Astral Codex Ten

Books: W

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Books: W

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

Reference Index

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

What We Owe The Future8 mentions across 8 issues

What We Owe The Future is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 8 times across 8 issues between April 03, 2022 and October 17, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Will MacAskill's book What We Owe The Future , on effective altruism and the long-term future"; "He and his book What We Owe The Future have recently been featured"; "These kinds of population ethics problems are just one chapter of What We Owe The Future". It most often appears alongside Will MacAskill, China, effective altruism.

Mention count
8
Issue count
8
First seen
April 03, 2022
Last seen
October 17, 2024
Book title
What We Owe The Future
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Open Thread 218
April 03, 2022 · Original source
5: Related: Will MacAskill's book What We Owe The Future, on effective altruism and the long-term future, is available for pre-order. He says it helps with marketing if people pre-order rather than wait until it comes out, so if you're interested, get it now. You can preorder on Amazon ($27).
Inline links: book, preorder on Amazon
Book Review: What We Owe The Future
August 23, 2022 · Original source
If the point of publishing a book is to have a public relations campaign, Will MacAskill is the greatest English writer since Shakespeare. He and his book What We Owe The Future have recently been featured in the New Yorker, New York Times, Vox, NPR, BBC, The Atlantic, Wired, and Boston Review. He’s been interviewed by Sam Harris, Ezra Klein, Tim Ferriss, Dwarkesh Patel, and Tyler Cowen. Tweeted about by Elon Musk, Andrew Yang, and Matt Yglesias. The publicity spike is no mystery: the effective altruist movement is well-funded and well-organized, they decided to burn “long-termism” into the collective consciousness, and they sure succeeded.
Inline links: What We Owe The Future, New Yorker, New York Times, Vox, NPR, BBC, The Atlantic, Wired, Boston Review, Sam Harris, Ezra Klein, Tim Ferriss, Dwarkesh Patel, Tyler Cowen, Elon Musk, Andrew Yang, Matt Yglesias
But what is “long-termism”? I’m unusually well-placed to answer that, because a few days ago a copy of What We Owe The Future showed up on my doorstep. I was briefly puzzled before remembering that some PR strategies hinge on a book having lots of pre-orders, so effective altruist leadership asked everyone to pre-order the book back in March, so I did. Like the book as a whole, my physical copy was a byproduct of the marketing campaign. Still, I had a perverse urge to check if it really was just lorem ipsum text, one thing led to another, and I ended up reading it. I am pleased to say that it is actual words and sentences and not just filler (aside from pages 15 through 19, which are just a glyph of a human figure copy-pasted nine hundred fifty four times)
Inline links: asked everyone to pre-order the book back in March
So fine. At the risk of joining on an already-overcrowded bandwagon, let’s see what we owe the future.
Links For September 2022
September 06, 2022 · Original source
11: Related: Eli Lifland’s take on What We Owe The Future. Two major disagreements: MacAskill estimates AI risk as 3% chance vs. Lifland (a star forecaster) treats it as 35% chance; MacAskill thinks a 35% chance of dangerous technological stagnation, vs. Lifland’s 5%. He thinks this has important implications for long-termist priorities.
Inline links: Eli Lifland’s take on
"Is Wine Fake?" In Asterisk Magazine
November 21, 2022 · Original source
Book Review - What We Owe The Future: You’ve read mine, this is Kelsey Piper’s. Kelsey is always great, and this is a good window into the battle over the word “long-termism”.
Inline links: Book Review - What We Owe The Future:, mine
Your Book Review: The Educated Mind
July 14, 2023 · Original source
Where do we see this? Only a few months ago, in his book review of What We Owe the Future, Scott responded to the Repugnant Conclusion (a seemingly-unwinnable philosophical paradox) by saying:
Inline links: his book review of
Book Review: The Origins Of Woke
May 01, 2024 · Original source
Like I said with What We Owe The Future, it’s probably unfair to review this book qua book.
Inline links: What We Owe The Future
Contra Stone On EA
May 30, 2024 · Original source
How many effective altruists would have to be in the Bay for Stone to notice? If we assume ability to detect a signal of 0.5 pp, it would take 200x this amount, or 500,000 in the Bay alone. For comparison, the most popular book on effective altruism, Will MacAskill’s What We Owe The Future, sold only 100,000 copies in the whole world.
Book Review: Deep Utopia
October 17, 2024 · Original source
I couldn’t help comparing Deep Utopia to Will MacAskill’s book What We Owe The Future. Both MacAskill and Bostrom are in a weird, almost unprecedented position - Oxford philosophers suddenly thrust onto the world stage by the success of the effective altruism movement. MacAskill got famous and decided to write an Official Important Person Book and promote it on the world stage. Bostrom got famous and decided he didn’t need to pretend to be normal anymore. As a result, Deep Utopia feels less like an academic paper, and more like the sort of things one of the great philosophers of the past might have written, back in the days when philosophical tracts could include a character called Stupidus who secretly represented the Pope.
Why Buddhism Is True3 mentions across 3 issues

