out of pious Christian humility, that looks better than backing out because you’re not macho enough to handle it.

Inline links: The Reformation Of Machismo: Evangelical Conversion And Gender In Colombia

The Religion War 31 mentions across 1 issues

The Religion War 3 is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 16, 2026 and January 16, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "Then I read The Religion War 3 , Adams’ sequel to God’s Debris". It most often appears alongside Adams, Alice, All-Seeing Eye.

Reference entry: The Religion War 3
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: January 16, 2026
Last seen: January 16, 2026
Book title: The Religion War 3

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The Dilbert Afterlife January 16, 2026

Adams 1 shared issues
Alice 1 shared issues
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barberpole theory of fashion 1 shared issues

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January 16, 2026 · Original source

...fic story for why it might work . So when Adams claimed to be a master hypnotist, I was originally willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. That lasted until I read The Religion War 3 , Adams’ sequel to God’s Debris . In the intro, which may be literally the most annoying passage ever written in all two million years of human history, he discusses the...

The Remains of the Day1 mentions across 1 issues

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

Reference entry: The Remains of the Day
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First seen: May 17, 2024
Last seen: May 17, 2024
Book title: The Remains of the Day

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Choose Book Review Finalists 2024 May 17, 2024

A Canticle For Leibowitz 1 shared issues
A Farewell to Alms 1 shared issues
A Husband 1 shared issues
A Practical Guide to Evil 1 shared issues
A Thousand Ways to Please 1 shared issues

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Your Review: The Synaptic Plasticity and Memory Hypothesis

May 17, 2024 · Original source

...nion / Win Bigly The Old Testament The Oldest Documents of the Human Race The Pale King The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention The Picture of Dorien Gray The Remains of the Day The Revelations The Signal and the Noise The Sixth Day and Other Tales The Story of Ferdinand The Structure of Scientific Revolutions The Sunset Limited The Tango of Eth...

The Republic1 mentions across 1 issues

The Republic is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 10, 2024 and January 10, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "like what his colleague Plato did in The Republic". It most often appears alongside Alexander the Great, Amorites, Anshan.

Reference entry: The Republic
Mention count: 1
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First seen: January 10, 2024
Last seen: January 10, 2024
Book title: The Republic

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Book Review: Cyropaedia January 10, 2024

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Book Review: Cyropaedia

January 10, 2024 · Original source

This reminded me of Sparta, which might not be a coincidence. Most of what we know of Spartan society, we know from . . . Xenophon, who in addition to spending time in Persia spent time in Sparta and wrote about them too. Maybe Persian society and Spartan society were similar in ways. Or maybe Xenophon just had a virtuous-military-education fetish that he applied to whatever society he was writing about, sort of like what his colleague Plato did in The Republic.

The Retrial of Joan of Arc1 mentions across 1 issues

The Retrial of Joan of Arc is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 01, 2025 and August 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Regine Pernoud wrote... The Retrial of Joan of Arc"; "and The Retrial of Joan of Arc, also a primary source compilation"; "Regine Pernoud's The Retrial of Joan of Arc". It most often appears alongside Africa, Agamemnon, Age of Empires II.

Reference entry: The Retrial of Joan of Arc
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First seen: August 01, 2025
Last seen: August 01, 2025
Book title: The Retrial of Joan of Arc

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Your Review: Joan of Arc August 01, 2025

Africa 1 shared issues
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Agincourt 1 shared issues

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Your Review: Joan of Arc

August 01, 2025 · Original source

Most first-person quotes are from the two books Regine Pernoud wrote on this topic, Joan of Arc: By Herself and Her Witnesses - my favorite Joan of Arc book because it's mostly a primary source compilation - and The Retrial of Joan of Arc, also a primary source compilation but more focused. This one is from By Herself And Her Witnesses, but a bunch of others will be from The Retrial. The third-person quotes are mostly from the W.P. Barrett translation of her trial.)

This is a rephrasing. The exact words, from The Retrial of Joan of Arc:

"She seemed to me to be subtle with an altogether feminine subtlety," said the judge Jean Beaupere. Source: page 263 of Regine Pernoud's The Retrial of Joan of Arc.

The Return of Hans Staden1 mentions across 1 issues

The Return of Hans Staden 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 "Duffy and Metcalf’s The Return of Hans Staden". It most often appears alongside A Change of Heart, Abraham, Adams.

Reference entry: The Return of Hans Staden
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First seen: September 12, 2025
Last seen: September 12, 2025
Book title: The Return of Hans Staden

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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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September 12, 2025 · Original source

The Tupinambá people ate their enemies. This fact scared Hans Staden, a German explorer who was captured by Tupinambá warriors in 1554, when they caught him by surprise during a hunting expedition. As their prisoner for nearly a year, Staden observed a number of their cannibalism rituals. They were elaborate, public affairs; here’s a description of them from Duffy and Metcalf’s The Return of Hans Staden, an assessment of Staden’s voyage and claims: (Ch. 2, pg. 51-52)

Inline links: Hans Staden

The Revolt of Islam1 mentions across 1 issues

The Revolt of Islam 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 "Shelley wrote in his preface to The Revolt of Islam". It most often appears alongside A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste, A Hymn to God the Father, Alabama.

Reference entry: The Revolt of Islam
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First seen: August 23, 2024
Last seen: August 23, 2024
Book title: The Revolt of Islam

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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

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

August 23, 2024 · Original source

The free verse writer devises his own line-division pattern. This form, eliminating the devices of metre and rhyme, calls on the poet to avoid the inconsequential and the trivial, and to write down only his important utterances. If rhyme is a shelter for mediocrity, as Shelley wrote in his preface to The Revolt of Islam, free verse is a test of the best that the poet has in him.

Inline links: The Revolt of Islam

The Revolt Of The Public1 mentions across 1 issues

The Revolt Of The Public is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 17, 2021 and September 17, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Martin Gurri's The Revolt Of The Public is from 2014". It most often appears alongside 1/6 insurrection, Abdel al-Sisi, Abu Ghraib.

Reference entry: The Revolt Of The Public
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First seen: September 17, 2021
Last seen: September 17, 2021
Book title: The Revolt Of The Public

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Book Review: The Revolt Of The Public September 17, 2021

6 insurrection 1 shared issues
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Book Review: The Revolt Of The Public

September 17, 2021 · Original source

Martin Gurri's The Revolt Of The Public is from 2014, which means you might as well read the Epic of Gilgamesh. It has a second-edition-update-chapter from 2017, which might as well be Beowulf. The book is about how social-media-connected masses are revolting against elites, but the revolt has moved forward so quickly that a lot of what Gurri considers wild speculation is now obvious fact. I picked up the book on its "accurately predicted the present moment" cred, but it predicted the present moment so accurately that it's barely worth reading anymore. It might as well just say "open your eyes and look around".

Inline links: The Revolt Of The Public

At the risk of being premature or missing Gurri's point, I want to try telling a story of how the revolt of the public and the crisis of legitimacy at least partially stalled.

The Rite of Spring1 mentions across 1 issues

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

Reference entry: The Rite of Spring
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: October 04, 2021
Last seen: October 04, 2021
Book title: The Rite of Spring
Likely author: Modris Eksteins

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Highlights From The Comments On Modern Architecture October 04, 2021

19th century African art 1 shared issues
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9-11 1 shared issues
abstract art 1 shared issues
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Highlights From The Comments On Modern Architecture

October 04, 2021 · Original source

The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction From Bauhaus To Our House The Rite of Spring by Modris Eksteins Art and Culture: Critical Essays by Clement Greenberg The Intellectuals and the Masses. Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939 Shock of the New (TV series) The Civilizing Process by Norbert Elias Distinction by Bourdieu

The Sci-fi Career Guide1 mentions across 1 issues

The Sci-fi Career Guide is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 11, 2024 and October 11, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "You can read his debut post "The Sci-fi Career Guide"". It most often appears alongside AmandaFromBethlehem, Amedeo Rothson, analogfutures.substack.com.

Reference entry: The Sci-fi Career Guide
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: October 11, 2024
Last seen: October 11, 2024
Book title: The Sci-fi Career Guide

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Book Review Contest 2024 Winners October 11, 2024

AmandaFromBethlehem 1 shared issues
Amedeo Rothson 1 shared issues
analogfutures.substack.com 1 shared issues
Arielle Friedman 1 shared issues
Arvid Häggqvist 1 shared issues

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Your Book Review: Progress And Poverty

October 11, 2024 · Original source

Autobiography Of Yukichi Fukuzawa, reviewed by Jason Rhys Parry. Jason is a researcher at Sapienship. He has a new tech and culture-themed Substack called Blueprint Canopy. You can read his debut post "The Sci-fi Career Guide" for a taste of things to come. He also tweets at @JRhysParry.

Inline links: Autobiography Of Yukichi Fukuzawa, Blueprint Canopy, @JRhysParry

The Science of Political Economy1 mentions across 1 issues

The Science of Political Economy is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 16, 2021 and April 16, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Henry George, The Science of Political Economy, p. 253". It most often appears alongside "The Rent Is Too Damn High!", 16th amendment, 1886.

Reference entry: The Science of Political Economy
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 16, 2021
Last seen: April 16, 2021
Book title: The Science of Political Economy

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Your Book Review: Progress And Poverty April 16, 2021

"The Rent Is Too Damn High!" 1 shared issues
16th amendment 1 shared issues
1886 1 shared issues
1897 1 shared issues
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April 16, 2021 · Original source

Although 2021 seems better than 1879 in absolute material terms, George's complaint still rings true: healthcare and higher education are increasingly unaffordable, inequality is as bad as it ever was, and The Rent Is Too Damn High. And even if all of these measures had improved as well, we still have to contend with a fundamental complaint: how can human civilization have piled up an amount of wealth best described as absolutely banana pants insane, and yetstill have poverty, oppression and cyclical recessions? Yes, greed, evil, and human nature will always be with us, but isn't it weird that we haven't eliminated these economic problems the same way we've eliminated Smallpox, Scurvy, and having to write your scathing polemics about Thomas Jefferson by candlelight with a goose feather? Giving the mic back to George, he closes the chapter with this haunting quote, first written 142 years ago: If there is less deep poverty in San Fran Francisco than in New York, is it not because San Francisco is yet behind new York in all that both cities are striving for? When San Francisco reaches the point where New York now is, who can doubt that there will also be ragged and barefooted children on her streets? I'll just leave this here: Number of Homeless Children in U.S. At All-Time High; California Among Worst States. I. Wages and Capital George insists sloppy terminology leads to sloppy thinking. Naturally, he spends an entire chapter beating words to death to correct this. The Meaning of the Terms Let's start with Wealth. The common usage, both then and now, is "anything with an exchange value." George doesn't like how this mixes dissimilar things. By George, what is wealth? Wealth is produced when Nature's bounty is touched by human labor resulting in a tangible product that is the object of human desire. Labor is required, but the amount and type doesn't matter - George offers the example of simply picking a berry off a bush as an act that transforms nature's gifts into human wealth. Note particularly that human desire is an important requirement of wealth; it doesn't matter how much work someone put into something, if it doesn't gratify human needs or desires in some way, it's not wealth. Speaking of human desire, let's talk about Value. Where does a thing's value come from? The prevailing theory of the day was the Labor Theory of Value which originated with Adam Smith and David Ricardo, which says that Labor is the source of value. The early formulations were a bit ambiguous, here's Smith in Wealth of Nations for instance: The value of any commodity ... is equal to the quantity of labor which it enables him to purchase or command. Labor, therefore, is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities. So... is a thing's value how much labor it takes to make the thing, or how much labor someone's willing to exchange for the thing? Nowadays Labor Theory of Value is most commonly associated with Marx. Marx picks a lane and says the value of something is tied to the amount of "socially necessary labor" required to produce it. George goes the other way: It is never the amount of labor that has been exerted in bringing a thing into being that determines its value, but always the amount of labor that will be rendered in exchange for it. - Henry George, The Science of Political Economy, p. 253 In other words, "a thing's value is whatever someone is willing to pay for it." This is in line with the so-called marginal revolution (the movement, not the blog) and modern theories of value. Labor Labor is the exertion of human beings. It's possible to labor to no avail (try punching a concrete wall), but typically humans labor towards an end, such as gaining wealth. But whether or not we accomplish anything with our efforts, George calls them labor. Labor isn't just making things, by the way – it's also moving or exchanging them. Production Production is labor applied "to the production of wealth." You know, productively. This is all human exertion that isn't punching a concrete wall and rewards you for your efforts with something that fits the definition of wealth. Said wealth is the "product of labor." Wages whatever is received as the result or reward of exertion is "wages." No distinction here is made between blue-collar work and white-collar work – whether one is called "hourly pay" and the other is called "annual salary," George calls them both "wages." It doesn't matter whether you receive them from your boss, from customers, or from nature. If you do work and get something from it, you have received "wages." With those basics under our belt, let's circle back to Wealth: What are some examples of wealth? By George, Gold is wealth. Teddy bears are wealth. Tesla roadsters and candy canes and young adult vampire romance novels are wealth. The same goes for fish you've caught, deer you've hunted, and cool looking rocks you've picked up on your morning walk. The value of these things may differ, but as long as they're tangible, originate in nature, someone ever did a lick of work to make or acquire them, and a human being somewhere desires them for any reason, they're wealth. It gets a little clearer when we ask what isn't wealth. And by George, Money isn't wealth. Articles of gold are wealth because they're tangible things that have been dug up, crafted, and fulfill certain human desires. But paper currency, digital currencies, and other things that aren't inherently valuable but merely represent value are not wealth (outside of putting their physical articles in coin collections or making paper airplanes, and so forth). Now don't get the man wrong, these things are certainly valuable. They're just not wealth. They are certificates that represent claims on wealth. For any computer programmers in the audience, money is a pointer to wealth. Likewise Stocks and Bonds and other financial instruments are not wealth. These are also just claims on wealth. A creditor's title to Debt isn't wealth, either, it's just a claim on the debtor's (typically future) wealth. And, writing as he was not long after the Civil War, George points out that Slaves are not wealth either but, represent "merely the power of one class to appropriate the earnings of another class." Wealth, thus defined, is the terminal "ground truth" bits of the economy, and all the financial layers on top are fancy IOUs that just encode various claims on it. George offers a thought experiment to test if something is wealth: if you produce a pile of gold, fish, or Lego bricks, you've clearly increased the amount of wealth in the world. But if you produce a giant pile of IOUs that just records who owns what and who owes what to whom, it doesn't matter how many of them you pile up or how long the chains of ownership get, you still haven't increased the amount of real wealth in the world. Again, this isn't saying the IOUs aren't valuable, they are. But they're only valuable because they ultimately point to real wealth. If you magically transported everyone over to a hypothetical Earth 2, carrying over all of Earth 1's money and financial instruments but none of Earth 1's tangible wealth, the value of all those IOUs would instantly evaporate. Now what about digital goods? Leaving things like Bitcoin aside for the moment, let's consider the case of a digital image file: By George, this is wealth. Digital though it may be, it's physically encoded on a storage device somewhere, and is thus tangible (it's not a pure abstract concept flitting about in Platonic heaven) and has its origins in nature. Human exertion built the computer that encodes it, and clicking the button that saves it to disk or displays it on your screen is labor. Finally, it directly satisfies human desires (mine, at the very least). It's value may be negligible, but it's wealth. By contrast, the digital bit sitting in some database that says I own a particular eBook or mp3 is just a digital IOU – a claim on the wealth that are the physical bits on my local storage device or remote server that digitally encodes the files. The fact that digital files don't seem particularly physical, and that they can be trivially and endlessly copied, doesn't mean that Henry George, magically transported to today, wouldn't regard them as wealth. Okay, so is there anything else that's not wealth? By George, Bitcoin isn't wealth, in case you were wondering. It's just a (very fancy) financial instrument, a digital claim on wealth. And that goes for most crypto assets – a token on some blockchain that says I own a painting by Banksy is just another IOU, regardless of the technical sophistication of its distributed trustless ledger. What about intellectual property? Copyrights, patents, and trademarks are all different forms of Monopoly – the exclusive, government-granted legal right to do a particular thing (publish a certain book, manufacture a certain product, use a certain name in business, etc). The exclusive right to do or produce a thing, valuable as it may be, is not the thing itself. By George, Monopoly is not wealth. But there is something big that is wealth – the C-word. Capital. By George, Capital is "wealth devoted to procuring more wealth", and it's the next thing he insists everyone is hopelessly confused about. He quotes Adam Smith, agreeing with him thus far: That part of a man's stock which he expects to afford him revenue is called his capital. ...and also gives us a short etymology lesson on the origin of the term: The word capital, as philologists trace it, comes down to us from a time when wealth was estimated in cattle, and a man's income depended upon the number of head he could keep for their increase. ("Per capita" being the Latin for "by head") By George, all capital is wealth, but not all wealth is capital. George notes capital is often described as being "stored up labor", and endorses this view – but what it really means, is capital is stored up production. It's not literally the labor that's stored up but the wealth generated by it, set aside and then dedicated to the purpose of getting more wealth. George insists that it is the owner's intention that transforms wealth into capital. If you buy an old factory to throw parties in for your hipster friends, it's just wealth. But the minute you decide to put it to work to make something useful (or start charging your hipster friends a cover charge at the door), it becomes capital. George therefore further insists that a laborer's daily bread and the clothes on their back do not count as capital, because a person has to eat and wear clothes whether they work or not. The laborer's tools (and arguably their steel-toed work boots) can however be counted as capital, because their purpose is to assist the laborer in getting more wealth by working for wages, and the laborer wouldn't acquire, use, and maintain those things otherwise. George has more exclusions: We must exclude from the category of capital everything that may be included either as land or labor. Human exertion (labor) by itself can never be capital. The products of human labor become capital when they are stored up and set to the purpose of getting more wealth. To muddle this distinction defeats the point of having separate terms for those things at all, and prevents us from reasoning meaningfully about how they relate to one another. Labor is not capital, and neither is labor by itself wealth, it produces wealth – and if it ain't wealth, it ain't capital. And that brings us to land. Land, land, land. By George, land is not wealth. And it's definitely not capital. The unique specialness of land is George's entire schtick and the very core of his philosophy. The term land embraces, in short, all natural materials, forces, and opportunities That means that a field or a meadow is "land", as is a mountain. But so are the fish in the sea, the clouds in the sky, veins of gold in the earth's crust, and the oil deep under ground. These things aren't yet wealth – not until human beings both a) desire them and b) touch them with labor. So... land is not wealth. But... how come? I mean, look: land is tangible, it "comes from nature", humans are always productively applying their labor to it, and it certainly seems capable of gratifying human desires. George sees this reasoning as understandable, but insists it's the root mistake that leads other political economists astray – because for George, land just is nature itself. Come again? Land is the ultimate source of all wealth, but it's most useful to think of it as a generator, acompletely separate entity from the wealth that human labor and desire draws from it. Players of Magic: the Gathering and Settlers of Catan should already have a solid grasp of this distinction: In modern times, George would grant electromagnetic spectrum and orbital real estate for satellites the same status of "land" that already applies to farmland and terrestrial real estate. We don't even need to speculate about whether he'd attach this status to sunlight because he straight-up predicted solar power: Even the lack of rain which makes some parts of the globe useless to man, may, if invention ever succeeds in directly utilizing the power of the sun's rays, be found to be especially advantageous for certain parts of production. (That's from Protection or Free Trade, footnote 19) The important thing to grasp about land is that it comes before everything humans do or make, and is itself a thing no human can make. Okay, smarty-pants, what about the Netherlands? They've been making land for centuries! Well, land in the Georgist sense doesn't refer simply to "dry land", but also the sea bed, the oceans, and the skies above. The "new land" in the Netherlands counts as an improvement to land that already existed. The seabed was always there, but by filling it in so you can walk around on it, now it's more useful to us (George has a lot to say about improvements to land, which we'll get to later). Okay, what is land not? nothing that is freely supplied by nature can be properly classed as capital By George, land is not wealth. And since it's not wealth, it's not capital. Okay, we get it. Land is very special to Mr. George and we must never put it in the same category as wealth, labor, capital, wages, production, money, or anything else. Why exactly is this so damn important? Well, by George, if you treat land the same way you would a bar of pig iron, an hour of work, or a dollar bill, before you know it you'll get poverty paradoxically advancing alongside progress, inexplicable bouts of industrial depression, literal genocides and holocausts (he's dead serious about this), and The Rent Being Too Damn High. With terminology now firmly established, George moves on to the relationship between wages and capital. 3-for-1 special on Wages, Capital, and Labor I'm condensing three chapters here because they all deal with the same basic thing. The question George wants to answer is: Why, in spite of increase in productive power, do wages tend to a minimum which will give but a bare living? The conventional wisdom of George's time is that wages are governed by a fixed ratio between the number of laborers and the amount of capital devoted to their employment, because "the increase in the number of laborers tends naturally to follow and overtake any increase in capital." So it doesn't matter how much capital you throw at employing workers, it'll just attract even more workers splitting it up, so although wages might temporarily wiggle a bit in the long term they'll always settle back to a "natural" minimum. (As we'll see in the next section, this argument stems from Malthusianism). George spends some time methodically poking holes in the theory (it's predictions don't line up with the facts he observes), and then sets out to prove his replacement theory (emphases mine): wages, instead of being drawn from capital, are in reality drawn from the product of the labor for which they are paid. He pulls a G.K. Chesterton to make his point: During the time [the laborer] is earning the wages he is advancing capital to his employer, but at no time, unless wages are paid before work is done, is the employer advancing capital to him. He starts by identifying the source of confusion: Because wages are generally paid in money, and in many of the operations of production are paid before the product is fully completed, or can be utilized, it is inferred that wages are drawn from pre-existing capital I mean, the old theory seems sensible: the employer has capital and uses it to pay wages. But however you slice it, capital's investment gets paid back by production when it takes its cut, so does it even make a difference to talk about where wages are "drawn" from? Value goes out, value comes in, isn't it all a wash? By George, it isn't: in the old theory, because capital "must come first", it follows that "industry is limited by capital - that capital must be accumulated before labor is employed", which leads to a reductio ad absurdum – We are told that capital is stored-up or accumulated labor – "that part of wealth which is saved to assist future production." If we substitute for the word "capital" this definition of the word, the proposition carries its own refutation, for that labor cannot be employed until the results of labor are saved becomes too absurd for discussion. George anticipates the following rejoinder – Well, when we say 'labor is paid out of capital' we don't mean it as an absolute statement for all stages of human development (or else we have a chicken-and-the-egg problem and civilization could never have begun), we just mean it applies to, say, every civilization that's left the stone age. George will have none of it and spends three entire chapters relentlessly beating to death the idea that wages are drawn from capital instead of from production. He starts with the simple case where wages are paid in the form of direct, concrete wealth, then moves on to the more complex case where people are paid in money and other instruments. Laboring for wages: Imagine a fishing village where nobody cooperates – each person digs their own bait and catches their own fish. Then they discover labor specialization and realize they can catch more fish together if one specializes in digging and the other in catching. So the digger digs, the catcher catches, and they share the fish. The digger really contributes as much to the catch as the one who physically pulls the fish off the hook even though the digger never directly "caught" a fish, and the fish he gets for his work is directly paid out of his contribution to the total production. Later, our fisherfolk invent canoes, and one stays home making and repairing canoes. This increases the haul of the digger and catcher, and the canoe-er gets paid out of her contribution to the increased production. And so it goes as society continues to advance. The work the specialist puts in causes more fish to be caught, and that person's wages is drawn from the growing pile of fish. As George puts it: "Earning is making." George gives another example: If I take a piece of leather and work it up into a pair of shoes, the shoes are my wages – the reward of my exertion. Surely they are not drawn from capital – either my capital or any one else's capital – but are brought into existence by the labor of which they become the wages; and in obtaining this pair of shoes as the wages of my labor, capital is not even momentarily lessened one iota... As my labor goes on, value is steadily added, until, when my labor results in the finished shoes, I have my capital plus the difference in value between the material and the shoes. And another: If I hire a man to gather eggs, to pick berries, or to make shoes, paying him from the eggs, the berries, or the shoes that his labor secures, there can be no question that the source of the wages is the labor for which they are paid. George goes on to say it doesn't matter if you're paid in money or directly in wealth, because the money is a direct claim on the underlying wealth. It also doesn't matter if you get paid on commission. Imagine a whaling ship where each crewman gets paid a share out of whatever the ship catches. When the ship sails back into port with a hold full of whale oil and bone, the crew gets paid in money, the owner simultaneously adds to his capital oil and bone. The crew's money directly represents their share of the concrete wealth that is the oil and bone. The owner's capital hasn't decreased, and the workers drew their wages directly from the production. So let's get to the point, Mr. George – wages aren't drawn from capital but instead from production. Great, let's grant that – so what? George hammers away at this because thinking wages are drawn from capital leads to a false conclusion, namely that "labor cannot exert its productive power unless supplied by capital with maintenance." "Maintenance?" Well, workers need food and clothing and they get paid by their employers, so you could imagine capital as a limiting factor on labor. But by George, food and clothing isn't capital, it's just wealth, as we said before. And with regard to wages, the point is that the employer always gets "paid" first, because the second the laborer produces value, the employer's capital increases: As in the exchange of labor for wages the employer always gets the capital created by the labor before he pays out capital in the wages, at what point is his capital lessened even temporarily? Okay, but what if I'm just a terrible businessman and I pay somebody $500 an hour to smash Ming vases, then sell the fragments as aggregate to a construction crew for a few pennies a pound, all at a tremendous loss? Surely then the laborer's wages must be drawn from my capital, because there's not enough productive value generated by the labor to draw them from! George says okay, sure, but only because I'm an idiot and will soon be out of business: Yet, unless the new value created by the labor is less than the wages paid, which can be only an exceptional case, the capital which he had before in money he now has in goods – it has been changed in form, but not lessened. Fair enough, Mr. George, but what if I'm building some enormously expensive multi-decade project, like a dam or a nuclear power plant or a cathedral? The kind of thing we call a "capital-intensive" project? What do you have to say to that? George points out that as laborers labor, they progressively add value to whatever they're producing. Take the case of a shipwright building ships for an employer – even if the boss can't sell a half-finished ship, it still holds value (for one, it costs less to finish a half-finished ship then no ship at all). And with every stroke of the laborer's work, the employer who owns the shipyard gets an incremental increase in his stock of capital. It is not the last blow, any more than the first blow, that creates the value of the finished product – the creation of value is continuous, it immediately results from the exertion of labor. A pedant would point out that the "last hit" that finishes the product which makes it ready for market adds disproportionate value, but George's point is just to establish that value is continuously created, and doesn't magically come into being allat once right at the end. George further points out that if you look at things like agriculture you'll see the market directly acknowledging his theory: As a plowed field will bring more than an unplowed field, or a field that has been sown more than one merely plowed... It is tangible in the case of orchards and vineyards which, though not yet in bearing, bring prices proportionate to their age. George freely admits that capital can be required for certain kinds of work, but he disagrees with what its purpose is. It's not a pool that wages get paid out of. He goes on for another chapter on "The Maintenance of Laborers Not Drawn From Capital" but I think we can safely skip it and move on. TL:DR – George hammers to absolute death the idea that Laborers derive their own maintenance (food/shelter/clothing/etc) from their wages, with George insisting it is drawn from production and... you guessed it, not from capital. At least some of George's ideas will not seem so radical to modern readers (especially those already critical of capitalism or neoclassical economics), but it's important to understand that at the time almost everything he was saying was considered deeply radical and shocking. Capital was the fundamental driving force of the economy and labor was utterly dependent on it, and the Malthusian theory of overpopulation was the accepted explanation for why wages were low and workers were starving. Political Cartoon literally demonizing Henry George – Puck magazine Oct. 20, 1886 The Real Functions of Capital Okay, Mr. George. You've spent three whole chapters beating me over the head with what the functions of capital aren't. So what are the functions of capital? Capital "increases the power of labor to produce wealth." How? By enabling labor to apply itself more effectively (power tools go brrrr)