Why Buddhism Is True is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between April 23, 2021 and July 10, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "that's what Robert Wright claims in Why Buddhism Is True"; "When reading Why Buddhism is True"; "the finalists are: 5: Why Buddhism Is True". It most often appears alongside Addiction By Design, Double Fold, Down and Out in Paris and London.

Mention count
3
Issue count
3
First seen
April 23, 2021
Last seen
July 10, 2021
Book title
Why Buddhism Is True
Likely author
Eve Bigaj
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Your Book Review: Why Buddhism Is True
April 23, 2021 · Original source
The main character of The Matrix, Neo, gets to choose whether to take the red or blue pill: whether to escape his dream world or remain inside it. Unlike Neo, we're (probably) not trapped in a virtual reality. Nevertheless, we may be living in something of a dream world. At least, that's what Robert Wright claims in Why Buddhism Is True.
What this story shows is that nihilistic vegetables exist (sorry, Greg!), and peddlers of enlightenment (like that swami) are sometimes secretly peddling envegetablement. When reading Why Buddhism is True, I had Greg's tumor, er, in the back of my mind. Wright thinks enlightenment is the ultimate liberation from evolution’s bondage, but is his version of enlightenment better than a hole in the brain? Is he promising a path towards the discovery of important truth (e.g. "only the present is real,” “there is no self”) - or a path towards the destruction of counterevidence to those "truths" (e.g. memories, the self)?
Vote In The Book Review Contest!
June 18, 2021 · Original source
1: Order Without Law 2: On The Natural Faculties 3: Progress And Poverty 4: Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are? 5: Why Buddhism Is True 6: Double Fold 7: The Wizard And The Prophet 8: Through The Eye Of A Needle 9: The Years Of Lyndon Johnson 10: Addiction By Design 11: The Accidental Superpower 12: Humankind 13: The Collapse Of Complex Societies 14: Where’s My Flying Car? 15: Down And Out In Paris And London 16: How Children Fail 17: Plagues And Peoples
Inline links: Order Without Law, On The Natural Faculties, Progress And Poverty, Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are?, Why Buddhism Is True, Double Fold, The Wizard And The Prophet, Through The Eye Of A Needle, The Years Of Lyndon Johnson, Addiction By Design, The Accidental Superpower, Humankind, The Collapse Of Complex Societies, Where’s My Flying Car?, Down And Out In Paris And London, How Children Fail, Plagues And Peoples
Book Review Contest: Winners
July 10, 2021 · Original source
Order Without Law, reviewed by Phil Hazelden Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are, reviewed by Jeff Russell Why Buddhism Is True, reviewed by Eve Bigaj Double Fold, reviewed by Boštjan P The Wizard And The Prophet, reviewed by Maryana Through The Eye Of A Needle, reviewed by Tom Powell Years Of Lyndon Johnson, reviewed by Theodore Ehrenborg Addiction By Design, reviewed by Ketchup Duck The Accidental Superpower, reviewed by Jon Boguth Humankind, reviewed by Neil Roques The Collapse Of Complex Societies, reviewed by Etirabys Where's My Flying Car, reviewed by Jonathan P How Children Fail, reviewed by HonoreDB Plagues And Peoples, reviewed by Joel Ferris (who is looking for a job, email here)
Inline links: Order Without Law, Phil Hazelden, Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are, Jeff Russell, Why Buddhism Is True, Eve Bigaj, Double Fold, Boštjan P, The Wizard And The Prophet, Through The Eye Of A Needle, Years Of Lyndon Johnson, Addiction By Design, The Accidental Superpower, Humankind, The Collapse Of Complex Societies, Etirabys, Where's My Flying Car, How Children Fail, Plagues And Peoples, here
Why Machines Will Never Rule the World3 mentions across 3 issues