Inline links: absolutely banana pants insane, Number of Homeless Children in U.S. At All-Time High; California Among Worst States, Labor Theory of Value, marginal revolution, blog, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!szbX!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F02e3f9db-5fe4-4a1b-bd19-5a13bac84aa1_500x500.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!cDFG!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F28ef979e-83da-4d1b-8d81-5f08fd6103a5_516x600.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!PVE6!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F68f4f7f0-2016-4fe9-9996-879a3c92db74_516x600.png, Protection or Free Trade, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!aeD5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F348d4d74-8c98-42e6-b5f7-7bd79b30a816_960x611.png

The Search For The Perfect Health System1 mentions across 1 issues

The Search For The Perfect Health System is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 21, 2022 and February 21, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "predict how many “likes” I would get by reviewing The Search For The Perfect Health System". It most often appears alongside A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Psychoanalysis, ACX Grants, Akhorahil.

Reference entry: The Search For The Perfect Health System
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: February 21, 2022
Last seen: February 21, 2022
Book title: The Search For The Perfect Health System

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Open Thread 212 February 21, 2022

A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Psychoanalysis 1 shared issues
ACX Grants 1 shared issues
Akhorahil 1 shared issues
Austin 1 shared issues
Carl Cohen 1 shared issues

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Open Thread 212

February 21, 2022 · Original source

3: I’m running an experiment with letting conditional prediction markets decide which books I’ll review. I’ve opened a bunch of play money Manifold markets trying to predict how many “likes” I would get by reviewing Nixonland, Whither Socialism, Penelope’s Dream Of Twenty Geese, The Search For The Perfect Health System, something by Rene Girard, The Power Of The Powerless, or A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Psychoanalysis. I don’t promise to definitely review whichever one gets the highest percent chance, but it will probably affect my decision. I realize there are many ways this could go wrong, which is why I’m describing it as an “experiment” - still, predict if you want!

The Selfish Gene1 mentions across 1 issues

The Selfish Gene is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 26, 2025 and June 26, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "a gene reads The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins". It most often appears alongside Aftab, Alex Young, Arthur Jensen.

Reference entry: The Selfish Gene
Mention count: 1
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First seen: June 26, 2025
Last seen: June 26, 2025
Book title: The Selfish Gene
Likely author: Richard Dawkins

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Missing Heritability: Much More Than You Wanted To Know June 26, 2025

Aftab 1 shared issues
Alex Young 1 shared issues
Arthur Jensen 1 shared issues
Awais Aftab 1 shared issues
behaviorism 1 shared issues

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Missing Heritability: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

June 26, 2025 · Original source

For example, educational attainment is 50% uncorrelated with direct genetic effects. You need to square this to figure out what percent is causal; when you do that, you find that the polygenic score that explained 14% of EA is only 4%pp direct genes, with the other 10%pp being nondirect5 confounders. So yes, it seems like most polygenic scores that don’t validate within families are confounded. However unhappy we previously were that we had only found 14% of genes for EA (vs. 40% expected), we should now be much more unhappy - we really only know 4% of genes that directly cause EA. On the other hand, you might say - so before we only knew 14%pp out of 40%. Now we only know 4%pp out of 40%. This is discouraging, but it doesn’t fundamentally change what we know about nature vs. nurture. Both 4%pp and 14%pp are less than 40% - with either number, we must be missing something or doing something wrong. Probably that’s insufficient sample size. We’ll keep working on sample size and other things, and eventually scrounge up the missing 26%pp or 36%pp or whatever of the variance, so this doesn’t change anything. All it means is that one predictive method that the average person never knew about in the first place doesn’t work as well as we thought. Who cares? Not doctors. So far this research has only just barely begun to reach the clinic. But also, all doctors want to do is predict things (like heart attack risk). They don’t care if they use causal vs. nondirect genes. It doesn’t matter if you’re “only” at higher risk of heart attack because you’re black, or Norman, or because your parents read books to you - you still need more heart attack medication! Polygenic embryo selection companies should care. They offer polygenic scores that can be used to select healthier or smarter embryos. If the predictors they use rely partly on variants that aren’t causal within families, their real benefits could be far lower than advertised. I talked to one of these companies, who said they’d already adjusted for these effects and expected their competitors had too - the proper antidote to this problem, sibling controls, is a natural choice when you’re literally picking between siblings. The biggest losers are the epidemiologists. They had started using polygenic predictors as a novel randomization method; suppose, for example, you wanted to study whether smoking causes Alzheimers. If you just checked how many smokers vs. nonsmokers got Alzheimers, your result would be vulnerable to bias; maybe poor people smoke more and get more Alzheimers. But (they hoped) you might be able to check whether people with the genes for smoking get more Alzheimers. Poverty can’t make you have more or fewer genes! This was a neat idea, but if the polygenic predictors are wrong about which genes cause smoking and what effect size they have, then the less careful among these results will need to be re-examined. But the reason I spent so much time on the subject here is that this has confused a lot of people into thinking heritability itself was confounded and is actually just 4%. When I read my first few blog posts on these findings, I came away thinking they were claiming to have discredited twin studies and heritability. And although I take partial ownership of my own poor reading comprehension, I maintain that the way that the new anti-hereditarians discuss this is pretty bad. For example, Turkheimer’s treatment of the Tan study above is called Is Tan Et Al The End Of Social Science Genomics?, and includes passages like: The median [direct genomic effect] heritability for behavioral phenotypes is .048. Let that sink in for a second. How different would the modern history of behavior genetics be if back in the 80s one study after another had shown that the heritability of behavior was around .05? When Arthur Jensen wrote about IQ, he usually used a figure of .8 for the heritability of intelligence. I know that the relationship between twin heritabilities and SNP heritabilities is complicated, and in fact the DGE heritability of ability is one of the higher ones, at .2336. But still, it seems to me that the appropriate conclusion from these results is that among people who don’t have an identical twin, genomic information is a statistically non-zero but all in all relatively minor contributor to behavioral differences. And comments included things like: I don’t know if [this study] is the end of social science genomics, but it should certainly be the end of attributing significant genetic influence to behavioral traits (despite the recent scientist-generated cartoons touting genes for “income”). And: There's no doubt that this reported findings have dealt a fatal blow to my conviction that behavioral traits are pre-eminently heritable…This is a remarkable example of an objective statistical fact mercilessly crushing the more subjective experiential sense of "A looks and acts more like B than C because A and B have the same parents." This subjective evidence is almost unshakable and universal in its application as a tried and tested psychosocial heuristic. And yet, here we are. Turkheimer is either misstating the relationship between polygenic scores and narrow-sense heritability, or at least egging on some very confused people who are doing that, and the dynamic was bad enough that I got confused myself for a while. But even more confusing, the new anti-hereditarians actually are saying that lots of behavioral traits have very low heritability! But this point requires different arguments, only tangentially related to these. So let’s move on to… Is Heritability Genuinely Low? (Part 1: GWAS & GREML) In the mid 2010s, when genome-wide association studies (GWAS) based polygenic predictors were getting better every year, it was easy to hope they might reach 40% and close the “missing heritability”. But since then, progress has stalled. The second-to-last tripling of sample size, from 300K to 1M between 2016 - 2018, increased predictive power from 6% → 12%. The last tripling, from 1M to 3M between 2018 - 2022, only increased predictive power from 12% → 14%. If you graph sample size vs. predictive power, it looks like there's an asymptote between 15 - 20% or so. (of which - remember - only 5% is directly causal!) Worse, a mid-2010s technique called GREML allowed researchers to estimate the percent of variance in a trait that comes from the sorts of common genes studied in GWAS, without having to identify the genes involved. A 2016 GREML paper suggested that the maximum share of variance that GWASs of educational attainment could ever discover was about 21% (again, compared to 40% predicted genetic from twin studies). Since unavoidable methodological issues will prevent GWASs from reaching the literal maximum possible, this agrees with the evidence suggesting an asymptote between 15 - 20%. So either twin studies are wrong and traits are less heritable than believed, or the heritability must lie somewhere other than the common genes identifiable by GWAS. What about rare genes? GWASs focus on genetic variation common enough to be worth including in a basic genetic test. Most of this is single nucleotide polymorphisms (“SNPs”). A single nucleotide is one letter of DNA - for example, a C or a G. Polymorphisms are genes that commonly vary in humans - sometimes across races (for example, some humans have a gene for light skin, and other humans have a gene for dark skin), and other times within races (for example, some white people have a gene that makes cilantro taste like soap, and others don’t). So SNPs are single-letter spots in DNA where different people often have different letters. How often? Some people say 1%, but the more practical definition is “often enough that someone has noticed and added it to the test panel”. There are three billion letters in the genome, of which only a few million are commonly-tested SNPs. But these SNP studies have limited7 ability to measure personal mutations and rare variants. Sometimes your parents’ egg and sperm cells mess up copying a nucleotide of DNA, and you get a mutation that isn’t inherited from your ethnic group or even from your subgroup/family line - it’s just some idiosyncratic DNA change that you might be the first person in history to have. Since scientists have never seen this mutation before, they don’t know about it and can’t test for it without doing something more expensive than a simple SNP screen. And SNP studies have limited ability to detect anything more complicated than a single letter changing to another single letter. But some mutations are more complicated structural variants. For example, some bits of DNA get stuck on repeat - one person might have GATGAT, another person might have GATGATGATGAT, and a third person might have fifty GATs in a row. Other bits come out backwards. Sometimes a whole chunk of DNA goes missing, or moves to the wrong place. Occasionally a gene reads The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, takes it too seriously, and evolves some ridiculous trick for spamming itself all over the genome. So if even the best molecular studies seem to be asymptoting around 15-20% of variance in educational attainment, but twin studies suggest it’s 40% genetic, might rare variants and structural variants make up the missing 20-25%pp? This remains a topic of bitter disagreement. On the one side, hereditarians bring up a Darwinian argument: imagine a genetic engineer who hopes to find the genes for educational attainment and edit them to make everyone smart and successful. She looks harder and harder, becoming more and more exasperated as they fail to materialize. Finally, she realizes she’s been scooped: evolution has been working on the same project, and has a 100,000 year head start. In the context of intense, recent selection for intelligence, we should expect evolution to have already found (and eliminated) the most straightforward, easy-to-find genes for low intelligence. Therefore, everything left should be convoluted or hidden or impossible to work with. So although this requires a sort of god-of-the-gaps argument - where we keep pushing heritability into whatever genes are too weird for existing techniques to detect - there are some reasons to think God really is in the gaps here. And a 2017 paper uses some clever techniques to estimate the share of intelligence variation lurking in hard-to-measure genes and finds it’s more than half: “By capturing these additional genetic effects, our models closely approximate the heritability estimates from twin studies for intelligence and education.” (see also Wainschtein 2022, Sidorenko 2024) The anti-hereditarians disagree. They cite papers like Zeng which measure the strength of selection on intelligence and suggest that it’s too weak to concentrate so much of the variation in rare genes8. And Sasha Gusev mentions Weiner 2023, which finds that in fact rare variants “explain 1.3% (SE = 0.03%) of phenotypic variance on average – much less than common variants” (other experts say that burden heritability only captures some rare variants and is not the right tool for this problem). But it may not even matter, because another set of findings suggests that heritability is genuinely low even when the rare variants are counted. Is Heritability Genuinely Low? (Part 2: Sib-Regression and RDR) Two newer methods, Sib-Regression and RDR, ask: using what we know from genetic studies, how much genetic variation do we think exists, total, across both common and rare genes? On average siblings share 50% of genes. But there’s a little randomness in meiosis, so some siblings might share 40% and others might share 60%. The more genetic influence on a trait, the more similar sibling pairs who share 60% of their genes will be, compared to sibling pairs who only share 40% of their genes. Since 60%-gene siblings and 40%-gene siblings are both equally part of the same family, you can use these numbers to calculate heritability unconfounded by a range of family factors. This is Sib-Regression. If you do a more complicated statistical process to extend the same idea to relatives other than siblings, it’s relatedness disequilibrium regression or RDR. GWAS asks: Looking at common easy-to-study genes, how much variation in a trait have we explained right now? GREML asks: looking at common easy-to-study genes, how much variation could we ever explain? But sib-regression and RDR ask a question more like twin studies: considering all genes, whether common / rare / easy-to-study / hard-to-study, how much variation is there total? This could address the rare variant objection mentioned above. And in many ways, these techniques are better than twin studies - Sib-Regression eliminates many potential biases, and RDR eliminates even more (although it’s harder to pull off, requiring more genetic information and computational resources). These techniques are new and hard-to-use, and only a few published studies have applied them to the sorts of behavioral traits we’re interested in: Young et al (2018) did Sib-Regression and RDR to genetic data from Iceland. Sib-regression found educational attainment = 40% (±15%) heritable, and RDR found 17% (±9%) heritable. Kemper et al (2021) did Sib-Regression only to genetic data from Britain. It found educational attainment = 14% heritable. This number conflicts with the 40% from the Young paper. Why? Unclear, but it could be selection bias - Young’s Icelandic sample was representative of the country; Kemper’s British population were Biobank volunteers who tend tend to be healthier and higher-class than the population at large. Upper-class people may have restricted range in educational attainment, or different factors affecting their educational attainment compared to the overall population. Either way, these are closer to the low estimates from GWAS and GREML (7% direct, 20% total), than to the higher estimates from twin studies (40%, generally presumed direct). And we can no longer use contributions from rare variants to paper over the difference. So what is going on? It seems like we have to accept one of three possibilities: Either something is wrong with twin studies. Or something is wrong with Sib-Regression and RDR (and then we can explain away GWAS and GREML by saying they’re missing rare variants). Or something is wrong with how we’re thinking about this topic and comparing things. What’s Going On? (Part 1: Is Something Wrong With Twin Studies?) Twin studies have dominated discussion of behavioral genetics for decades, so there’s a vast literature investigating their various assumptions and whether something might be wrong with them. Here are some of the assumptions and what the research says about each. Some of these will be duplicates of the GWAS confounders above, but we’ll go through them again anyway to review how they apply to twins. 1: Parents Treat Fraternal And Identical Twins The Same: Twin studies claim that twins are a uniquely powerful genetic laboratory; both fraternal and identical twin pairs have equally concordant environments, but identical twins have more concordant genes. Therefore, the more similar identical twin pairs are relative to fraternal twin pairs, the more heritable a trait must be. But this conclusion falls apart if identical twin pairs actually have more similar environments than fraternal twin pairs do, maybe because parents (knowing their twins are identical) treat them more similarly than they would fraternal twins. Would-be twin-study-discreditors have been trying to argue that this must be true for decades, but it’s always been a kind of quixotic battle. Remember, twin studies find many behavioral traits like IQ are >60% heritable, so you would need to prove not only that parents treat identical twin pairs differently from fraternal, but that this was an overwhelming effect. Parents of identical twins would have to obsessively expose them to the exact same stimuli in the exact same order; parents of fraternal twins would have to send one to the Gifted Advanced Placement Acceleration program while locking the other in a box and force-feeding them lead pellets. Common sense tells us there are no such differences, and studies confirm this: when parents are wrong about their twins’ status (eg they have fraternal twins, but falsely think they’re identical, or vice versa) their trait similarity matches their real status, rather than the incorrect status that determined how their parents treat them; parental treatment explains less than 1% of why identical twin pairs are more concordant (2, 3, 4). See also Felson 2013, which tries to measure environmental similarity and adjust for it, with minimal effects. Are these two cuties monozygotic or dizygotic? Are you sure? (answer) 2: Fraternal And Identical Twins Have Equally Concordant Uterine Environments: Fraternal twins have different sacs in the uterus and use different placentas. Most identical twins share a placenta, and some share an amniotic sac. If trait similarity is caused by sharing a placenta or sac (maybe because the placenta is defective, the fetal brain is starved of nutrients, and so the person has a lower IQ when they grow up), twin studies would falsely read this identical-fraternal difference as genetic. Luckily this is easy to study; not all identical twins share a placenta or sac, so you can cleanly separate the effect of uterine environment from genetics. If you measure enough traits, you can find small deviations in some, but it’s not clear whether this is just multiple testing, and in any case the deviations are small. The best studies suggest this chips off somewhere between 0 - 3% from heritability estimates9. 3: There is little assortative mating: We discussed this one above in the earlier section on GWAS - smart/pretty/kind/whatever people tend to marry other smart/pretty/kind/whatever people. Why would this bias twin study results? Identical twins share 100% of their genes. Fraternal twins ought to share 50% of their genes - but they get half their genes from their mother, and half from their father. In the degenerate case where the mother and father have exactly the same genes (“would you have sex with your clone?”) even fraternal twins will be extremely similar (although not quite identical, since they’ll get different alleles from each clone). In the more plausible case where mothers and fathers are just a little more alike than chance (eg because smart people tend to marry other smart people), fraternal twins will share a genetic tendency towards a trait somewhat more than their 50% shared genes suggest. Since this makes fraternal twin pairs more (genetically) like identical twin pairs, and twin studies assess heritability as the difference in fraternal-identical-twin-pair concordance, this bias would make twin studies underestimate heritability. But this is the opposite of what you would need to “discredit” twin studies - if this bias is true, then everything is more genetic than twin studies think. And unlike the previous two biases, this one seems real and important, so much so that when you adjust for it, the heritability of educational attainment rises from ~40% to ~50%. I’m only mentioning this one here because some anti-hereditarians argue that you can’t trust twin studies because of assortative mating, without mentioning that this can only bias them down. 4: Population stratification: This is often large and worth worrying about, but it applies to identical and fraternal twin pairs equally, and doesn’t bias twin study heritability estimates much (though it might shift the balance between shared and non-shared environment). See eg the sentence around footnote 30 here. 5: Non-additive / “interaction” effects: These are theoretically interesting, but all research thus far has found they are minimal (1, 2). Some experts think this may miss rarer or harder-to-find interactions; we’ll return to this later. 6: “Genetic nurture”, parent-to-child Mentioned above: if there is a gene for reading books to kids, and reading books raises IQ, it will look like a “gene for IQ”. This isn’t as relevant to twin study estimates of heritability, since both identical twins and fraternal twins are equally related to their parents, and any trait caused by genetic nurture wouldn’t differ between them (and therefore would not falsely appear heritable in this design). Rather, they would appear as shared environment. 7: “Genetic nurture”, sibling-to-sibling That is, suppose your sibling’s traits influence your own development. For example, suppose your sibling has a gene that makes them sabotage your schoolwork, causing you to fail and drop out of school early. An identical twin would share this gene with their sibling more often than a fraternal twin, making it look like a “gene for doing badly at school” (since the people who have it do worse at school than those who don’t). Why are we even talking about this? Do we really think it’s a big part of the variance in behavioral traits? Challenging twin study heritability estimates through this route requires inhabiting a weird no-man’s-land where otherwise-invisible genetic and environmental pathways suddenly flare up when you say the magic words “it was done by a sibling”. For example, this requires a strong effect of shared environment - that is, your educational attainment has to depend on whether you’re being sabotaged or not. But in general, shared environmental effects are weak. And it requires a strong effect of genes - that is, this mechanism only works if your sibling’s tendency to sabotage you is highly genetically determined. But we’re deploying this claim to deny that traits like IQ or educational attainment are highly genetically determined. So to get much out of this, the tendency to sabotage siblings would have to be more genetic than other behavioral traits! The reason this convoluted possibility gets brought up so often is that, unlike the more plausible parent-to-child genetic nurture, twin studies can’t rule it out. So if you really want to deny twin studies, this is one of your best bets. But when investigated, this has effects indistinguishable from zero. I’ve been a bit mean in this whole section, because people really like to dismiss twin studies as “Oh, don’t you know, those depend on assumptions, I bet you never considered that assumptions might be wrong”, and then Gish Gallop you with different assumptions until you give up. But scientists have actually done a lot of really good work checking the assumptions and they mostly hold. An alternative way of validating twin studies (brought up by Noah Carl in this article) is to check them against their close cousins, adoption studies and pedigree studies. Pedigree studies investigate large family trees, and check how trait similarity decreases with genetic distance. They avoid twin specific biases (like different treatment of fraternal vs. identical twin pairs, or different prenatal environments), while adding others like assortative mating. Here are the heritabilities of IQ and EA found in pedigree studies10 (see footnote for sources and caveats, and see also here and here for somewhat similar designs): Adoption studies investigate whether adoptees’ traits are more correlated with their adoptive or biological parents. They avoid a large swathe of biases, at the risk of introducing new adoption-related biases of their own (like the possibility that agencies deliberately place adoptive children with parents who are culturally or behaviorally similar, or the possibility that adoptees were adopted late enough to still get some shared environment from their biological parents). Here are the findings of some of the largest and best11: Both straightforwardly confirmed the larger heritability numbers found in twin studies. I would add the evidence from some less formal “adoption studies”12. During residency, I spent a few months working in a child psychiatric hospital for the worst of the worst - kids who committed murder or rape or something before age 18. Many of these children had similar stories: they were taken from their parents just after birth because the parents were criminals/drug addicts/in jail/abusing them. Then they were adopted out to some extremely nice Christian family whose church told them that God wanted them to help poor little children in need. Then they promptly proceeded to commit crime / get addicted to drugs / go to jail / abuse people, all while those families’ biological children were goody-goodies who never got so much as a school detention. When I met with the families, they would always be surprised that things had gone so badly, insisting that they’d raised them exactly like their own son/daughter and taught them good Christian morals. I had to resist the urge to shove a pile of twin studies in their face. This has left me convinced that behavioral traits are highly heritable to a level that it would be hard for any study to contradict. Ultimate source here. Although the study is confusing about this, I think it’s trying to say that almost 90% of subjects were adopted before age 2. But I don’t think studies do contradict this. Given the degree to which their assumptions have been validated, and the level of confirmation from pedigree and adoption studies, I think they have earned a presumption of accuracy. Doubting the twin studies doesn’t seem like a promising route to reconciling the twin-vs-Sib-Regression/RDR discrepancy. What’s Going On? (Part 2: Is Something Wrong With Sib-Regression And RDR?) Sib-Regression is a clever way of avoiding most biases. Its independent variable - the degree to which some sibling pairs end up with slightly more shared genes than others - is even more random and exogenous than the difference between fraternal and identical twins. It can sometimes have biases related to assortative mating (which would falsely push heritability down), but otherwise it’s pretty good. RDR has many of the same advantages, and allows more diverse relationships and so larger sample sizes. It’s hard to think of ways these methods could be wildly off. There is one caveat: although RDR includes most of the rare and structural variants missed by GWAS, in theory it can miss certain ultra-rare variants which are so uncommon that they aren’t shared between some of the relative pairs used in RDR. De novo variants that occurred during the subject’s own conception would be in this category, if the subject didn’t have children or didn’t pass on that gene13. This seems like a pretty small subcategory of genetic variation, and I wouldn’t normally expect that much of importance to be hiding here, but maybe it’s more important than it seems. RDR also doesn’t include much variance caused by statistical interactions between genes. Although we said above that these are usually found to be insignificant, they might be more important in a trait like intelligence that has been under recent evolutionary selection that lops off easily-detectable sources of variance and leaves only the weird obscure ones behind. There’s limited ability for classical Mendelian dominance to affect common variants, but more complicated genetic interactions might still prove important. Overall these are strong methods, and their failure to converge is troubling. If forced to explain them away, we might tell a story like: So far, there is only one RDR study and a few Sib-Regression studies, so we should wait for more data before updating too hard.

Inline links: 5, Polygenic embryo selection, need, Is Tan Et Al The End Of Social Science Genomics?, 6, like, And, 300K, 1M, 3M, A 2016 GREML paper, 7, evolves some ridiculous trick, a Darwinian argument, a 2017 paper, Wainschtein 2022, Sidorenko 2024, Zeng, 8, Weiner 2023, other experts say, meiosis, Young et al (2018), Kemper et al (2021), their trait similarity, matches their real status, 2, 3, 4, Felson 2013, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!r3kV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd575f2d6-3619-40e6-9a5e-f9f1ec1399a5_650x422.png, answer, The best studies, 9, seems real and important, here, 1, 2, when investigated, in this article, 10, here, here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!b3LF!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc094f9c0-4c71-48cf-89dc-615498d94812_483x51.png, 11, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!XFWU!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F85f433e5-d141-47b7-8dc5-2271925032e9_483x102.png, 12, https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1935731422205010135, here, 13

The Signal and the Noise1 mentions across 1 issues

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

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Does Georgism Work? Part 2: Can Landlords Pass Land Value Tax on to Tenants?

May 17, 2024 · Original source

...Oldest Documents of the Human Race The Pale King The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention The Picture of Dorien Gray The Remains of the Day The Revelations The Signal and the Noise The Sixth Day and Other Tales The Story of Ferdinand The Structure of Scientific Revolutions The Sunset Limited The Tango of Ethics The Treuhand The Trial The Unconsoled...

The Single Tax and Land Use Planning1 mentions across 1 issues

The Single Tax and Land Use Planning is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 10, 2021 and December 10, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Donald Hagman's 1965 book The Single Tax and Land Use Planni". It most often appears alongside A. R. Hutchinson, ATCOR theory, Australia.

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December 10, 2021 · Original source

The source he cites is Donald Hagman's 1965 book The Single Tax and Land Use Planning: Henry George Updated, which I can find cited in a bunch of places but can't actually seem to locate. The closest I can get is this 1978 article, also by Hagman, posted to Cooperative-Individualism.org, an old school Georgist site. There, Hagman says that when the income tax was first introduced in New Zealand in the 1890's, Land Value Tax was responsible for 75.7% of the combined tax yield of land + income taxes, but over the course of the next century that figure dropped all the way to 0.5% in 1965 and 0.3% in 1970 (note the placement of the decimal point).

Inline links: this 1978 article, Cooperative-Individualism.org

The Single Tax and Land Use Planning: Henry George Updated1 mentions across 1 issues

The Single Tax and Land Use Planning: Henry George Updated is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 10, 2021 and December 10, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Donald Hagman's 1965 book The Single Tax and Land Use Planning: Henry George Updated". It most often appears alongside A. R. Hutchinson, ATCOR theory, Australia.

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Does Georgism Work? Part 2: Can Landlords Pass Land Value Tax on to Tenants?

December 10, 2021 · Original source

The source he cites is Donald Hagman's 1965 book The Single Tax and Land Use Planning: Henry George Updated, which I can find cited in a bunch of places but can't actually seem to locate. The closest I can get is this 1978 article, also by Hagman, posted to Cooperative-Individualism.org, an old school Georgist site. There, Hagman says that when the income tax was first introduced in New Zealand in the 1890's, Land Value Tax was responsible for 75.7% of the combined tax yield of land + income taxes, but over the course of the next century that figure dropped all the way to 0.5% in 1965 and 0.3% in 1970 (note the placement of the decimal point).

Inline links: this 1978 article, Cooperative-Individualism.org

The Sixth Day and Other Tales1 mentions across 1 issues

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

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Highlights From The Comments On Prison

May 17, 2024 · Original source

...uman Race The Pale King The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention The Picture of Dorien Gray The Remains of the Day The Revelations The Signal and the Noise The Sixth Day and Other Tales The Story of Ferdinand The Structure of Scientific Revolutions The Sunset Limited The Tango of Ethics The Treuhand The Trial The Unconsoled The Untethered Soul The Veget...

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December 10, 2024 · Original source

Skarbek's book "The Social Order of the Underworld: How Prison Gangs Govern the American Penal System" is a great read.

The Spatial Economy1 mentions across 1 issues

The Spatial Economy is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 01, 2021 and July 01, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Venables’ The Spatial Economy". It most often appears alongside Africa, Allodium, Alvaro de Menard.

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Highlights From The Comments On "How Asia Works" July 01, 2021

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Highlights From The Comments On "How Asia Works"

July 01, 2021 · Original source

…Or, we might start to wonder if successful development policies simply determine countries’ place in a queue. My longtime readers will also know that in addition to How Asia Works, I love Krugman, Fujita, and Venables’ The Spatial Economy. And in the final section of that (highly technical) book, the authors turn what was a humble theory of urbanization into a grand theory of global development. And the upshot of that grand theory is that countries have to basically wait in line to get rich. There’s just no way for them to all hop on the rapid industrialization train all at once. Better policy can let you cut to the front of the line, but then the countries you cut in front of are out of luck.

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The Story of Ferdinand1 mentions across 1 issues

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

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May 17, 2024 · Original source

...ttern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention The Picture of Dorien Gray The Remains of the Day The Revelations The Signal and the Noise The Sixth Day and Other Tales The Story of Ferdinand The Structure of Scientific Revolutions The Sunset Limited The Tango of Ethics The Treuhand The Trial The Unconsoled The Untethered Soul The Vegetarian The Wages of Dest...

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Your Book Review: The History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe

May 17, 2024 · Original source

...Dorien Gray The Remains of the Day The Revelations The Signal and the Noise The Sixth Day and Other Tales The Story of Ferdinand The Structure of Scientific Revolutions The Sunset Limited The Tango of Ethics The Treuhand The Trial The Unconsoled The Untethered Soul The Vegetarian The Wages of Destruction The Wheel of Time The Zoologist's Guide to the Gala...

The Supernatural is Dead1 mentions across 1 issues

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August 30, 2024 · Original source

[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked] 1. The Supernatural is Dead April, 1861 was a cruel month. The American Civil War had just started, and across the Atlantic, high in a remote valley in the western Alps, in the old market town of Morzines, another war was raging, this one pitting the locals against the legions of Hell.