Why Machines Will Never Rule the World is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between June 03, 2023 and September 15, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "I arrived at Why Machines Will Never Rule the World by Jobst Landgrebe and Barry Smith"; "The Straussian reading of Why Machines Will Never Rule the World"; "Why Machines Will Never Rule the World is 301 pages". It most often appears alongside Lying For Money, Njal’s Saga, On the Marble Cliffs.

Mention count
3
Issue count
3
First seen
June 03, 2023
Last seen
September 15, 2023
Book title
Why Machines Will Never Rule the World
Likely author
Jobst Landgrebe
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Your Book Review: Why Machines Will Never Rule the World
June 03, 2023 · Original source
I set out to find the best book-length argument—one that really engages with the technical issues—against imminent, world-dooming, Skynet-and-Matrix-manifesting artificial intelligence. I arrived at Why Machines Will Never Rule the World by Jobst Landgrebe and Barry Smith, published by Routledge just last year. Landgrebe, an AI and biomedicine entrepreneur, and Smith, an eminent philosopher, are connected by their study of Edmund Husserl, and the influence of Husserl and phenomenology is clear throughout the book. (“Influence of Husserl” is usually a good enough reason to stop reading something.)
Should you read Why Machines Will Never Rule the World? If you're an AI safety researcher or have a technical interest in the topic, then you might enjoy it. It's sweeping and impeccably researched, but it's also academic and at times demanding, and for long stretches the meat-to-shell ratio is poor. But should you pick up these ideas?
I came away from the Why Machines Will Never Rule the World much less convinced than Landgrebe and Smith would like me to be. Whether or not Turing machines can emulate general intelligence is an open question. (The Church-Turing-Deutsch principle, for example, states that if quantum mechanics is sufficient to describe reality then quantum computers can emulate all physically realizable processes.) Whether or not there exists a mathematics that can fully model complex systems is an open question. The brain is managing more than just intelligence, and it's unclear how many of its processes would need to be emulated to model intelligence alone. Landgrebe and Smith rest very strong conclusions atop strong but leaky propositions.
Vote In The 2023 Book Review Contest
September 08, 2023 · Original source
1: Cities And The Wealth Of Nations / The Question Of Separatism 2: Lying For Money 3: Why Machines Will Never Rule The World 4: Man’s Search For Meaning 5: Njal’s Saga 6: Public Citizens 7: Safe Enough? 8: Secret Government 9: The Educated Mind 10: The Laws Of Trading 11: On The Marble Cliffs 12: The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich 13: The WEIRDest People In The World 14: The Mind Of A Bee 15: Why Nations Fail 16: Zuozhuan
Inline links: Cities And The Wealth Of Nations / The Question Of Separatism, Lying For Money, Why Machines Will Never Rule The World, Man’s Search For Meaning, Njal’s Saga, Public Citizens, Safe Enough?, Secret Government, The Educated Mind, The Laws Of Trading, On The Marble Cliffs, The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich, The WEIRDest People In The World, The Mind Of A Bee, Why Nations Fail, Zuozhuan
Book Review Contest 2023 Winners
September 15, 2023 · Original source
Why Machines Will Never Rule the World, reviewed by Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass. Thom is an AI researcher and winner of the 2022 Passage Prize for Poetry. He occasionally publishes essays at snodgrass.blog.
Inline links: Why Machines Will Never Rule the World, snodgrass.blog
Why Nations Fail3 mentions across 3 issues

Why Nations Fail is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between August 25, 2023 and September 15, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Why Nations Fail is not a very good book"; "Why Nations Fail tries to do narrative history"; "If Why Nations Fail isn't very good". It most often appears alongside Lying For Money, Njal’s Saga, On the Marble Cliffs.

Article page
Why Nations Fail
Mention count
3
Issue count
3
First seen
August 25, 2023
Last seen
September 15, 2023
Book title
Why Nations Fail
Likely author
Declan Trott
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Your Book Review: Why Nations Fail
August 25, 2023 · Original source
Why Nations Fail is not a very good book.
Inline links: Why Nations Fail
Even if correct, it is much less interesting and useful than it appears. Epistemic status: I have a decade-old PhD in economics (not in the field of economic growth) and a handful of peer-reviewed papers in moderately-ranked journals. I'm not claiming to make any original technical points, or to give a comprehensive evaluation of the economic growth literature. My criticisms are largely straight from the authors' own mouths. 1. What is this book about? Why is it not very good? Acemoglu and Robinson (AR) argue that countries are rich or poor because of their political institutions, not culture, geography or policy ignorance. I'll do this as much as possible in AR’s own words. Why Nations Fail was written during the Arab Spring, so the preface begins with Egypt. Some stress that Egypt’s poverty is determined primarily by its geography, by the fact that the country is mostly a desert and lacks adequate rainfall, and that its soils and climate do not allow productive agriculture1. Others instead point to cultural attributes ... Egyptians, they argue, lack the same sort of work ethic and cultural traits that have allowed others to prosper, and instead have accepted Islamic beliefs that are inconsistent with economic success. A third approach, the one dominant among economists and policy pundits, is based on the notion that the rulers of Egypt simply don’t know what is needed to make their country prosperous, and have followed incorrect policies and strategies in the past. Unsurprisingly, those other economists and policy pundits turn out to be wrong and the authors turn out to be right. In this book we’ll argue that the Egyptians in Tahrir Square, not most academics and commentators, have the right idea. In fact, Egypt is poor precisely because it has been ruled by a narrow elite that have organized society for their own benefit at the expense of the vast mass of people. And the Egyptian lesson turns out to be general. Whether it is North Korea, Sierra Leone, or Zimbabwe, we’ll show that poor countries are poor for the same reason that Egypt is poor. Countries such as Great Britain and the United States became rich because their citizens overthrew the elites who controlled power and created a society where political rights were much more broadly distributed, where the government was accountable and responsive to citizens, and where the great mass of people could take advantage of economic opportunities. What are “institutions” anyway? (The economic and political kind, not the prison and mental hospital kind.) Basically, AR mean politics. The word "institutions" occurs over 1000 times in Why Nations Fail2. I'll just focus on how AR use it without worrying about the dictionary, different schools of economics, or other social sciences. They begin with what institutions do rather than what they are. Nogales, Arizona, is in the United States. Its inhabitants have access to the economic institutions of the United States, which enable them to choose their occupations freely, acquire schooling and skills, and encourage their employers to invest in the best technology, which leads to higher wages for them. They also have access to political institutions that allow them to take part in the democratic process, to elect their representatives, and replace them if they misbehave. The word is used dozens more times before ARattempt a more general definition. Each society functions with a set of economic and political rules created and enforced by the state and the citizens collectively. Economic institutions shape economic incentives: the incentives to become educated, to save and invest, to innovate and adopt new technologies, and so on. It is the political process that determines what economic institutions people live under, and it is the political institutions that determine how this process works. So while economic and political institutions can be separated, it is the political institutions that matter in the long run. The good kind of institutions that lead to economic growth are "inclusive", as opposed to "extractive". To be inclusive, economic institutions must feature secure private property, an unbiased system of law, and a provision of public services that provides a level playing field in which people can exchange and contract; it also must permit the entry of new businesses and allow people to choose their careers. ... such rights must exist for the majority of people in society. Political pluralism is necessary, but not sufficient without a strong centralised state. ... political institutions that distribute power broadly in society and subject it to constraints are pluralistic. ... the key to understanding why South Korea and the United States have inclusive economic institutions is not just their pluralistic political institutions but also their sufficiently centralized and powerful states. A telling contrast is with the East African nation of Somalia. I am still a bit hazy as to the relative importance of de jure written rules versus the de facto struggle for power. AR are somewhat circular: Politics is the process by which a society chooses the rules that will govern it. Politics surrounds institutions ... When there is conflict over institutions, what happens depends on which people or group wins out in the game of politics ... The political institutions of a society are a key determinant of the outcome of this game. They are the rules that govern incentives in politics. But overall, you could just say ‘politics’ and not be too far off. AR do this themselves occasionally. South Korea ended up with very different economic institutions than the North because different people with different interests and objectives made the decisions about how to structure society. In other words, South Korea had different politics. AR's academic reputation is based on statistical analysis, but Why Nations Fail tries to do narrative history, IMHO not very well. When Jeffrey Sachs reviewed the book, he complained: They never define their key variables with precision, present any quantitative data or classifications based on those definitions, or offer even a single table, figure, or regression line to demonstrate the relationships that they contend underpin all economic history. Instead, they present a stream of assertions and anecdotes about the inclusive or extractive nature of this or that institution. AR replied baldly: Sachs ... argues that we provide no evidence. Right, we do not in the book. But that’s because a book for a