[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]

The Synaptic Plasticity And Memory Hypothesis1 mentions across 1 issues

The Synaptic Plasticity And Memory Hypothesis is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 17, 2025 and October 17, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Synaptic Plasticity And Memory Hypothesis , by John V". It most often appears alongside 80,000 Hours, ACX, ACX.

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Non-Book Review Contest 2025 Winners October 17, 2025

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Highlights From The Comments On Nerds And Hipsters

October 17, 2025 · Original source

The Synaptic Plasticity And Memory Hypothesis, by John V. John is a neuroscientist and AI researcher in Boston; he also wrote last year’s finalist How Language Began. He just started blogging at Theories of Intelligence. If you loved or hated his review, check his Substack soon for a detailed response to some of your comments and criticisms.

Inline links: The Synaptic Plasticity And Memory Hypothesis, How Language Began, Theories of Intelligence

The Tale Of Albanaidd Hir, The Warrior Who Could Turn Into An Ant1 mentions across 1 issues

The Tale Of Albanaidd Hir, The Warrior Who Could Turn Into An Ant is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 27, 2023 and April 27, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "wrote it up in the style of a Mabinogion myth - The Tale Of Albanaidd Hir, The Warrior Who Could Turn Into An Ant". It most often appears alongside 286, 8088, Adorno.

Reference entry: The Tale Of Albanaidd Hir, The Warrior Who Could Turn Into An Ant
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 27, 2023
Last seen: April 27, 2023
Book title: The Tale Of Albanaidd Hir, The Warrior Who Could Turn Into An Ant

Outbound links

Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On Nerds And Hipsters April 27, 2023

286 1 shared issues
8088 1 shared issues
Adorno 1 shared issues
Ant-Man 1 shared issues
Basic 1 shared issues

Source context

April 27, 2023 · Original source

On a rational level, I’m less sure. Suppose we took the Ant-Man movie, translated the plot into concepts that would make sense in medieval Welsh, and wrote it up in the style of a Mabinogion myth - The Tale Of Albanaidd Hir, The Warrior Who Could Turn Into An Ant (ironically, Sam Kriss is probably the single person alive most qualified to do this). Then we showed a dozen real Mabinogion stories plus our fake one to an intelligent, good-taste-having person who had never encountered either story before. Would we expect them to say “Wow, these stories are great - except that one about the ant warrior, that one’s total garbage, just an utterly valueless myth, doesn’t speak to anything in the human spirit at all”?

Inline links: probably the single person alive most qualified to do this

The Tale of Genji1 mentions across 1 issues

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

Reference entry: The Tale of Genji
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: November 03, 2023
Last seen: November 03, 2023
Book title: The Tale of Genji

Outbound links

Issue trail

Quests And Requests November 03, 2023

23andme 1 shared issues
ACX Grants 1 shared issues
administrative state 1 shared issues
Alyssa 1 shared issues
Art Nouveau 1 shared issues

Source context

Quests And Requests

November 03, 2023 · Original source

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

The Talmud1 mentions across 1 issues

The Talmud is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 19, 2023 and September 19, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "the Talmud embellishes it". It most often appears alongside 15th century Sicilian manuscript, Agrimardio, Aigeis.

Reference entry: The Talmud
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 19, 2023
Last seen: September 19, 2023
Book title: The Talmud

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: The Alexander Romance September 19, 2023

15th century Sicilian manuscript 1 shared issues
Agrimardio 1 shared issues
Aigeis 1 shared issues
Alans 1 shared issues
Alexander 1 shared issues

Source context

September 19, 2023 · Original source

People ate it up. The Romance stayed near the top of the best-seller lists for over a thousand years. Some people claim (without citing sources) that it was the #2 most-read book of antiquity and the Middle Ages, after only the Bible. The Koran endorses it, the Talmud embellishes it, a Mongol Khan gave it rave reviews. While historians and critics tend to use phrases like “contains nothing of historic or literary value”, this was the greatest page-turner of the ancient and medieval worlds.

There is a weird echo of this story in, of all places, the Talmud, although here Alexander is interviewing the sages of Israel, who we assume are clothed. Taken from here, slightly edited:

Inline links: here

The Tango Of Ethics1 mentions across 1 issues

The Tango Of Ethics is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 17, 2024 and May 17, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Currently known gaps: The Tango Of Ethics"; "The Tango of Ethics". It most often appears alongside A Canticle For Leibowitz, A Farewell to Alms, A Husband.

Reference entry: The Tango Of Ethics
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 17, 2024
Last seen: May 17, 2024
Book title: The Tango Of Ethics

Outbound links

Issue trail

Choose Book Review Finalists 2024 May 17, 2024

A Canticle For Leibowitz 1 shared issues
A Farewell to Alms 1 shared issues
A Husband 1 shared issues
A Practical Guide to Evil 1 shared issues
A Thousand Ways to Please 1 shared issues

Source context

Dictator Book Club: Xi Jinping

May 17, 2024 · Original source

If you wrote a review, please check to make sure your review is in the document. Currently known gaps: The Tango Of Ethics (we are going to solve this, no action needed from you), and Julie, Or The New Heloise (if this is you, check your email; if you didn’t get an email, email me). If there’s another gap I don’t know about, email me or comment here.

The Third Revolution1 mentions across 1 issues

The Third Revolution is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 06, 2022 and April 06, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Third Revolution, by Elizabeth Economy, promises to explain “the transformative changes underway in China today”"; "Now we return to territory well-covered in The Third Revolution". It most often appears alongside America, American consulate, Attorney General.

Reference entry: The Third Revolution
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 06, 2022
Last seen: April 06, 2022
Book title: The Third Revolution
Likely author: Elizabeth Economy

Outbound links

Issue trail

Dictator Book Club: Xi Jinping April 06, 2022

America 1 shared issues
American consulate 1 shared issues
Attorney General 1 shared issues
authoritarianism 1 shared issues
BBC 1 shared issues

Source context

April 06, 2022 · Original source

The Third Revolution, by Elizabeth Economy, promises to explain “the transformative changes underway in China today”. But like her namesake, Dr. Economy doesn’t always allocate resources the way I would like.

Inline links: The Third Revolution

Third Revolution barely touched on any of this. It mostly explained Xi’s domestic and foreign policies. Some of this was relevant: a lot of Xi’s policies involve repression to prop up his rule. But none of it answered my key questions. So this is less of a book review than other Dictator Book Club entries. It’s a look through recent Chinese history, with The Third Revolution as a very loose inspiration.

Now we return to territory well-covered in The Third Revolution.

The Toxoplasmosa of Rage1 mentions across 1 issues

The Toxoplasmosa of Rage is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 26, 2025 and July 26, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "ends with either The Toxoplasmosa of Rage or Untitled". It most often appears alongside 4chan, ACX, ACX.

Reference entry: The Toxoplasmosa of Rage
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 26, 2025
Last seen: July 26, 2025
Book title: The Toxoplasmosa of Rage

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Review: The Astral Codex Ten Commentariat (“Why Do We Suck?”) July 26, 2025

4chan 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
ACX Commentariat 1 shared issues
ACX-era 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Review: The Astral Codex Ten Commentariat (“Why Do We Suck?”)

July 26, 2025 · Original source

...could safely say it has definitely begun by the time of The Control Group is Out of Control (although I would date it a little earlier, personally) and ends with either The Toxoplasmosa of Rage or Untitled – basically 2014 has a high density of ‘important’ posts. - There’s then a white band representing the NYT unpleasantness where the blog was briefly on a hia...

..., but I think you could safely say it has definitely begun by the time of The Control Group is Out of Control (although I would date it a little earlier, personally) and ends with either The Toxoplasmosa of Rage or Untitled – basically 2014 has a high density of ‘important’ posts. - There’s then a white band representing the NYT unpleasantness where the blog was briefly on a hiatus, and the...

The Tragedy of the Titanium Tyrant1 mentions across 1 issues

The Tragedy of the Titanium Tyrant is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 17, 2025 and October 17, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "currently serializing his first novel, The Tragedy of the Titanium Tyrant". It most often appears alongside 80,000 Hours, ACX, ACX.

Reference entry: The Tragedy of the Titanium Tyrant
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: October 17, 2025
Last seen: October 17, 2025
Book title: The Tragedy of the Titanium Tyrant

Outbound links

Issue trail

Non-Book Review Contest 2025 Winners October 17, 2025

80,000 Hours 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
ACX comments section 1 shared issues
Aella 1 shared issues

Source context

October 17, 2025 · Original source

1st: Joan of Arc, by William Friedman. William is a history enthusiast and author who lives in California, where he spends his time reading, writing, GMing, playing video games and telling people excitedly about all the horrific stuff he learned in his latest history book. His fiction blog is Palace Fiction (which is currently serializing his first novel, The Tragedy of the Titanium Tyrant) and his nonfiction blog is As Our Days.

Inline links: Joan of Arc, Palace Fiction, As Our Days

The Treuhand1 mentions across 1 issues

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

Reference entry: The Treuhand
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 17, 2024
Last seen: May 17, 2024
Book title: The Treuhand

Outbound links

Issue trail

Choose Book Review Finalists 2024 May 17, 2024

A Canticle For Leibowitz 1 shared issues
A Farewell to Alms 1 shared issues
A Husband 1 shared issues
A Practical Guide to Evil 1 shared issues
A Thousand Ways to Please 1 shared issues

Source context

May 17, 2024 · Original source

...Revelations The Signal and the Noise The Sixth Day and Other Tales The Story of Ferdinand The Structure of Scientific Revolutions The Sunset Limited The Tango of Ethics The Treuhand The Trial The Unconsoled The Untethered Soul The Vegetarian The Wages of Destruction The Wheel of Time The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy Three Days in Dwarfland Time L...

The Trial1 mentions across 1 issues

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

Reference entry: The Trial
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 17, 2024
Last seen: May 17, 2024
Book title: The Trial

Outbound links

Issue trail

Choose Book Review Finalists 2024 May 17, 2024

A Canticle For Leibowitz 1 shared issues
A Farewell to Alms 1 shared issues
A Husband 1 shared issues
A Practical Guide to Evil 1 shared issues
A Thousand Ways to Please 1 shared issues

Source context

Highlights From The Comments On Vibecession

May 17, 2024 · Original source

...The Signal and the Noise The Sixth Day and Other Tales The Story of Ferdinand The Structure of Scientific Revolutions The Sunset Limited The Tango of Ethics The Treuhand The Trial The Unconsoled The Untethered Soul The Vegetarian The Wages of Destruction The Wheel of Time The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy Three Days in Dwarfland Time Loops Two A...

The Two-Income Trap1 mentions across 1 issues

The Two-Income Trap is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 31, 2025 and December 31, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Elizabeth Warren’s The Two-Income Trap"; "response to Elizabeth Warren’s The Two-Income Trap". It most often appears alongside 1955, 4chan, AARP.

Reference entry: The Two-Income Trap
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: December 31, 2025
Last seen: December 31, 2025
Book title: The Two-Income Trap

Outbound links

Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On Vibecession December 31, 2025

1955 1 shared issues
4chan 1 shared issues
AARP 1 shared issues
Aella 1 shared issues
Alex 1 shared issues

Source context

December 31, 2025 · Original source

This is what they took from you. They never should have passed the ‘Make It Illegal To Wear Hair Gel And Marry A White Woman Act' back in 1959! He argues that the reason most wives work these days isn’t because we’re poorer (and they have to work to survive), but because we’re richer (and so wives can make so much money working outside the home that the opportunity cost is too high to pass up). A single earner could still support a family on a 1950s lifestyle. It would just feel like a failure, because we don’t realize how much worse than 1950s lifestyle was compared to our current conditions. The article’s paywalled, but you can get a pretty good sense of the argument from these paragraphs. After determining that the median man makes about $80,000/year, he writes: Let’s say our $80,000-a-year man is living in the Jacksonville area. The Department of Housing and Urban Development calculates what are called Fair Market Rents for each American metro — this means the 40th percentile rent for a home with any given set of characteristics. They say F.M.R. for a three-bedroom home in the Jacksonville area is $2,163. That comes out to about 30 percent of Mr. Median’s annual income. Can you really get a place to live for that little? Here’s a lovely three-bedroom home in the East Arlington neighborhood for $2,020 a month, and it’s zoned for an elementary school with a 10-out-of-10 ranking from GreatSchools. It’s true that 1,617 square feet is on the small side for, say, a family of five in the contemporary United States. But the average size of a new single family home was 1,289 square feet in 1960 and 1,500 square feet in 1970. Two of your kids are going to need to share a bedroom, but that’s how people lived back in the day. There’s more to life than housing, of course, but I started there because that’s the largest item in a household budget. Durable goods like furniture, cars, and appliances have all become better and more affordable since the mid-1960s. That’s partially offset by rising prices for things like college tuition, child care, and health care. But in the 1960s, most young people didn’t go to college. The way health insurance works, you only need one worker in your family to get a job-based health plan. And of course, with your wife serving as a full-time homemaker, you don’t need to worry about child care expenses. The big thing is that, with a larger family, you literally have a bunch of mouths to feed. But the model here is to replicate how people actually lived in the mid-1960s, which is that they dined out much less frequently and also spent a much larger share of their total income on food. When I try to retrace this, it seems possible, but barely. I imagined doing this in Sacramento, to be near family. Suppose I make $80K pretax = $6.6K/month pretax = $5K per month posttax. A cheap 3-bedroom house on a nice-enough block is $2200 mortgage, assume $3K after property taxes etc. A cheap new car is $350/month. Food can be arbitrarily low if you’re willing to eat rice all the time, but let’s say $250/month. CoveredCalifornia offered my family of four healthcare for $600/month. So top four expenses take $4200/month of the $5000/month pretax income. I don’t know; seems tough. I would like to see a more thorough breakdown of an average 2026 vs. 1956 man’s likely budget. There are also some areas where it’s harder to separate genuine declines from rising expectations. Most people in the 1950s didn’t have health insurance. Was that because they accepted lower levels of health, or because medical care was cheaper, and easy enough to afford out-of-pocket? Probably some very complicated combination of both. And it might be impossible to get certain kinds of 1950s medical care today, i.e. a bed in a cheap low-quality shared hospital room. (some of the best discussion around this came from the response to Elizabeth Warren’s The Two-Income Trap, see eg Matt Bruenig here) Still, I find this tangential to the main point. Yes, a few conservatives complain that it’s hard to have a single-income family. But most vibecession complaints come from singles or dual-earner households! 4: What About Other Countries? … Dionysus writes: Did you know that China also has a vibecession? If even China can’t regulate social media heavily enough to prevent this phenomenon, how can any liberal society possibly hope to? The link goes to an NYT article, which includes quotes like: Using apps like RedNote and Douyin, people are reviving memories of the 2000s and the early 2010s with photos of daring outfits, upbeat songs and vintage TV commercials, all of which, in different ways, evoke a time in China that pulsed with optimism. “The music back then throbbed with exuberance, brimming with the sense that the future could only get brighter,” a middle-aged man said in a RedNote video. “Today’s lyrics begin with lines like, ‘We’re trying our best to survive.’” And The boom-time beauty meme is the latest expression of a Gen Z counterculture born of disillusionment, the recognition that they may be the first generation in half a century unlikely to surpass their parents’ standard of living, no matter how hard they try. Over the past five years, this quiet resistance has taken many forms. It began with “lying flat,” a refusal to join the rat race. Some chose to pursue the “run philosophy,” or emigrating in search of freedom and brighter prospects. Others declared themselves the “last generation,” vowing not to have children. Still others embraced “let it rot,” giving up on difficult goals rather than battling for uncertain rewards. To show they could care less about career prospects, many took to wearing “gross outfits” at work. This is especially crazy in China, where GDP per capita is now ten times what it was back during the “Boom Years” that everyone reminisces about. This might be the smoking gun that people’s economic beliefs are totally unmoored from how rich they are. The Chinese story has an obvious moral: people care about growth rate more than level. But even this doesn’t work for America - our Vibecession doesn’t correspond to a period of unusually low growth. machine_spirit writes: It’s interesting to compare it to Europe as the control group. Unlike the US, whose economy muddled through just fine during the last decade, we are currently experiencing a massive economic decline that could soon turn into a full-blown collapse. And yet, outside of debates about immigration or foreign policy especially regarding Ukraine you don’t really hear the same level of rancour about ‘things being bad’ in the local media. I’m surprised to hear this. I hear many economic complaints from Europeans, but I suppose this passes through my own American filter bubble which is incentivized to talk about economic hardship for its own American reasons. Golden Feather writes: I am an Italian currently living in the US. My main guesses would be: Right-wing parties control a supermajority of TV and print media. They have also been in the govt most of the time, which means they control the state TV and have an interest in presenting things as rosey. The much older population makes the internet less relevant for public sentiment. Even in the few years where they were at the opposition, they mostly focused on immigration and crime to rile up popular sentiment, I guess because the population is older, their voters even moreso, so they care more about that than about the economy

Inline links: They say, lovely three-bedroom home in the East Arlington neighborhood for $2,020 a month, average size of a new single family home was 1,289 square feet in 1960 and 1,500 square feet in 1970, how people actually lived in the mid-1960s, dined out much less frequently, see eg Matt Bruenig here, writes, China also has a vibecession?, lying flat, run philosophy, gross outfits, writes, writes

The Unconsoled1 mentions across 1 issues

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

Reference entry: The Unconsoled
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 17, 2024
Last seen: May 17, 2024
Book title: The Unconsoled

Outbound links

Issue trail

Choose Book Review Finalists 2024 May 17, 2024

A Canticle For Leibowitz 1 shared issues
A Farewell to Alms 1 shared issues
A Husband 1 shared issues
A Practical Guide to Evil 1 shared issues
A Thousand Ways to Please 1 shared issues

Source context

May 17, 2024 · Original source

...and the Noise The Sixth Day and Other Tales The Story of Ferdinand The Structure of Scientific Revolutions The Sunset Limited The Tango of Ethics The Treuhand The Trial The Unconsoled The Untethered Soul The Vegetarian The Wages of Destruction The Wheel of Time The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy Three Days in Dwarfland Time Loops Two Arms and a Head...

The Untethered Soul1 mentions across 1 issues

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

Reference entry: The Untethered Soul
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 17, 2024
Last seen: May 17, 2024
Book title: The Untethered Soul
Instagram handle: @shoppingtheatre.inc

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Choose Book Review Finalists 2024 May 17, 2024

A Canticle For Leibowitz 1 shared issues
A Farewell to Alms 1 shared issues
A Husband 1 shared issues
A Practical Guide to Evil 1 shared issues
A Thousand Ways to Please 1 shared issues

Source context

Highlights From The Comments On Liberalism And Communities

May 17, 2024 · Original source

...The Sixth Day and Other Tales The Story of Ferdinand The Structure of Scientific Revolutions The Sunset Limited The Tango of Ethics The Treuhand The Trial The Unconsoled The Untethered Soul The Vegetarian The Wages of Destruction The Wheel of Time The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy Three Days in Dwarfland Time Loops Two Arms and a Head War and Peace Warrio...