general audience is not the right forum for presenting academic research, and we spent many years of our lives precisely on writing academic papers providing exactly the sort of evidence. ... So yes, we don’t provide the econometric evidence in the book, which isn’t of course the right place to do it, but econometric evidence is abundantly loud in the way it speaks on these topics. So, don't expect Why Nations Fail to be an accessible explanation of AR's academic work, which is what I was hoping for when I first read it. What do they spend over 500 pages on then? Well, after the preface, there's fifteen chapters of, as Sachs says, "assertions and anecdotes". Not just about "the inclusive or extractive nature of this or that institution", to be fair, but how institutions can change at "critical junctures" such as the Black Death or colonisation, and why it can be in elites’ interests to block economic innovation if it threatens their power, so that growth under extractive institutions is unlikely to be sustained. These chapters are not particularly good – I found them poorly organised and repetitive – but not particularly bad, if you are willing to accept the underlying premise that institutions are the main determinant of economic growth. Cumulatively they have an effect similar to the Old Testament, if you are willing to accept the underlying premise that the fortunes of the nation of Israel are determined by the LORD. Only the second chapter, ‘Theories that Don't Work’, makes a sustained argument against alternative theories. Geography is disposed of by noting the stark differences at the US-Mexican, North-South Korean and East-West German borders, and the reversal of fortune by which the present day US and Canada only became richer than Mexico, Central and South America following European colonisation. Culture is hand-waved away with the assertion that institutions determine the any relevant cultural behaviours, not the other way around, referring to the same border examples, the rapid catch up of Catholic Europe despite Weber's Protestant Ethic, the malign influence of the European and Ottoman empires on Africa, the range of outcomes within the former British Empire, and the more European population of Argentina and Uruguay versus the US and Canada, or of Columbia versus Ecuador and Peru. Not a bad list of anecdotes, but one could equally well point to the cross-border success of Ashkenazi Jews, overseas Chinese, or Baltic and Volga Germans. Ignorance is simply dismissed with the assertion that "if ignorance were the problem, well-meaning leaders would quickly learn what types of policies increased their citizens’ incomes and welfare, and would gravitate toward those policies." Various good and bad policy changes are explained as the result of political pressures rather than improved knowledge. The implication seems to be that good policies are so obvious they don’t require expert knowledge or advice, or that the experts never get it wrong. This appears most implausible in the debate over socialism and economic planning. Writing off the entire Communist experience as simply another elite trying to preserve its power feels inadequate, especially considering that some distinguished bourgeois economists thought central planning was a plausible road to riches until quite late in the day. Genetics or race is not mentioned, but would presumably attract the same counterexamples as geography and culture. Another theory AR do not discuss is crude exploitation: while colonial empires are excoriated, it is for setting up persistent extractive political institutions rather than for a direct theft of resources. The prosperity of white-owned South African farms next to poverty-stricken Bantustans is explained by the better quality of the institutions available to whites under apartheid, not relative population densities and land quality. For the rest of the book, I'll just list a few nitpicks to signal I read the whole thing and know a bit of history, but feel free to skip this – the real evidence for AR's thesis is in their academic papers, and I'll discuss those in the next section. I think AR overrate the importance of the Glorious Revolution, to the point of claiming it "created the rule of law" – after all, Parliament had already deposed and executed a king, then brought back the king’s son on their own terms after a decade of republican government. No less a luminary than Edmund Burke asserted "The Revolution was made to preserve our ancient indisputable laws and liberties, and that ancient constitution of government which is our only security for law and liberty." Also, strong signs of British economic uniqueness – the abnormal growth of London and reliance on coal as a fuel – predated 1688.
Inline links: 1, 2, dictionary, schools, economics, social sciences, reviewed, replied, Protestant Ethic, planning, distinguished, bourgeois, Glorious Revolution, Edmund Burke, predated
"IMF/World Bank policies are not adopted and not implemented, or are implemented in name only" rather understates the extent of privatisation, trade liberalisation and financial deregulation imposed by those institutions. It might be truer to say you cannot shrink a functioning state to the point where a corrupt elite will not find a way to steal from it. 2. If Why Nations Fail isn't very good, why have multiple Nobel prize winners written it nice blurbs and why might the authors still get a Nobel prize of their own? Well, I don't have an insider's view of the backscratching in elite academia, and remember economics is a discipline where Nobel prize winners call each other camp following whores.
Inline links: camp following whores
Vote In The 2023 Book Review Contest
September 08, 2023 · Original source
1: Cities And The Wealth Of Nations / The Question Of Separatism 2: Lying For Money 3: Why Machines Will Never Rule The World 4: Man’s Search For Meaning 5: Njal’s Saga 6: Public Citizens 7: Safe Enough? 8: Secret Government 9: The Educated Mind 10: The Laws Of Trading 11: On The Marble Cliffs 12: The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich 13: The WEIRDest People In The World 14: The Mind Of A Bee 15: Why Nations Fail 16: Zuozhuan
Inline links: Cities And The Wealth Of Nations / The Question Of Separatism, Lying For Money, Why Machines Will Never Rule The World, Man’s Search For Meaning, Njal’s Saga, Public Citizens, Safe Enough?, Secret Government, The Educated Mind, The Laws Of Trading, On The Marble Cliffs, The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich, The WEIRDest People In The World, The Mind Of A Bee, Why Nations Fail, Zuozhuan
Book Review Contest 2023 Winners
September 15, 2023 · Original source
Why Nations Fail, reviewed by Declan Trott, “a line management minion in an anonymous department”.
Inline links: Why Nations Fail
World Empire Lost3 mentions across 3 issues

World Empire Lost is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between May 17, 2024 and October 11, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "World Empire Lost"; "Honorable mention to at least ... World Empire Lost"; "World Empire Lost , reviewed by Iain". It most often appears alongside Catkin, Dominion, Don Juan.

Article page
World Empire Lost
Mention count
3
Issue count
3
First seen
May 17, 2024
Last seen
October 11, 2024
Book title
World Empire Lost
Likely author
Iain
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Source context
Choose Book Review Finalists 2024
May 17, 2024 · Original source
...tand The World Who We Are And How We Got Here Why Fish Don't Exist Winnie-the-Pooh / The House At Pooh Corner Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History World Empire Lost Young Adults
Open Thread 334
June 17, 2024 · Original source
2: Book review contest finalists are: Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa, Dominion, Don Juan, Family That Couldn't Sleep, How Language Began, How The War Was Won, Nine Lives, Real Raw News, Silver Age Marvel Comics, Sixth Day, Spirit of Rationalism, Complete Rhyming Dictionary, The Pale King, Two Arms and a Head, and Ballad of the White Horse. Honorable mention to at least Catkin, Road of the King, World Empire Lost, Piranesi, Meme Machine, and Determined. I might promote some honorable mentions to finalists depending on how tolerant you all are of book reviews, and some others to honorable mention after I read more reviews. First review goes up this Friday! Thanks to everyone who entered.
Book Review Contest 2024 Winners
October 11, 2024 · Original source
World Empire Lost, reviewed by Iain. Iain is a former civil servant and government adviser based in England. He blogs on politics, government, society, books and miscellany at www.edrith.co.uk, where he also hosts an annual UK-focused forecasting competition.
Inline links: World Empire Lost, www.edrith.co.uk
War in Human Civilization2 mentions across 2 issues