The Upswing1 mentions across 1 issues

The Upswing is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 12, 2025 and August 12, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "The book The Upswing by Putnam is incredibly important". It most often appears alongside All Who Go Not Return, Amica Terra, Amish.

Reference entry: The Upswing
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 12, 2025
Last seen: August 12, 2025
Book title: The Upswing
Likely author: Putnam

Outbound links

Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On Liberalism And Communities August 12, 2025

All Who Go Not Return 1 shared issues
Amica Terra 1 shared issues
Amish 1 shared issues
Amish 1 shared issues
Ariel 1 shared issues

Source context

August 12, 2025 · Original source

While this post is helpful (I agree that abundance and communities are not contrary, especially in the sense that more abundance means you need less coercion to retain community standards), I think this is the wrong lens for this issue. The book The Upswing by Putnam is incredibly important as a historical social science grounding for debates around weakening communities. Most of these debates assume a monotonic decrease in community (which also seems to be happening here), but The Upswing takes great pains to note all the ways that in the first half of the 20th century, all the indicators of strong communities in America were going UP.

We ended the Gilded Age fractured and alone, and built up civic associational life, communitarian ideals, etc. from around 1900 to around 1960, after which all those indicators start plunging in all the charts you see everywhere today. But because we have been so focused on the last 60-odd years of data, we have missed the incredibly important context of the (titular) upswing that occurred in the first half of the 20th century in America and didn't require populism (in fact, the Populist movement in America was strongest right BEFORE the upswing began, ~1870-1900), and it was the Progressives that kicked off associational, communitarian ideals. This increase in community and togetherness was a strong trend through the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Postwar years. It wasn't costless! There were reasons people rebelled against the reigning order in the 1960s and 1970s. But every solution creates its own problems, and I think making this about Modernity and not about the last 65 years of culture obscures the contours of the issue.

The Vegetarian1 mentions across 1 issues

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

Reference entry: The Vegetarian
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 17, 2024
Last seen: May 17, 2024
Book title: The Vegetarian

Outbound links

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Choose Book Review Finalists 2024 May 17, 2024

A Canticle For Leibowitz 1 shared issues
A Farewell to Alms 1 shared issues
A Husband 1 shared issues
A Practical Guide to Evil 1 shared issues
A Thousand Ways to Please 1 shared issues

Source context

May 17, 2024 · Original source

...her Tales The Story of Ferdinand The Structure of Scientific Revolutions The Sunset Limited The Tango of Ethics The Treuhand The Trial The Unconsoled The Untethered Soul The Vegetarian The Wages of Destruction The Wheel of Time The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy Three Days in Dwarfland Time Loops Two Arms and a Head War and Peace Warrior's Woman What...

The Wages of Destruction1 mentions across 1 issues

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

Reference entry: The Wages of Destruction
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 17, 2024
Last seen: May 17, 2024
Book title: The Wages of Destruction

Outbound links

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Choose Book Review Finalists 2024 May 17, 2024

A Canticle For Leibowitz 1 shared issues
A Farewell to Alms 1 shared issues
A Husband 1 shared issues
A Practical Guide to Evil 1 shared issues
A Thousand Ways to Please 1 shared issues

Source context

May 17, 2024 · Original source

...tory of Ferdinand The Structure of Scientific Revolutions The Sunset Limited The Tango of Ethics The Treuhand The Trial The Unconsoled The Untethered Soul The Vegetarian The Wages of Destruction The Wheel of Time The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy Three Days in Dwarfland Time Loops Two Arms and a Head War and Peace Warrior's Woman What Even Is Gender? When We C...

The Watergate Affair1 mentions across 1 issues

The Watergate Affair is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 17, 2025 and October 17, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Watergate Affair , reviewed by Jake Scheiber". It most often appears alongside 80,000 Hours, ACX, ACX.

Reference entry: The Watergate Affair
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: October 17, 2025
Last seen: October 17, 2025
Book title: The Watergate Affair
Likely author: Jake Scheiber

Outbound links

Issue trail

Non-Book Review Contest 2025 Winners October 17, 2025

80,000 Hours 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
ACX comments section 1 shared issues
Aella 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: Lying for Money

October 17, 2025 · Original source

The Watergate Affair, reviewed by Jake Scheiber. Jake is a retired engineer who now spends all his time Worrying. He blogs at the mostly inaccurately named www.souprecipies.com.

Inline links: The Watergate Affair, www.souprecipies.com

The Wealth of Nations1 mentions across 1 issues

The Wealth of Nations is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 26, 2023 and May 26, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "in The Wealth of Nations, he frowned practice of price fixing by describing it as a "conspiracy against the public."". It most often appears alongside /r/wallstreetbets, 2013 Financial Services (Banking Reform) Act, 80,000 Hours.

Reference entry: The Wealth of Nations
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 26, 2023
Last seen: May 26, 2023
Book title: The Wealth of Nations

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Issue trail

Your Book Review: Lying for Money May 26, 2023

wallstreetbets 1 shared issues
2013 Financial Services (Banking Reform) Act 1 shared issues
80,000 Hours 1 shared issues
80,000 Hours podcast 1 shared issues
@eigenrobot 1 shared issues

Source context

May 26, 2023 · Original source

Adam Smith was breaking with centuries of tradition when, in The Wealth of Nations, he frowned practice of price fixing by describing it as a "conspiracy against the public." And even though believed that price fixing had a pernicious effect, he believed that it would be "impossible indeed to prevent such meetings," as any meeting that tried to ban conspiratorial price-fixing would have either been impossible to execute, or inconsistent with liberty and justice. (He wrote this in 1776, but had the US Constitution and Bill of Rights existed at the time, he might have argued that a meeting between two competitors to decide how to price their wares would be protected by the First Amendment.)

The Wheel of Time1 mentions across 1 issues

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

Reference entry: The Wheel of Time
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 17, 2024
Last seen: May 17, 2024
Book title: The Wheel of Time

Outbound links

Issue trail

Choose Book Review Finalists 2024 May 17, 2024

A Canticle For Leibowitz 1 shared issues
A Farewell to Alms 1 shared issues
A Husband 1 shared issues
A Practical Guide to Evil 1 shared issues
A Thousand Ways to Please 1 shared issues

Source context

May 17, 2024 · Original source

...ucture of Scientific Revolutions The Sunset Limited The Tango of Ethics The Treuhand The Trial The Unconsoled The Untethered Soul The Vegetarian The Wages of Destruction The Wheel of Time The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy Three Days in Dwarfland Time Loops Two Arms and a Head War and Peace Warrior's Woman What Even Is Gender? When We Cease To Understand...

The White King Of La Gonave1 mentions across 1 issues

The White King Of La Gonave is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 30, 2026 and March 30, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "Book Review: The White King Of La Gonave". It most often appears alongside ACX Grantee 1DaySooner, AI pause, Astralcodexten Com.

Reference entry: The White King Of La Gonave
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: March 30, 2026
Last seen: March 30, 2026
Book title: The White King Of La Gonave

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Issue trail

Open Thread 427 March 30, 2026

ACX Grantee 1DaySooner 1 shared issues
AI pause 1 shared issues
Astralcodexten Com 1 shared issues
Clinical Trial Abundance 1 shared issues
Every Bay Area House Party 1 shared issues

Source context

Open Thread 427

March 30, 2026 · Original source

4: New subscriber only post - Book Review: The White King Of La Gonave. Autobiography of a US Marine who unintentionally ended up as king of a small Caribbean island:

Inline links: Book Review: The White King Of La Gonave

The Widow Ching - Pirate1 mentions across 1 issues

The Widow Ching - Pirate is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 19, 2022 and August 19, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as ""The Widow Ching - Pirate" vs. "The Living Ancestor"". It most often appears alongside 1587, 1587, 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline.

Reference entry: The Widow Ching - Pirate
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 19, 2022
Last seen: August 19, 2022
Book title: The Widow Ching - Pirate

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Issue trail

Your Book Review: 1587, A Year Of No Significance August 19, 2022

1587 1 shared issues
1587 1 shared issues
1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline 1 shared issues
A Universal History of Infamy 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues

Source context

Inline links: Garald is skeptical of the narrative of the Ollantay post, here, Hitler based his personal style, including the mustache, on the figure of Wotan in Franz Stuck’s “The Wild Chase”, Stuck’s Wotan looks, GPT-5 thinks

August 19, 2022 · Original source

“The Widow Ching - Pirate” vs. “The Living Ancestor”

The Wild Chase1 mentions across 1 issues

The Wild Chase is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 25, 2025 and August 25, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Franz Stuck’s “The Wild Chase”". It most often appears alongside ACX, ACX Grants, CBTi.

Reference entry: The Wild Chase
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 25, 2025
Last seen: August 25, 2025
Book title: The Wild Chase

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Issue trail

Open Thread 396 August 25, 2025

ACX 1 shared issues
ACX Grants 1 shared issues
CBTi 1 shared issues
Dictator Book Club 1 shared issues
Dictator Book Club 1 shared issues

Source context

Open Thread 396

August 25, 2025 · Original source

1: Comments of the week: Garald is skeptical of the narrative of the Ollantay post [EDIT: Response from reviewer here]. And some more discussion of people being one-shotted by works of art: hottakergeneral claims that Hitler based his personal style, including the mustache, on the figure of Wotan in Franz Stuck’s “The Wild Chase”. Fact check: although Stuck’s Wotan looks eerily like Hitler, GPT-5 thinks any theory of casual resemblance is speculative and that there are other explanations for Hitler’s style.

The Winter of Our Discontent1 mentions across 1 issues

The Winter of Our Discontent is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 06, 2021 and May 06, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "In Steinbeck’s “The Winter of Our Discontent”, the protagonist obsesses with getting back into the local town’s ruling aristocracy". It most often appears alongside 320 AD, 476 AD, Africa.

Reference entry: The Winter of Our Discontent
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 06, 2021
Last seen: May 06, 2021
Book title: The Winter of Our Discontent

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: Through The Eye Of A Needle May 06, 2021

320 AD 1 shared issues
476 AD 1 shared issues
Africa 1 shared issues
African ceramics 1 shared issues
African wines 1 shared issues

Source context

Highlights From The Comments On Modern Architecture

May 06, 2021 · Original source

Speculation on Curiales. This book made me realize the key role the “curiales” have played in almost all human history. In ancient Greece, I think you’d call these people the aristocracy or the oligarchs. They were always competing with the democrats for power. In Steinbeck’s “The Winter of Our Discontent”, the protagonist obsesses with getting back into the local town’s ruling aristocracy. That novel is set in the 1950s northeastern United States. Or Mr. Potter, the banker who owns half the town in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” What happened to those people? Are most cities and towns still run by a handful of old aristocratic families and I somehow have never noticed? Did something dramatic change in western society over the past 70 odd years? Is this the first time in history every little town isn’t run by a gaggle of wealthy families? I grew up in small town New England and there are definitely traces of old Brahmin aristocrats all over the place. They don’t seem to exist in the same way anymore.

The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction1 mentions across 1 issues

The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 04, 2021 and October 04, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Many people recommended books or papers on this subject. I haven’t read them yet, but the most enthusiastically mooted were: The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction". It most often appears alongside 19th century African art, 20th century, 9-11.

Reference entry: The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: October 04, 2021
Last seen: October 04, 2021
Book title: The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction

Outbound links

Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On Modern Architecture October 04, 2021

19th century African art 1 shared issues
20th century 1 shared issues
9-11 1 shared issues
abstract art 1 shared issues
Aka 1 shared issues

Source context

October 04, 2021 · Original source

The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction From Bauhaus To Our House The Rite of Spring by Modris Eksteins Art and Culture: Critical Essays by Clement Greenberg The Intellectuals and the Masses. Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939 Shock of the New (TV series) The Civilizing Process by Norbert Elias Distinction by Bourdieu

The World of Late Antiquity1 mentions across 1 issues

The World of Late Antiquity is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 06, 2021 and May 06, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "first came across Peter Brown’s work in the extremely readable “The World of Late Antiquity” from 1971". It most often appears alongside 320 AD, 476 AD, Africa.

Reference entry: The World of Late Antiquity
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 06, 2021
Last seen: May 06, 2021
Book title: The World of Late Antiquity

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: Through The Eye Of A Needle May 06, 2021

320 AD 1 shared issues
476 AD 1 shared issues
Africa 1 shared issues
African ceramics 1 shared issues
African wines 1 shared issues

Source context

Choose Nonbook Review Finalists 2025

May 06, 2021 · Original source

Peter Brown, is an English historian and the Rollins Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton. He’s one of the great scholars of “Late Antiquity." He is sometimes regarded as the inventor of the field (per Wikipedia). I’m not a historian, but I am interested in the world of classical Rome and Greece. I'm interested in men and women struggling to maintain systems and hold off collapse. The end of the Roman society is probably the best documented and most accessible example. Thus I first came across Peter Brown’s work in the extremely readable “The World of Late Antiquity” from 1971. The short, introductory work got me hooked, so I read Brown’s 2014 book “Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD.”

The Zone Of Interest1 mentions across 1 issues

The Zone Of Interest is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 03, 2025 and June 03, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Zone Of Interest". It most often appears alongside ACX Commentariat, Arnold Schoenberg, Baldur's Gate 3.

Reference entry: The Zone Of Interest
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 03, 2025
Last seen: June 03, 2025
Book title: The Zone Of Interest

Outbound links

Issue trail

Choose Nonbook Review Finalists 2025 June 03, 2025

ACX Commentariat 1 shared issues
Arnold Schoenberg 1 shared issues
Baldur's Gate 3 1 shared issues
Banerjee 1 shared issues
Bennett Foddy 1 shared issues

Source context

June 03, 2025 · Original source

...enix Theatre at Great Northern Mall Princess Mononoke The Beginning After The End Of Humanity Circus The Brutalist The Future of Legal AI The Tale Of The Princess Kaguya The Zone Of Interest She-Ra and the Princesses Of Power Shrinking: Men Silo Skibidi Toilet

The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy1 mentions across 1 issues

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

Reference entry: The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 17, 2024
Last seen: May 17, 2024
Book title: The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy

Outbound links

Issue trail

Choose Book Review Finalists 2024 May 17, 2024

A Canticle For Leibowitz 1 shared issues
A Farewell to Alms 1 shared issues
A Husband 1 shared issues
A Practical Guide to Evil 1 shared issues
A Thousand Ways to Please 1 shared issues

Source context

May 17, 2024 · Original source

...ic Revolutions The Sunset Limited The Tango of Ethics The Treuhand The Trial The Unconsoled The Untethered Soul The Vegetarian The Wages of Destruction The Wheel of Time The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy Three Days in Dwarfland Time Loops Two Arms and a Head War and Peace Warrior's Woman What Even Is Gender? When We Cease To Understand The World Who We Are And How We Got...

Theory Of The Aspirational Class1 mentions across 1 issues

Theory Of The Aspirational Class is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 18, 2021 and February 18, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Elizabeth Currid-Halkett's Theory Of The Aspirational Class". It most often appears alongside American education, Appalachian, Baby Einstein.

Reference entry: Theory Of The Aspirational Class
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: February 18, 2021
Last seen: February 18, 2021
Book title: Theory Of The Aspirational Class

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: The Cult Of Smart February 18, 2021

American education 1 shared issues
Appalachian 1 shared issues
Baby Einstein 1 shared issues
Bezoses 1 shared issues
Bryan Caplan 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: The Laws of Trading

February 18, 2021 · Original source

DeBoer isn't convinced this is an honest mistake. He draws attention to a sort of meta-class-war - a war among class warriors over whether the true enemy is the top 1% (this is the majority position) or the top 20% (this is DeBoer's position; if you've read Staying Classy, you'll immediately recognize this disagreement as the same one that divided the Church and UR models of class). The 1% are the Buffetts and Bezoses of the world; the 20% are the "managerial" class of well-off urban professionals, bureaucrats, creative types, and other mandarins. Opposition to the 20% is usually right-coded; describe them as "woke coastal elites who dominate academia and the media", and the Trump campaign ad almost writes itself. But some Marxists flirt with it too; the book references Elizabeth Currid-Halkett's Theory Of The Aspirational Class, and you can hear echoes of this every time Twitter socialists criticize "Vox liberals" or something. Access to the 20% is gated by college degree, and their legitimizing myth is that their education makes them more qualified and humane than the rest of us. DeBoer thinks the deification of school-achievement-compatible intelligence as highest good serves their class interest; "equality of opportunity" means we should ignore all other human distinctions in favor of the one that our ruling class happens to excel at.

Inline links: Staying Classy, Theory Of The Aspirational Class

Thinking in Bets1 mentions across 1 issues

Thinking in Bets is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 21, 2023 and July 21, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets". It most often appears alongside 2008 Financial Crisis, 2023 book review contest, 30-Year Mortgage.

Reference entry: Thinking in Bets
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 21, 2023
Last seen: July 21, 2023
Book title: Thinking in Bets

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: The Laws of Trading July 21, 2023

2008 Financial Crisis 1 shared issues
2023 book review contest 1 shared issues
30-Year Mortgage 1 shared issues
A.L. Barker 1 shared issues
ACX Book Review Contest 1 shared issues

Source context

July 21, 2023 · Original source

Tales of Icarus flying too close to the sun, where readers revel in schadenfreude, e.g., When Genius Failed. With The Laws of Trading, Agustin Lebron has written something different: part love letter to trading, part philosophical treatise on epistemology and modeling the world around us, and part guide to applied decision-making. Lebron’s Laws are Laws of the Jungle, not Laws of Nature. He views financial markets as the most competitive Darwinian environment on Earth, where participants must adapt or die. According to Lebron, the book is for people working in finance and trading, as well as anyone in the business of making rational decisions. This explicitly rationalist bent is similar to Julia Galef’s The Scout Mindset or Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets. Where The Laws of Trading sets itself apart is with the best description of financial market dynamics that I’ve ever seen while diving deep into philosophical concepts. Why trust Lebron? He is an engineer, worked as a quantitative trader and researcher at Jane Street, and has a deep understanding of trading. He has what Taleb would describe as skin in the game. You and I may read Astral Codex Ten in our spare time, post on LessWrong, and navel gaze about our epistemic certainty, but at the end of the day most of us are pursuing rationality for fun, as a hobby. Traders like Lebron pursue rationality as a profession: Their livelihood depends on having a better model of the world than their competition. There are lessons to learn from them that apply to our daily lives. 1: Motivation Know why you are doing a trade before you trade. “What is trading about? Fundamentally, it’s about the relationship between you and the rest of the world.” Right now, you’re making a trade. You’re trading your time to read this book review. You have a cost: you could be spending time with your loved ones, exercising, working, sleeping. You might be hoping to learn something, to take away lessons that you can apply to your life, or simply to entertain yourself. Here, off the bat, are two key insights: We are all making trades, all of the time.

Inline links: The Laws of Trading

This is an Uprising1 mentions across 1 issues

This is an Uprising 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 "original book here: http://thisisanuprising.org/". It most often appears alongside #EEGManyLabs, 23andme, @freeshreeda.

Reference entry: This is an Uprising
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: November 10, 2023
Last seen: November 10, 2023
Book title: This is an Uprising

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

Re #8: I briefly dated someone who is very involved in political activism scenes, and according to her the model that is super popular right now is called the "momentum model": https://www.momentumcommunity.org/momentum-model, original book here: http://thisisanuprising.org/ . Although this might be more on the "social change" (i.e., get society to shift on controversial issues) rather than targeted political change for ideas that are already mostly accepted.