War in Human Civilization is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between April 22, 2021 and June 03, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as ""Read for : a wonderful case study of what a rigorous, multi-disciplinary look at a complex and important phenomenon looks like. This might be my favorite example of a book...""; "The other book I’ve read recently about war and proto-states ( War In Human Civilization )". It most often appears alongside ACX, African Gray Parrots, ancient Rome.

Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
April 22, 2021
Last seen
June 03, 2021
Book title
War in Human Civilization
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Your Book Review: Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are?
April 22, 2021 · Original source
I was always pretty bored by plants - they don't move, they don't have the Four Fs (Fight, Flight, Feed, and, er, Mate), what could possibly be interesting about them? Well, trees and forests turn out to be amazing interdependent complex systems, so this book not only taught me what there was to love about plants, it also scratched a similar "joy of pure learning" itch to Are We Smart Enough. There's less that's directly applicable to humans, though some of its insights on complex systems might come in handy. Wohlleben maybe gets a bit poetic and reads too much into tree "cognition" at places, but I won't hold it too much against him, because he does a great job of re-awakening the awe and wonder many of us have felt for big, beautiful forests. War in Human Civilization Read for: a wonderful case study of what a rigorous, multi-disciplinary look at a complex and important phenomenon looks like.
Inline links: Four Fs
This might be my favorite example of a book that takes a huge, sprawling topic that requires insights from multiple academic fields and puts it together rigorously. History, archaeology, evolutionary psychology, primatology, climatology, hell, even metallurgy. This book amounts to a comprehensive survey on what we know about human violence since we've been humans (and maybe a little before) through to the modern day. And given the species that we are, a comprehensive treatment of war pretty much amounts to a treatment of all of human history. This is why when I'm feeling snarky, I sometimes call it Sapiens for grownups (not totally fair - Sapiens is also a great example of weaving together findings from many disciplines, but after all the rave reviews, I expected something more earth shattering. Then I realized everyone I had heard from who was blown away by it was a STEM type that probably hasn't spent much time with history, evolutionary psych, and so forth). You will especially enjoy War in Human Civilization if you found the discussions in Are We Smart Enough about chimp politics and strategy interesting.
Your Book Review: The Collapse Of Complex Societies
June 03, 2021 · Original source
I’m not sure why the Mayans didn’t have standing armies and find this quite interesting. Perhaps that was common in sufficiently labor-taxed states where everyone had to spend as much time as possible extracting the next head of maize from the soil? The other book I’ve read recently about war and proto-states (War In Human Civilization) indicates standing armies was a very advantageous thing to have, because the common pre-state alternative was calling forward an assembly to deal with every incursion on an ad hoc basis, and such societies tended to get overwhelmed by a persistent, professional force, even if that persistent force was smaller. (Rome was able to beat back numerically superior invasions from proto-states for similar reasons.)
War of the Worlds2 mentions across 2 issues

War of the Worlds is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between January 23, 2024 and November 01, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "science fiction suggests some clever strategies for defeating them - maybe microbes like War of the Worlds"; "a sequel to War Of The Worlds in which a vengeful human race, led by Thomas Edison". It most often appears alongside Elon Musk, /r/BadMTGCombos, @cremieuxrecuel.