Inline links: https://www.momentumcommunity.org/momentum-model, http://thisisanuprising.org/

This is Water1 mentions across 1 issues

This is Water is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 06, 2024 and September 06, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "As he said in his famous Kenyon commencement address, This is Water". It most often appears alongside #MeToo, 21st century political dogmatism, Advanced Tax.

Reference entry: This is Water
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 06, 2024
Last seen: September 06, 2024
Book title: This is Water

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: The Pale King September 06, 2024

#MeToo 1 shared issues
21st century political dogmatism 1 shared issues
Advanced Tax 1 shared issues
Anand Singh 1 shared issues
Ann Williams 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: The Pale King

September 06, 2024 · Original source

He wasn’t some simple reactionary. His work wove in postmodern self-awareness, metacommentary and irony, all while arguing that we had to transcend it. And to do so, we need the very principles postmodernism had spent the past half-century deconstructing: decency, sincerity, responsibility, neighborliness, sacrifice. As he said in his famous Kenyon commencement address, This is Water, “The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”

Three Days in Dwarfland1 mentions across 1 issues

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

Reference entry: Three Days in Dwarfland
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 17, 2024
Last seen: May 17, 2024
Book title: Three Days in Dwarfland

Outbound links

Issue trail

Choose Book Review Finalists 2024 May 17, 2024

A Canticle For Leibowitz 1 shared issues
A Farewell to Alms 1 shared issues
A Husband 1 shared issues
A Practical Guide to Evil 1 shared issues
A Thousand Ways to Please 1 shared issues

Source context

May 17, 2024 · Original source

...e Tango of Ethics The Treuhand The Trial The Unconsoled The Untethered Soul The Vegetarian The Wages of Destruction The Wheel of Time The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy Three Days in Dwarfland Time Loops Two Arms and a Head War and Peace Warrior's Woman What Even Is Gender? When We Cease To Understand The World Who We Are And How We Got Here Why Fish Don't Exi...

Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD1 mentions across 1 issues

Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 06, 2021 and May 06, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Brown’s 2014 book “Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD.”". It most often appears alongside 320 AD, 476 AD, Africa.

Reference entry: Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 06, 2021
Last seen: May 06, 2021
Book title: Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: Through The Eye Of A Needle May 06, 2021

320 AD 1 shared issues
476 AD 1 shared issues
Africa 1 shared issues
African ceramics 1 shared issues
African wines 1 shared issues

Source context

Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman

May 06, 2021 · Original source

...ame across Peter Brown’s work in the extremely readable “The World of Late Antiquity” from 1971. The short, introductory work got me hooked, so I read Brown’s 2014 book “Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD.” The core of the 530 page book uses the writings of the pagan Symmachus and the Christian writers Ambrose, Jerome, Pelagius, Augustine, Paulinus of Nola, John Cassian,...

...ple. Thus I first came across Peter Brown’s work in the extremely readable “The World of Late Antiquity” from 1971. The short, introductory work got me hooked, so I read Brown’s 2014 book “Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD.” The core of the 530 page book uses the writings of the pagan Symmachus and the Christian writers Ambrose, Jerome, Pelagius, Augustine, Paulinus of Nola, John Cassian, Pi...

Thus Spake Zarathustra1 mentions across 1 issues

Thus Spake Zarathustra is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 30, 2024 and July 30, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Rand once said that: [Nietzsche’s] Thus Spake Zarathustra is my Bible". It most often appears alongside /r/iamverysmart, 4chan, Achilles.

Reference entry: Thus Spake Zarathustra
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 30, 2024
Last seen: July 30, 2024
Book title: Thus Spake Zarathustra

Outbound links

Issue trail

Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman July 30, 2024

iamverysmart 1 shared issues
4chan 1 shared issues
Achilles 1 shared issues
Ada Palmer 1 shared issues
Africa 1 shared issues

Source context

July 30, 2024 · Original source

These are obviously left-wing, in the sense that they’re literal Communist propaganda. But to the modern eye there’s something off about them, something that makes you want to call them right-wing or even fascist. They’re bold and optimistic. Even though the commissars who commissioned them probably rejected some traditional or capitalist conception of virtue, they still firmly insist that there’s something sort of like virtue or power which is attainable and good. I think these are first-form posters, and that most modern leftism is second-form. I think if you had to group barbarian warlords, Puritans, Soviet communists, and modern leftists on a Nietzschean/geneaological/aesthetic axis, it would go: (Barbarian warlords) | (Puritans, Soviet communists) | (modern leftists) So one very weak compromise - hardly even a compromise, since it predates Nietzsche - is to try to stick with first-form slave morality, in the hopes that most of the problems come from the second. VIII. Ayn Rand “Is Ayn Rand a Nietzschean?”- the greatest thread in the history of forums, locked by a moderator after 12239 pages of heated debate. There’s a real answer here. Rand started out respecting, maybe even loving Nietzsche. She once said that: [Nietzsche’s] Thus Spake Zarathustra is my Bible. I can never commit suicide while I have it. …which maybe reveals more about her psychological situation than I expected from the answer to a “who’s your favorite philosopher” questionnaire. But later on she broke from him. It’s hard to figure out her exact position - she has a bad habit of treating anyone who disagrees with her in any tiny detail as the Antichrist, such that it’s hard to figure out whether she thinks of someone as a 99% fellow traveler or an arch-enemy. Still, there are substantial differences. Nietzsche is more chaotic - he expects the superior man to defy all external rules in favor of his own glorious destiny. But Rand is attached to rules - most of all the epistemic rules of Reason, but also the usual moral tenets like “don’t kill” and “don’t steal”. Nietzsche’s masters take the Ron Swanson approach to justifying their actions: …whereas Rand’s masters are prone to giving twenty-page-long arguments for why whatever they’re doing is the right choice according to Objectively Correct Moral Law. Rand’s approach has lots of advantages. The Nietzschean master, like Andrew Tate, is an awful guy to have around. It’s hard to fit him into a functioning civilization, except maybe an autocracy with him as autocrat. Nietzsche’s pitch is “hey excellent people, you should try to become this guy”, never “hey normal people, you should support my project of creating these guys, out of your own self-interest.” The latter wouldn’t pass the laugh test. Rand’s masters, while still probably very stressful to be around, have been tamed. They follow civilized rules of honesty and nonviolence - not, of course, because they’re too weak to defy them, but because following civilized rules is objectively the coolest thing of all. Instead of competing in battle and leaving a trail of bloody corpses, they compete in Capitalism and leave a trail of high-paying jobs and excellent consumer goods. They’re not doing to serve you - “I should serve the little guy” is slave moralist bulls**t. But, by coincidence, their excellent actions are doing you a service. They might only invent rocket ships to enact their Promethean conquest of nature and prove their own greatness. But you still get to ride in one. Rand also spares more of a thought (or at least an afterthought) for the little guy. Capitalism needs all types - even the company janitor genuinely contributes to whatever glorious accomplishments are going on, and deserves to feel good about themselves. She wants everyone to be the best, most ambitious, and most fighting-for-their-own-aesthetic/moral-vision they can be. But if that means being the company janitor, that’s fine. And if you love rockets and you consummate that love by becoming the janitor for a rocket company, the Objectively Correct Moral Law is 100% on board. I am not a Nietzsche scholar, but I think this is a more productive answer than Nietzsche has for this question. The disadvantage of Rand’s approach compared to Nietzsche’s is that it only works if you believe her proofs about why the Objectively Correct Moral Law is definitely objective and correct - most of which seem to me to be either hand-wavy or balderdash. Otherwise the whole thing breaks down - why is the most masterful thing to be a positive-sum capitalist instead of a negative-sum warlord? Rand really really wants to justify a peaceful, glorious, positive-sum society, to the exact people most capable of benefiting from defecting against it, without bringing in altruism or the common good at any point. It’s an extremely sympathetic goal. But I don’t think she makes it. Still, this is why I’m fond of her. If you really read her books - as opposed to skimming them while subvocalizing “this is that evil woman who loves selfishness” under your breath the whole time - it’s obvious that she believes, with a deep and burning belief, that good things are good. She really really wants to think that you can objectively convince people to support a peaceful, glorious, positive-sum society, without any hint of the psychologically-toxic slave morality that typified the USSR she grew up in. When people react to her books with loathing - without even a hint of fondness - I get suspicious that they’ve gotten so deep into slave morality that thy can’t recognize goodness when it hits them over the head with a sledgehammer. Elsewhere, I wrote: Edward Teach (Sadly, Porn) is famous for making up fake novels to criticize, and it is a little known fact that the "Ayn Rand" character along with all her novels are 100% his work. They operate as a diagnostic test based on his psychodynamic theory of envy. The instrument presents a picture of some exceptional people achieving great things who don't apologize for their greatness, and doesn’t explicitly ask the patient - I mean, reader - for their opinion. If the reader has no strong opinion, or says something like "Good for them, I guess," she passes the test. "I like these people and will use them as a role model" also passes. Some specific criticisms (see below) may also pass. If the reader says "Ah, people who are better than the pathetic sheep around them, just like I'm better than all the pathetic sheep around me!", she . . . still passes the test. That's not what it's testing for! You fail the test if you absolutely freak out about some combination of the Rand characters themselves and the potential existence of arrogant people who identify with the Rand characters. The secret is that it's not a screening test for the kind of people who would get featured on /r/iamverysmart. It's a screening test for the kind of people who would comment on /r/iamverysmart, ie the self-designated Tall Poppy Police, ie the people who build their ego off being the enforcers of the rule that you're not allowed to look better than anyone else. These people's basic mental stance is to hate people who seem too excellent. They don't think of it in these terms. They think of it as calling out arrogance, although if you look too closely you'll find their definition of arrogance covers anyone who seems excellent and but doesn't spend all their time apologizing and abasing themselves and denying it. The brilliance of Teach-Rand is how he-she draws this tendency to the foreground For example, why the whole "Objectivism" thing? Not because value is necessarily completely objective, but because the idea that any value might ever be even partially objective freaks out the Tall Poppy Syndrome people. Mention value at all, and they say you must be trying to secretly smuggle in the assumption that you are more valuable than other people (and therefore you are less valuable than other people, and therefore they are better than you). The same is true of Reason. Mention that Reason exists, and they'll interpret it as a claim that you, the only rational person, are claiming to always be right and infallible. But (they retort) actually nobody knows anything, and the only wise people are the people like them who humbly admit this. (how do you decide what's true without Reason? By bias-based-reasoning - "You say X, but I can imagine a way that would come from a place of believing you're better than other people, therefore, Not-X is true. You say that's a logical fallacy? That must come from a place of believing you're smarter than everyone else and the only person who can use Facts and Logic.") The Teach-Rand test is designed to catch the sort of person who, if someone says that on a right triangle a^2 + b^2 = c^2, responds with "Oh, so you're claiming to be some kind of right triangle expert who's better than the rest of us? You really need to work on that arrogance problem! Super cringe!" Any criticism of the book that doesn't come from this particular place is irrelevant to the test and doesn't count against your grade. (which is good, because the books are bad in a lot of ways. But that's fine - Rorschach blots don't also have to be great art!) Still, I don’t think she’s the superman (superwoman?) who successfully transcends the dichotomy Her philosophy is only as strong as its proofs of Objective Correctness, which I consider weak. Without those, you need some subjective motivation to glue things together - of which altruism is the most popular. But also, don’t we like altruism? When we’re bestriding the Earth like colossi, working on our glorious rocket ships to colonize the universe, isn’t part of what we’re thinking “this is going to revolutionize humankind and make everybody better off?” If you force yourself to reject that motivation, to just repeat “no no no, I’m only doing this because rockets are really big and make cool explosions”, aren’t you cutting out a part of yourself, in exactly the way Nietzschean masters are supposed to try to avoid doing? I find something very compelling about Rand. I think she goes some of the way to answering the Andrew Tate objection to master morality. But she’s a means and not an end. A real superman would have to figure out some way to reintroduce basic human kindness. IX. Matt Yglesias Yglesias’s mantra - “good things are good” - is too perfect and profound to come from anyone other than an esoteric master of Nietzschean philosophy. Good Straussians ignore the title and focus on the subtitle. Nietzsche wrote in the 1890s. There were still real nobles and emperors walking around; communists had not yet started calling capitalism “late capitalism”. Sure, his world was probably some sort of weak compromise between master and slave morality, but it was different from our weak compromise. Our weak compromise was forged through dialogue and warfare with fascism’s novel take on master morality and socialism’s novel take on slave morality. I think of Yglesias - who combines an insistence that good things are good and a proclivity for embiggenment with commitments to democracy, the welfare state, and the poorest among us - as one of its most self-conscious proponents. When I first titled this post, I didn’t know that Richard Hanania had come to the same conclusion and created this face-mash-up of Matt Yglesias and Nietzsche. The compromise goes something like: Everyone is equal before the law, before the metaphorical throne of metaphorical God, and in some poorly defined philosophical sense. This is very important. It’s our headline result. Everything else should be interpreted in light of this central fact.

Inline links: a real answer here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!OtNv!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6ae1aaf2-6cc3-488c-b0a7-5df62eee457b_225x225.jpeg, Elsewhere, Sadly, Porn, /r/iamverysmart, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!MzIr!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff03d1a9d-5ffc-45ff-84bc-db3388915bbc_259x390.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!hYvV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd0f9b152-da12-4525-b062-b4c14d8b8005_383x373.png

Thus Spoke Zarathustra1 mentions across 1 issues

Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 08, 2024 and August 08, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "it is of utmost importance in Thus Spoke Zarathustra". It most often appears alongside 10240, 4chan, @slatestarcodex.

Reference entry: Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 08, 2024
Last seen: August 08, 2024
Book title: Thus Spoke Zarathustra

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Highlights From The Comments On Nietzsche August 08, 2024

10240 1 shared issues
4chan 1 shared issues
@slatestarcodex 1 shared issues
Acemoglu & Robinson 1 shared issues
Achillead 1 shared issues

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August 08, 2024 · Original source

Nietzsche calls for a new kind of morality. He wants us to try different perspectives on living, to forge our own categorical imperative, to develop our own virtues. I should add that the idea of the übermensch is a weird one for Nietzsche: it is of utmost importance in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but barely mentioned elsewhere. But the idea is of a world-affirming individual who has completely overcome the sickness of Christianity and can live in such a way that at the end of their lives they shout da capo! Do it all over again, without change or alteration. That’s what it means to embrace the eternal recurrence.

Time Loops1 mentions across 1 issues

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

Reference entry: Time Loops
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 17, 2024
Last seen: May 17, 2024
Book title: Time Loops

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Choose Book Review Finalists 2024 May 17, 2024

A Canticle For Leibowitz 1 shared issues
A Farewell to Alms 1 shared issues
A Husband 1 shared issues
A Practical Guide to Evil 1 shared issues
A Thousand Ways to Please 1 shared issues

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May 17, 2024 · Original source

...euhand The Trial The Unconsoled The Untethered Soul The Vegetarian The Wages of Destruction The Wheel of Time The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy Three Days in Dwarfland Time Loops Two Arms and a Head War and Peace Warrior's Woman What Even Is Gender? When We Cease To Understand The World Who We Are And How We Got Here Why Fish Don't Exist Winnie-t...

To Kill A Mockingbird1 mentions across 1 issues

To Kill A Mockingbird is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 18, 2021 and February 18, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "traumatized eighteen-year-olds who have written 10,000 pages on symbolism in To Kill A Mockingbird". It most often appears alongside American education, Appalachian, Baby Einstein.

Reference entry: To Kill A Mockingbird
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: February 18, 2021
Last seen: February 18, 2021
Book title: To Kill A Mockingbird

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Book Review: The Cult Of Smart February 18, 2021

American education 1 shared issues
Appalachian 1 shared issues
Baby Einstein 1 shared issues
Bezoses 1 shared issues
Bryan Caplan 1 shared issues

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February 18, 2021 · Original source

I am so, so tired of socialists who admit that the current system is a helltopian torturescape, then argue that we must prevent anyone from ever being able to escape it. Who promise that once the last alternative is closed off, once the last nice green place where a few people manage to hold off the miseries of the world is crushed, why then the helltopian torturescape will become a lovely utopia full of rainbows and unicorns. If you can make your system less miserable, make your system less miserable! Do it before forcing everyone else to participate in it under pain of imprisonment if they refuse! Forcing everyone to participate in your system and then making your system something other than a meat-grinder that takes in happy children and spits out dead-eyed traumatized eighteen-year-olds who have written 10,000 pages on symbolism in To Kill A Mockingbird and had zero normal happy experiences - is doing things super, super backwards!

To Me, You’re Perfect1 mentions across 1 issues

To Me, You’re Perfect is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 20, 2024 and November 20, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "This is “To Me, You’re Perfect” by Ria Hagane". It most often appears alongside /r/ImaginaryWarhammer, 19th Century, Abstract/Modern.

Reference entry: To Me, You’re Perfect
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: November 20, 2024
Last seen: November 20, 2024
Book title: To Me, You’re Perfect
Likely author: Ria Hagane

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How Did You Do On The AI Art Turing Test? November 20, 2024

ImaginaryWarhammer 1 shared issues
19th Century 1 shared issues
Modern 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
Agony In The Garden 1 shared issues

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California Gubernatorial Candidates From Z to Z

November 20, 2024 · Original source

AI. This is “To Me, You’re Perfect” by Ria Hagane on Nightcafe, made with DALL-E3.

Inline links: “To Me, You’re Perfect”

To The Police Officer Who Refused To Sit In The Same Room As My Son Because He’s A ‘Gang Banger'1 mentions across 1 issues

To The Police Officer Who Refused To Sit In The Same Room As My Son Because He’s A ‘Gang Banger' is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 24, 2022 and May 24, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "A typical example is To The Police Officer Who Refused To Sit In The Same Room As My Son Because He’s A ‘Gang Banger". It most often appears alongside #Abolitionist, #AntiNazi, #antiwar.

Reference entry: To The Police Officer Who Refused To Sit In The Same Room As My Son Because He’s A ‘Gang Banger'
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 24, 2022
Last seen: May 24, 2022
Book title: To The Police Officer Who Refused To Sit In The Same Room As My Son Because He’s A ‘Gang Banger'

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California Gubernatorial Candidates From Z to Z May 24, 2022

#Abolitionist 1 shared issues
#AntiNazi 1 shared issues
#antiwar 1 shared issues
#Democratic 1 shared issues
#ENCRYPTION 1 shared issues

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May 24, 2022 · Original source

...“"In essential things, unity; in nonessential things, liberty”, and one suspects he thinks very many things are essential. The important question is: are his poems good? A typical example is To The Police Officer Who Refused To Sit In The Same Room As My Son Because He’s A ‘Gang Banger : How dare you! How dare you pull this mantle from your sloven sleeve and think it worthy enough to cover my boy. How dare you judge when you also wallow in this mud. So...

Tom Sawyer1 mentions across 1 issues

Tom Sawyer is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 21, 2021 and January 21, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "There's a scene in Tom Sawyer"; "'There's a scene in Tom Sawyer where Tom runs away from town and is presumed dead.'". It most often appears alongside 7500 people signed a petition, Alex Tabarrok, Balaji Srinivasan.

Reference entry: Tom Sawyer
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: January 21, 2021
Last seen: January 21, 2021
Book title: Tom Sawyer

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Still Alive January 21, 2021

7500 people signed a petition 1 shared issues
Alex Tabarrok 1 shared issues
Balaji Srinivasan 1 shared issues
Bitcoin 1 shared issues
Bolshevik Revolution 1 shared issues

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Still Alive

January 21, 2021 · Original source

There's a scene in Tom Sawyer where Tom runs away from town and is presumed dead. He returns just as they're holding his funeral, and gets to listen to everyone praise his life and talk about how much they loved him. Seems like a good deal. Likewise, Garrison Keillor said that - since they say such nice things at people's funerals - it was a shame he was going to miss his own by just a few days.

Trans1 mentions across 1 issues

Trans is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 02, 2022 and September 02, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Trans got exactly 8.0". It most often appears alongside 1587, 1587, A Year Of No Significance, @campeters4.

Reference entry: Trans
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 02, 2022
Last seen: September 02, 2022
Book title: Trans

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Book Review Contest 2022 Winners September 02, 2022

1587 1 shared issues
1587, A Year Of No Significance 1 shared issues
@campeters4 1 shared issues
a_reader 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues

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September 02, 2022 · Original source

Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, reviewed by Ashadyna.

Inline links: Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

Unsettled is about the science of global warming; both reviews were excellent but very long; read them if you’re interested in this topic. Trans got exactly 8.0 and I was forced to decide whether by “above 8” I meant “including 8” or “literally above 8” and how much I wanted to start World War III in the comments section; I apologize to the author for chickening out. Albion is a bizarre 19th-century experimental epic poem, and the review is excellent; this is another one I feel bad for not being able to include.

Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality1 mentions across 1 issues

Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 02, 2022 and September 02, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality , reviewed by Ashadyna". It most often appears alongside 1587, 1587, A Year Of No Significance, @campeters4.

Reference entry: Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 02, 2022
Last seen: September 02, 2022
Book title: Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality
Likely author: Ashadyna

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Book Review Contest 2022 Winners September 02, 2022

1587 1 shared issues
1587, A Year Of No Significance 1 shared issues
@campeters4 1 shared issues
a_reader 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues

Source context

September 02, 2022 · Original source

Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, reviewed by Ashadyna.

Inline links: Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

Transgressing Boundaries: A Non-Binary, Non-Toxic, Non-Violent Journey1 mentions across 1 issues

Transgressing Boundaries: A Non-Binary, Non-Toxic, Non-Violent Journey is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 21, 2024 and February 21, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "most irritatingly narcissistic book titles they can think of. Such as: Transgressing Boundaries: A Non-Binary, Non-Toxic, Non-Violent Journey". It most often appears alongside 2017 SSC survey, A Woman First: First Woman: A Memoir, Aella.

Reference entry: Transgressing Boundaries: A Non-Binary, Non-Toxic, Non-Violent Journey
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: February 21, 2024
Last seen: February 21, 2024
Book title: Transgressing Boundaries: A Non-Binary, Non-Toxic, Non-Violent Journey

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Highlights From The Comments On Polyamory February 21, 2024

2017 SSC survey 1 shared issues
A Woman First: First Woman: A Memoir 1 shared issues
Aella 1 shared issues
Amish 1 shared issues
Anomie 1 shared issues

Source context

February 21, 2024 · Original source

Transgressing Boundaries: A Non-Binary, Non-Toxic, Non-Violent Journey Neutralizing Poison: The Fourth Level of Self-Healing (the first three being, of course, Curing Light Wounds, Slowing the Venom, and Banishing Blindness, and the sequel being Returning from the Underworld) The Love of an Influencer: Very Different from Conventional Love

Trapped In A Dilbert World1 mentions across 1 issues

Trapped In A Dilbert World is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 16, 2026 and January 16, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "You can read his frustration in his book titles: Trapped In A Dilbert World". It most often appears alongside Adams, Alice, All-Seeing Eye.

Reference entry: Trapped In A Dilbert World
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: January 16, 2026
Last seen: January 16, 2026
Book title: Trapped In A Dilbert World

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The Dilbert Afterlife January 16, 2026

Adams 1 shared issues
Alice 1 shared issues
All-Seeing Eye 1 shared issues
Avatar 1 shared issues
barberpole theory of fashion 1 shared issues

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The Psychopolitics Of Trauma

January 16, 2026 · Original source

Scott Adams never forgave this. Too self-aware to deny it, too narcissistic to accept it, he spent his life searching for a loophole. You can read his frustration in his book titles: How To Fail At Almost Everything And Still Win Big. Trapped In A Dilbert World. Stick To Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain. Still, he refused to stick to comics. For a moment in the late-90s, with books like The Dilbert Principle and The Dilbert Future, he seemed on his way to be becoming a semi-serious business intellectual. He never quite made it, maybe because the Dilbert Principle wasn’t really what managers and consultants wanted to hear:

Trigger Warning: My Radical Feminist Life1 mentions across 1 issues

Trigger Warning: My Radical Feminist Life is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 25, 2024 and January 25, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Sheila Jeffreys’ biography is called Trigger Warning: My Radical Feminist Life". It most often appears alongside 1979 study on capital punishment by psychologists, 2016 election, Bayesian updating.

Reference entry: Trigger Warning: My Radical Feminist Life
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: January 25, 2024
Last seen: January 25, 2024
Book title: Trigger Warning: My Radical Feminist Life

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The Psychopolitics Of Trauma January 25, 2024

1979 study on capital punishment by psychologists 1 shared issues
2016 election 1 shared issues
Bayesian updating 1 shared issues
Big Government 1 shared issues
Big Tech 1 shared issues

Source context

January 25, 2024 · Original source

A Google search brought up this lovely t-shirt. I think eBay’s policy of promoting inclusiveness by displaying shirts on ethnically diverse models may have failed them in this case. This is only the tip of the iceberg. Donald Trump Jr has a book called Triggered, and a biweekly TV show of the same name. Sheila Jeffreys’ biography is called Trigger Warning: My Radical Feminist Life. Jeffreys and Trump Jr may not have much else in common, but they are united by a shared appreciation for applying this technical psychiatric term to politics. I think this makes the most sense if political triggering and psychiatric triggering are literally the same thing because political toxicity is a subspecies of PTSD. D2: Persistent and exaggerated negative beliefs or expectations about oneself, others, or the world. Do I even need to explain this one? D3: Persistent distorted cognitions about the cause or consequences of the traumatic events that lead the individual to blame himself or others. As stated, this doesn’t really apply to politics. But I claim this is an overly restrictive description of the true problem, which is a general distortion of cognition around traumatic stimuli. See for example Reasoning, trauma, and PTSD: insights into emotion–cognition interaction. Here the researchers make people solve math/logic puzzles with five apples and eight oranges or whatever; as usual, most people do fine. Then they change the content to traumatic stimuli, like five rapists and eight abusers. Nobody is particularly happy about this change, but traumatized people seem to do worse when the stimuli relate to their own trauma. This is an exact analog to the “five Democrats and eight assault weapons” task discussed above; I don’t know if one line of research inspired the others, but they show some similar results. Other people have even more general findings. You may remember the Stroop Effect, where people have to say the color of words without getting distracted by their content. One variant is the Emotional Stroop Effect, where instead of giving color words (“yellow”, “red”, etc), you use emotional words and traumatic stimuli. Traumatized people tend to do worse at Emotional Stroop tasks relating to their specific trauma. See Modification of cognitive biases related to posttraumatic stress: A systematic review and research agenda. See also The Precision Of Sensory Evidence for a discussion of how this effect might happen. E1: Irritable behavior and angry outbursts (with little or no provocation) typically expressed as verbal or physical aggression toward people and objects. As seen at your family Thanksgiving table. Politics makes otherwise kind people into angry jerks. E3: Hypervigilance This is defined as a heightened awareness of surroundings, constantly scanning for danger, and misinterpreting innocuous stimuli as threatening. Wikipedia describes it as “there is a perpetual scanning of the environment to search for sights, sounds, people, behaviors, smells, or anything else that is reminiscent of activity, threat or trauma”. Dog whistles. Microaggressions. The hallmark of the advanced political partisan is the ability to describe everything the other side (or neutral third parties) do as secretly a political offense, and to reduce every possible situation to their issue of choice. For the past ten years, I’ve been involved in the anti-AI-existential risk movement, and have gotten to know other people in this movement pretty well. I can say with high certainty that the number one motive of these people is that they do not want to be killed by robots. Still, over the years people have ascribed every possible motive to us except that one, for example: It’s a plot by Big Tech to distract from other harms they are committing.

Inline links: Triggered, Trigger Warning: My Radical Feminist Life, Reasoning, trauma, and PTSD: insights into emotion–cognition interaction, Modification of cognitive biases related to posttraumatic stress: A systematic review and research agenda., The Precision Of Sensory Evidence, Dog whistles

Triggered1 mentions across 1 issues

Triggered is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 25, 2024 and January 25, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Donald Trump Jr has a book called Triggered". It most often appears alongside 1979 study on capital punishment by psychologists, 2016 election, Bayesian updating.

Reference entry: Triggered
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: January 25, 2024
Last seen: January 25, 2024
Book title: Triggered

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The Psychopolitics Of Trauma January 25, 2024

1979 study on capital punishment by psychologists 1 shared issues
2016 election 1 shared issues
Bayesian updating 1 shared issues
Big Government 1 shared issues
Big Tech 1 shared issues

Source context

The Psychopolitics Of Trauma

January 25, 2024 · Original source

Experiencing repeated or extreme exposure to aversive details of the traumatic event(s) (e.g., first responders collecting human remains; police officers repeatedly exposed to details of child abuse). This is already quite broad! The victim doesn’t need to have anything bad happen to them - just be threatened with it. And they don’t need to personally be the victim of the threat. They can learn that it happened to someone close to them, or they can just hear about it happening to someone else. A police officer who hears about child abuse may be a trauma victim! The DSM’s job is to draw a medico-legal boundary - this counts, but that doesn’t. The real world has no obligation to obey the DSM, and often doesn’t. For example, can someone be traumatized by something happening to a distant family member? It would be insane to think this has never happened, and that some law of nature limits it to close family members. The DSM is just using the heuristic that probably it’s worse when it’s someone close to you. It goes on: [Part 4] does not apply to exposure through electronic media, television, movies, or pictures, unless this exposure is work-related. Did someone prove it was a natural law that you can only be traumatized by seeing a story on TV if it’s for work? Or is this another unprincipled compromise? People not involved in the DSM, unbound by medicolegal considerations, have added all kinds of stuff to this basic definition. For example, even though it’s not in the strict DSM definition, psychologists almost universally agree that emotional abuse can be traumatizing. And in the current social climate, inevitably people have started talking about collective trauma, eg institutional racism may be traumatizing for some individual black person even if they personally have never been victimized in any dramatic way. The knowledge that people hate their whole group serves as an adequate proxy for anybody abusing them personally. Can you chain all of these exceptions together? Can witnessing a family member suffering emotional abuse be traumatizing? Can learning secondhand about someone encountering institutional racism be traumatizing? Can you be traumatized by hearing on TV that someone was emotionally abused on account of their race? Only if it’s part of your job? At this point the nice crisp distinctions of the DSM are starting to feel a little artificial. I think of all of this in a deflationist, spectrum-y type of way. Anything can be traumatizing if it gives you strong negative emotions and makes you feel helpless and victimized. The DSM points to some categories that are especially likely to cause this kind of reaction. Other people have added their own. But if something you hear on TV makes you feel victimized and helpless, then sure, go ahead and call it traumatizing. If Trump’s election made you feel victimized and helpless, then I’m prepared to say “trauma” is a potentially fruitful lens through which to investigate this response. (I’m not saying that Trump’s election was inherently traumatizing, or that trauma was the correct response. If you prefer, you can think of it as a condemnation of the media for irresponsibly fanning fear of Trump. I’m just saying, without trying to lay blame, that lots of people did experience feelings of fear and helplessness around Trump’s election.) III. I didn’t personally feel traumatized by Trump’s election. My own story, which I don’t claim is atypical or sympathetic in any way, is that in college a bunch of people tried to cancel me for something I’d intended to be an anti-racist joke, but which apparently didn’t come out that way. Former friends turned against me, I got a few death threats, and I was told to attend a criticism session at a local social justice meeting group (which I foolishly did; I thought people would realize I was cooperative and agreed with them, and so lay off - obviously this didn’t work). I briefly considered dropping out of college to avoid the hatred; instead I spent a month locked in my room, waiting for the storm to blow over. It was the worst experience of my life. Ever since then, when I read arguments promoting social justice and cancel culture, or saying that their victims are probably bad people and shouldn’t be allowed to defend themselves, I get all kinds of easily noticeable unpleasant bodily and emotional reactions. When I read good arguments against these positions, I get some kind of nice calm feeling, like that I’m suddenly safer and the world has brightened a little bit. I try as hard as I can to approach these kinds of issues fairly, but it wouldn’t surprise me if I make more of the “five Democrats and eight assault weapons” style reasoning errors there than I would on some boring topic like taxes. Of course, I hear similar stories from people on the other side of this particular culture war. A typical example (this is a pastiche of many people) would be a transgender person who sometimes gets harassed when they try to go into public restrooms. Even if it never gets beyond catcalling, they remember all the stories they read about trans people getting murdered, and even looks of disapproval feel like they carry the potential for physical violence. Then they hear about trans bathroom bills in North Carolina or wherever and absolutely see red; they feel like Society as an abstracted entity is trying to deny their right to exist. Then they invent entirely new kinds of social technology to prevent themselves from ever having to talk to or interact with the sort of people who would support such a thing. Most people haven’t personally been cancelled or discriminated against, and they might not have stories like these. But they might feel like society is “threatening” them with these kinds of experiences. Or they might have “close family” or “close friends” who qualify. Or they might have heard about them on TV. (In a work-related context? Sure, let’s say yes.) But also, there’s the collective trauma exemption! Everybody belongs to various groups - black people, white people, Jews, Christians, men, women, LGBTs, gun owners, socialists, cops. Parts of each of these groups have developed narratives about how they’re being singled out for special persecution by the people in power. You probably believe that some of these groups’ narratives are valid, and others are false and offensive. That doesn’t matter. The important thing is that (some of) the group members believe it. The DSM is quite clear that people react to threatened trauma, not actual trauma. If some very silly person works himself up into a frenzy believing he’s being abused and persecuted because he eats eggs for breakfast, that’s potentially traumatizing, even if his concerns have no basis. But also, everyday political debate crosses lines that would qualify as emotional abuse in any other sphere of life. People get told they’re disgusting or idiotic or deserve to die. They have to watch as powerful rivals plot openly how to ostracize them from polite society. Groups of their enemies get together to spread the rumor that they are Satanists, Nazis, or pedophiles. They have their views twisted into totally false claims that they want to murder children, which then “go viral” to people who otherwise know nothing about them. If you’re not famous, this might not happen to you personally - nobody says “John Smith is a Nazi pedophile”. But John Smith might be a socialist, and someone might say “All socialists are Nazi pedophiles”. If we believe that racism can traumatize minority individuals even if they’re not personally named in the stereotypes, we should believe that the discourse around socialism can traumatize socialists, even if they’re not personally involved. I’m probably not describing this well, so I can only beg you to supplement my inadequate words with your lived experience. All bullying sounds trivial when you’re not involved. “He called me a fatty on the playground!” Well, whatever, laugh it off. But somehow from the inside, iterated over many experiences, coming from people you perceive as more socially powerful than you, it creeps up on you, starts getting power you definitely don’t remember giving it. Think of some discourse you’re involved in, some issue you feel really invested in, and think about the people you find most unfair and enraging on the other side. I dunno, either you’ve had this experience or you haven’t. I think a lot of people feel persecuted and threatened by politics, a lot of people feel emotionally abused by politics, and a lot of people feel like they’ve had vicarious experiences of people they identify with being harmed by politics. This isn’t enough for a formal PTSD diagnosis - they probably didn’t watch the relevant TV news segments in a work-related context. But it might be enough to start doing some really unhealthy things to their brains. IV. Here’s what the DSM has to say about some symptoms of PTSD: B4: Intense or prolonged psychological distress at exposure to internal or external cues that symbolize or resemble an aspect of the traumatic event. The popular term for criterion B4 is “a trigger”. For example, if you were raped, you might be triggered by hearing someone describe rape. This is justification for so-called “trigger warnings” in books and movies. Triggers have long since jumped from the lexicon of PTSD to the lexicon of politics. Left-wingers describe exposure to right-wing ideas or symbols as “triggering”. Right-wingers try to avoid the terminology, because it sounds too leftie, but they have the experience so often that lefties asking right-wingers “oh, are you TRIGGERED?” has become a meme. Twitter searches for “triggered” are an interesting anthropological experience. A Google search brought up this lovely t-shirt. I think eBay’s policy of promoting inclusiveness by displaying shirts on ethnically diverse models may have failed them in this case. This is only the tip of the iceberg. Donald Trump Jr has a book called Triggered, and a biweekly TV show of the same name. Sheila Jeffreys’ biography is called Trigger Warning: My Radical Feminist Life. Jeffreys and Trump Jr may not have much else in common, but they are united by a shared appreciation for applying this technical psychiatric term to politics. I think this makes the most sense if political triggering and psychiatric triggering are literally the same thing because political toxicity is a subspecies of PTSD. D2: Persistent and exaggerated negative beliefs or expectations about oneself, others, or the world. Do I even need to explain this one? D3: Persistent distorted cognitions about the cause or consequences of the traumatic events that lead the individual to blame himself or others. As stated, this doesn’t really apply to politics. But I claim this is an overly restrictive description of the true problem, which is a general distortion of cognition around traumatic stimuli. See for example Reasoning, trauma, and PTSD: insights into emotion–cognition interaction. Here the researchers make people solve math/logic puzzles with five apples and eight oranges or whatever; as usual, most people do fine. Then they change the content to traumatic stimuli, like five rapists and eight abusers. Nobody is particularly happy about this change, but traumatized people seem to do worse when the stimuli relate to their own trauma. This is an exact analog to the “five Democrats and eight assault weapons” task discussed above; I don’t know if one line of research inspired the others, but they show some similar results. Other people have even more general findings. You may remember the Stroop Effect, where people have to say the color of words without getting distracted by their content. One variant is the Emotional Stroop Effect, where instead of giving color words (“yellow”, “red”, etc), you use emotional words and traumatic stimuli. Traumatized people tend to do worse at Emotional Stroop tasks relating to their specific trauma. See Modification of cognitive biases related to posttraumatic stress: A systematic review and research agenda. See also The Precision Of Sensory Evidence for a discussion of how this effect might happen. E1: Irritable behavior and angry outbursts (with little or no provocation) typically expressed as verbal or physical aggression toward people and objects. As seen at your family Thanksgiving table. Politics makes otherwise kind people into angry jerks. E3: Hypervigilance This is defined as a heightened awareness of surroundings, constantly scanning for danger, and misinterpreting innocuous stimuli as threatening. Wikipedia describes it as “there is a perpetual scanning of the environment to search for sights, sounds, people, behaviors, smells, or anything else that is reminiscent of activity, threat or trauma”. Dog whistles. Microaggressions. The hallmark of the advanced political partisan is the ability to describe everything the other side (or neutral third parties) do as secretly a political offense, and to reduce every possible situation to their issue of choice. For the past ten years, I’ve been involved in the anti-AI-existential risk movement, and have gotten to know other people in this movement pretty well. I can say with high certainty that the number one motive of these people is that they do not want to be killed by robots. Still, over the years people have ascribed every possible motive to us except that one, for example: It’s a plot by Big Tech to distract from other harms they are committing.

Inline links: emotional abuse, institutional racism may be traumatizing, entirely new kinds of social technology, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!G65x!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9be25ee8-5d77-4a57-a07d-efff5ff66b44_589x461.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!i3Mp!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F69cd8c8a-3f2b-4842-b8fd-1455aa1310bf_591x587.png, Triggered, Trigger Warning: My Radical Feminist Life, Reasoning, trauma, and PTSD: insights into emotion–cognition interaction, Modification of cognitive biases related to posttraumatic stress: A systematic review and research agenda., The Precision Of Sensory Evidence, Dog whistles

Twitter searches for “triggered” are an interesting anthropological experience. A Google search brought up this lovely t-shirt. I think eBay’s policy of promoting inclusiveness by displaying shirts on ethnically diverse models may have failed them in this case. This is only the tip of the iceberg. Donald Trump Jr has a book called Triggered, and a biweekly TV show of the same name. Sheila Jeffreys’ biography is called Trigger Warning: My Radical Feminist Life. Jeffreys and Trump Jr may not have much else in common, but they are united by a shared appreciation for applying this technical psychiatric term to politics. I think this makes the most sense if political triggering and psychiatric triggering are literally the same thing because political toxicity is a subspecies of PTSD. D2: Persistent and exaggerated negative beliefs or expectations about oneself, others, or the world. Do I even need to explain this one? D3: Persistent distorted cognitions about the cause or consequences of the traumatic events that lead the individual to blame himself or others. As stated, this doesn’t really apply to politics. But I claim this is an overly restrictive description of the true problem, which is a general distortion of cognition around traumatic stimuli. See for example Reasoning, trauma, and PTSD: insights into emotion–cognition interaction. Here the researchers make people solve math/logic puzzles with five apples and eight oranges or whatever; as usual, most people do fine. Then they change the content to traumatic stimuli, like five rapists and eight abusers. Nobody is particularly happy about this change, but traumatized people seem to do worse when the stimuli relate to their own trauma. This is an exact analog to the “five Democrats and eight assault weapons” task discussed above; I don’t know if one line of research inspired the others, but they show some similar results. Other people have even more general findings. You may remember the Stroop Effect, where people have to say the color of words without getting distracted by their content. One variant is the Emotional Stroop Effect, where instead of giving color words (“yellow”, “red”, etc), you use emotional words and traumatic stimuli. Traumatized people tend to do worse at Emotional Stroop tasks relating to their specific trauma. See Modification of cognitive biases related to posttraumatic stress: A systematic review and research agenda. See also The Precision Of Sensory Evidence for a discussion of how this effect might happen. E1: Irritable behavior and angry outbursts (with little or no provocation) typically expressed as verbal or physical aggression toward people and objects. As seen at your family Thanksgiving table. Politics makes otherwise kind people into angry jerks. E3: Hypervigilance This is defined as a heightened awareness of surroundings, constantly scanning for danger, and misinterpreting innocuous stimuli as threatening. Wikipedia describes it as “there is a perpetual scanning of the environment to search for sights, sounds, people, behaviors, smells, or anything else that is reminiscent of activity, threat or trauma”. Dog whistles. Microaggressions. The hallmark of the advanced political partisan is the ability to describe everything the other side (or neutral third parties) do as secretly a political offense, and to reduce every possible situation to their issue of choice. For the past ten years, I’ve been involved in the anti-AI-existential risk movement, and have gotten to know other people in this movement pretty well. I can say with high certainty that the number one motive of these people is that they do not want to be killed by robots. Still, over the years people have ascribed every possible motive to us except that one, for example: It’s a plot by Big Tech to distract from other harms they are committing.

Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!i3Mp!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F69cd8c8a-3f2b-4842-b8fd-1455aa1310bf_591x587.png, Triggered, Trigger Warning: My Radical Feminist Life, Reasoning, trauma, and PTSD: insights into emotion–cognition interaction, Modification of cognitive biases related to posttraumatic stress: A systematic review and research agenda., The Precision Of Sensory Evidence, Dog whistles

A Google search brought up this lovely t-shirt. I think eBay’s policy of promoting inclusiveness by displaying shirts on ethnically diverse models may have failed them in this case. This is only the tip of the iceberg. Donald Trump Jr has a book called Triggered, and a biweekly TV show of the same name. Sheila Jeffreys’ biography is called Trigger Warning: My Radical Feminist Life. Jeffreys and Trump Jr may not have much else in common, but they are united by a shared appreciation for applying this technical psychiatric term to politics. I think this makes the most sense if political triggering and psychiatric triggering are literally the same thing because political toxicity is a subspecies of PTSD. D2: Persistent and exaggerated negative beliefs or expectations about oneself, others, or the world. Do I even need to explain this one? D3: Persistent distorted cognitions about the cause or consequences of the traumatic events that lead the individual to blame himself or others. As stated, this doesn’t really apply to politics. But I claim this is an overly restrictive description of the true problem, which is a general distortion of cognition around traumatic stimuli. See for example Reasoning, trauma, and PTSD: insights into emotion–cognition interaction. Here the researchers make people solve math/logic puzzles with five apples and eight oranges or whatever; as usual, most people do fine. Then they change the content to traumatic stimuli, like five rapists and eight abusers. Nobody is particularly happy about this change, but traumatized people seem to do worse when the stimuli relate to their own trauma. This is an exact analog to the “five Democrats and eight assault weapons” task discussed above; I don’t know if one line of research inspired the others, but they show some similar results. Other people have even more general findings. You may remember the Stroop Effect, where people have to say the color of words without getting distracted by their content. One variant is the Emotional Stroop Effect, where instead of giving color words (“yellow”, “red”, etc), you use emotional words and traumatic stimuli. Traumatized people tend to do worse at Emotional Stroop tasks relating to their specific trauma. See Modification of cognitive biases related to posttraumatic stress: A systematic review and research agenda. See also The Precision Of Sensory Evidence for a discussion of how this effect might happen. E1: Irritable behavior and angry outbursts (with little or no provocation) typically expressed as verbal or physical aggression toward people and objects. As seen at your family Thanksgiving table. Politics makes otherwise kind people into angry jerks. E3: Hypervigilance This is defined as a heightened awareness of surroundings, constantly scanning for danger, and misinterpreting innocuous stimuli as threatening. Wikipedia describes it as “there is a perpetual scanning of the environment to search for sights, sounds, people, behaviors, smells, or anything else that is reminiscent of activity, threat or trauma”. Dog whistles. Microaggressions. The hallmark of the advanced political partisan is the ability to describe everything the other side (or neutral third parties) do as secretly a political offense, and to reduce every possible situation to their issue of choice. For the past ten years, I’ve been involved in the anti-AI-existential risk movement, and have gotten to know other people in this movement pretty well. I can say with high certainty that the number one motive of these people is that they do not want to be killed by robots. Still, over the years people have ascribed every possible motive to us except that one, for example: It’s a plot by Big Tech to distract from other harms they are committing.

Trojan Sky1 mentions across 1 issues

Trojan Sky is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 22, 2025 and April 22, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Trojan Sky , a scifi story by Richard Ngo". It most often appears alongside 80,000 Hours, @msamalam, A Ketamine Addict’s Perspective On Musk.

Reference entry: Trojan Sky
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 22, 2025
Last seen: April 22, 2025
Book title: Trojan Sky
Likely author: Richard Ngo

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Links For April 2025 April 22, 2025

80,000 Hours 1 shared issues
@msamalam 1 shared issues
A Ketamine Addict’s Perspective On Musk 1 shared issues
Agent Village 1 shared issues
AGI Fridays 1 shared issues

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Links For April 2025

April 22, 2025 · Original source

41: Trojan Sky, a scifi story by Richard Ngo. Straussian reading: Gur tyvgpuref ercerfrag evtug-jvat Gjvggre vasyhrapref.

Inline links: Trojan Sky

True Believer1 mentions across 1 issues

True Believer is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 16, 2024 and August 16, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "the Stan Lee biography “ True Believer ”". It most often appears alongside 20th Century Fox, Abomination, Abomination.

Reference entry: True Believer
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 16, 2024
Last seen: August 16, 2024
Book title: True Believer

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Your Book Review: Silver Age Marvel Comics August 16, 2024

20th Century Fox 1 shared issues
Abomination 1 shared issues
Abomination 1 shared issues
Abraham Lincoln 1 shared issues
Action Comics 1 shared issues

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Your Book Review: Silver Age Marvel Comics

August 16, 2024 · Original source

There are plenty of histories of the early days of Marvel Comics, but my favorite by far was Sean Howe’s, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (The audio book is also good). A good supplement if you want to read more is the Stan Lee biography “True Believer”.

Inline links: Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, True Believer

True History: An Account of Cannibal Captivity in Brazil1 mentions across 1 issues

True History: An Account of Cannibal Captivity in Brazil 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 "hilariously titled True History: An Account of Cannibal Captivity in Brazil". It most often appears alongside A Change of Heart, Abraham, Adams.

Reference entry: True History: An Account of Cannibal Captivity in Brazil
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 12, 2025
Last seen: September 12, 2025
Book title: True History: An Account of Cannibal Captivity in Brazil

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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

His final deception was to talk his way onto a French ship, the Catherine, in late 1554. After four months crossing the Atlantic, Europe was in sight, and he was free. He later wrote a bestselling memoir about his time among the Tupinambá, whose English translation was hilariously titled True History: An Account of Cannibal Captivity in Brazil.

A woodcutting illustration from Staden’s book that illustrates part of a Tupinambá cannibalism ritual. True history, visualized. At one point in his book, Staden recounts admonishing a Tupinambá warrior named Cunhambebe about eating human flesh. From Duffy and Metcalf: (Ch. 2, pg. 67)

Trump Tower1 mentions across 1 issues

Trump Tower is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 22, 2025 and April 22, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Trump Tower is a BDSM erotic novel published in 2011". It most often appears alongside 80,000 Hours, @msamalam, A Ketamine Addict’s Perspective On Musk.

Reference entry: Trump Tower
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 22, 2025
Last seen: April 22, 2025
Book title: Trump Tower

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Links For April 2025 April 22, 2025

80,000 Hours 1 shared issues
@msamalam 1 shared issues
A Ketamine Addict’s Perspective On Musk 1 shared issues
Agent Village 1 shared issues
AGI Fridays 1 shared issues

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Links For April 2025

April 22, 2025 · Original source

16: Trump Tower is a BDSM erotic novel published in 2011. It was originally credited to Donald Trump as author (with Jeffrey Robinson as ghostwriter), but at the last moment Trump changed his mind, and Robinson was listed as the author. I appreciated Ozy Brennan's review of Saddam Hussein’s erotic novel, and nominate them to cover this one too. 17: Wikipedia on the beginning of the Horslips, one of Ireland’s most famous rock bands: Barry Devlin, Eamon Carr and Charles O'Connor met when they worked at Arks Advertising Agency in Dublin. They were cajoled into pretending to be a band for a Harp Lager commercial but needed a keyboard player. Devlin said he knew a Jim Lockhart who would fit the bill. The four enjoyed the act so much that they decided to try being proper rock performers. 18: I complained that Elon Musk’s idea of “truth-seeking AI” was bad for alignment, and I still think this is true in the very long run. But I can’t deny it’s an inspired / providential choice for the current moment, already paying dividends (X): 19: Lyman Stone Continues Being Dumb, The Fallacious Inferences Of Lyman Stone, and Against Lyman Stone are some of this month’s top anti-Lyman-Stone content. 20: New polling on the Middle Ages: 21: More new-ish AI policy substacks potentially worth your time: You may remember Helen Toner from the OpenAI board drama, but she’s also an experienced and thoughtful scholar on AI policy and now has a Substack, Rising Tide. I especially appreciated Nonproliferation Is The Wrong Approach To AI Misuse.

Inline links: Trump Tower, Ozy Brennan's review of Saddam Hussein’s erotic novel, the beginning of the Horslips, bad for alignment, already paying dividends (X), https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!nPJW!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fad66b2c0-0180-4fc1-afc1-25de0f0ce40f_533x518.png, Lyman Stone Continues Being Dumb, The Fallacious Inferences Of Lyman Stone, Against Lyman Stone, New polling on the Middle Ages, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!9b_4!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe3163eca-eaf4-492a-ac68-eadefa169be2_632x419.png, Rising Tide, Nonproliferation Is The Wrong Approach To AI Misuse

Turn Left To Eden1 mentions across 1 issues

Turn Left To Eden is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 20, 2023 and April 20, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Short fiction by someone I know: Turn Left To Eden". It most often appears alongside 15 minute cities, 200 Concrete Problems In AI Interpretability, 2022 ACX Forecasting contest.

Reference entry: Turn Left To Eden
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 20, 2023
Last seen: April 20, 2023
Book title: Turn Left To Eden

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Links For April 2023 April 20, 2023

15 minute cities 1 shared issues
200 Concrete Problems In AI Interpretability 1 shared issues
2022 ACX Forecasting contest 1 shared issues
AB 835 1 shared issues
Africa 1 shared issues

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Links For April 2023

April 20, 2023 · Original source

10: Short fiction by someone I know: Turn Left To Eden 11: Short fiction by someone I know: The Library of Slaanesh 12: Cremieux double-checks the “penises getting longer” link from last time and finds that No, Penises Haven’t Gotten Longer. 13: GPT-4 starts a business (click image for more). Not of actual AI interest, but funny: 14: Jiankui He, jailed a few years ago for genetically engineering human babies, is back: 15: Glaze is a free service for artists who want to prevent image model AIs from copying their style. If I understand right, you make your picture, apply their (mostly invisible to humans) filter, and then the picture becomes an adversarial example that AIs can’t process correctly: 16: The Extended IQ Classification (Classified) 17: Eliezer in TIME Magazine. Related: 18: Related: interview with Ryan Kupyn, winner of the 2022 ACX Forecasting contest, on forecasting AGI: 19: Related: Geoffrey Hinton, probably the most accomplished AI scientist in the world, says that “until quite recently, I thought it was going to be like 20 to 50 years before we have general purpose AI, and now I think it may be 20 years or less”. Also that AI wiping out humanity is “not inconceivable . . . that’s all I’ll say”. 20: Related: you’ve probably all seen this by now, but Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter. 30,000 people - including deep learning pioneer Yoshua Bengio, former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Gary Marcus, and MIRI director Nate Soares - have signed a letter calling for a six month pause on training AIs bigger than GPT-4. Many people have made fun of this, noting that nobody has an argument for why a six month delay would help anything. And an additional reason for eye-rolling: training AIs larger than GPT-4 is extremely expensive and hard, the most likely people to do it within a six month timespan are OpenAI themselves, and they’ve announced they’re taking a break and not planning on doing this, so the letter is demanding a stop to something which probably won’t happen anyway. I think it’s intended be a compromise between many people all vaguely against current levels of AI progress for different reasons (Scott Aaronson says - I can’t tell how seriously - that some are AI researchers who want to be able to publish papers on the current generation of AI without them becoming obsolete halfway through peer review), most of them are thinking of it as mood-affiliation-y “let’s make noise and show lots of people are worried about AI and want action”, and “a six month pause” was a sufficiently vague proposal that it didn’t prevent any of these people from signing. You could have done just as well with a letter saying “AI BAD”, except that people would have taken it less seriously. Less cynically, FLI (the group behind the letter) has put out a list of concrete policy proposals they would like people to discuss during the pause. [update: here’s Max Tegmark from FLI explaining what he hopes to achieve with the letter/pause] The alignment community always figured their concerns sounded too weird for normal people to care about, that politics was a lost cause, and that our best hope lay in technical research. They also hoped that sometime in the future there would be a “fire alarm” - something would happen to get people and policy-makers’ attention - and then the political route would open up. I think we always imagined this as some AI-initiated disaster destroying a city or something. I personally am pretty surprised it was just “GPT-4 got released and was very good”. Still, that is what happened, and I’m updating. In fact, I’ve updated so far that I’m starting to worry that the problem won’t be building a political coalition against unsafe AI, the problem will be not overshooting and banning all AI forever. I’m against this: I think society’s current track is toward other existential risks or dystopia, that AI could kill everybody but could also create post-scarcity and an end to most of our current problems, and that at some point (not yet!) the risk of continuing the current path indefinitely becomes worse than the risk of just going with AI and seeing what happens. In my ideal world, we would take ten or twenty years to go really slowly with AI, pouring lots of resources into alignment the whole time - but eventually, we would take the plunge. Everything I’ve said on this topic in the has been about giving us that breathing room and those resources. Still, I also want to make sure we don’t totally kill AI the way we’ve killed (to various degrees) nuclear power, supersonic flight, and genetic engineering. I’m still trying to calibrate what that means I should be doing, but I have a lot of respect for everyone on all sides. Except the people making terrible arguments (you know who you are!) 21: I’m not sure what this means in real life or why this would have changed, but congratulations to Peter Thiel, I guess: 22: This month in institution design: The Pear Ring is a distinctive ring you can wear to signal that you’re single and interested in people introducing themselves or flirting with you. Good idea in a vacuum, but I’m worried about the two usual banes of things like this - how do you build up a critical mass who understand the signal, and how do you prevent negative selection (even if it’s just “selection for weird people who like weird institution design things”?) Also, this is one of the rare cases where a startup is selling a practical product and I’d prefer a subscription-based Internet Of Things monstrosity - surely it would be even better if you spotted someone wearing the ring and then you could use your smartphone to call up their dating profile. 23: A few years ago I wrote Trump: A Setback For Trumpism, about how after Trump was elected, support for most of his policies (including immigration restrictions) fell. A new paper confirms that this is a general pattern whenever right-wing populists win an election. I continue to be interested in why this is true for right-wing populists in particular. 24: 200 Concrete Problems In AI Interpretability. “You can note which you're working on, and reach out to other people doing the same.” 25: Some good discussion of Nayib Bukele’s apparently successful anti-gang crackdown in El Salvador: Richard Hanania presents evidence that it’s not just a “deal with the gangs”, it’s a real crackdown that should be embarrassing to other countries that choose not to do this.

Twilight of the Idols1 mentions across 1 issues

Twilight of the Idols is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 08, 2024 and August 08, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "From Twilight of the Idols :". It most often appears alongside 10240, 4chan, @slatestarcodex.

Reference entry: Twilight of the Idols
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 08, 2024
Last seen: August 08, 2024
Book title: Twilight of the Idols

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Highlights From The Comments On Nietzsche August 08, 2024

10240 1 shared issues
4chan 1 shared issues
@slatestarcodex 1 shared issues
Acemoglu & Robinson 1 shared issues
Achillead 1 shared issues

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