Article page
War of the Worlds
Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
January 23, 2024
Last seen
November 01, 2024
Book title
War of the Worlds
Likely author
Thomas Edison
Outbound links
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Source context
Should The Future Be Human?
January 23, 2024 · Original source
Although the aliens are technologically beyond us, science fiction suggests some clever strategies for defeating them - maybe microbes like War of the Worlds, or computer viruses like Independence Day. If we can pull together a miracle like this, should we use it?
Links For November 2024
November 01, 2024 · Original source
Here the black line indicates that the average European of 6000 BC would have had genetic IQ 65 (compared to modern 100), but the regression line indicates more like IQ 90 - I don’t know why the researchers chose to interpret the trend as necessarily constant and linear, or whether we should follow. There isn’t enough ancient DNA to fully test whether the same happened in other populations yet, although a preliminary small-sample test on Asians suggests it happened there too (not really, see here). If the selection for IQ was a response of agriculture, we’d expect to see higher genetic IQ in populations that got agriculture earlier. But it could also be a response to sentience itself creating new selection pressures that continued to act as recently as historical time (some evidence suggests this is true of schizophrenia), which might make populations more similar. 7: Joseph Heath on Marxism vs. John Rawls. I appreciated this because everyone knows we’re supposed say that John Rawls is among the most important philosophers of all time blah blah blah but nobody had ever explained why to me (veil of ignorance seems neither very original nor very good). Heath’s answer: Marxism dominated the academy for decades, but eventually became philosophically unsustainable. This wasn’t because of the generic “Communism doesn’t work” objections that moved ordinary people. It was because Marx’s ethical critique of capitalism was based on exploitation, according to a technical definition of “exploit” that only made sense according to Marx’s labor theory of value. But the supply-and-demand theory of value quickly supplanted the labor theory, the exploitation argument doesn’t really work within supply-and-demand, and so Marxist philosophers were left without a clear ethical critique. John Rawls, by coming up with the part of the underpinning for the modern inequality-based-critique of society, let all the Marxist academics switch to being liberals while continuing to dislike capitalists. 8: /r/BadMTGCombos: a simple 19-card combination of Leyline of Anticipation, Leyline of Transformation, Mirror Room, Darksteel Citadel, Sanctum Weaver, Freed From The Real, Abuelo's Awakening, Myrkul Lord of Bones, Zimone All Questioning, Birgi God of Storytelling, Siege Zombie, Desecration Elemental, Mirror Gallery, Clock of Omens, Parallel Lives, Life and Limb, Isochron Scepter, Narset's Reversal, and Molten Reflection can be used to deal infinite damage if and only if the Twin Prime Conjecture is true. 9: During the most recent Berkeley ACX meetup, we somehow ended up discussing how often people feed living mice to snakes. The answer seems to be that there’s a debate about it in the snake community, the smartest and most experienced voices are against it, but it still happens a lot. Here’s an EA Forum post on the feeder rodent industry and efforts to make it more humane. 10: King Frederick William I of Prussia decided to have a regiment of giants in his army and scoured Europe for extremely tall people, including poaching them from other countries’ armies and forcing them to enlist against their will. He ended up with 3,000 soldiers, ranging from 6’2 - 7’6, but “many of the men were unfit for combat due to their gigantism”. So why did he do it? He liked to paint their portraits from memory. He tried to show them to foreign visitors and dignitaries to impress them. At times he would try to cheer himself up by ordering them to march before him, even if he was in his sickbed. This procession, which included the entire regiment, was led by their mascot, a bear. He once confided to the French ambassador that "The most beautiful girl or woman in the world would be a matter of indifference to me, but tall soldiers—they are my weakness" The King dreamed of a eugenics program to create even taller soldiers. He got as far as pairing up some of his tall soldiers up with tall women and birthing a few tall babies before he died; his successor had no interest and let everybody go home. 11: Before modern IP law, you could write a sequel to someone else’s book and they couldn’t stop you. Among the most successful examples is American “astronomer and writer” Garrett Serviss’ Edison’s Conquest Of Mars, a sequel to War Of The Worlds in which a vengeful human race, led by Thomas Edison, invent spaceships and attack Mars in retaliation for the first book’s Martian invasion. "The book contains some notable 'firsts' in science fiction: alien abductions, spacesuits, aliens building the Pyramids, space battles, oxygen pills, asteroid mining and disintegrator rays", and was credited as an inspiration by Robert Goddard and HP Lovecraft. 12: Joe Biden, singularitarian? (click for link to video) 13: Gwern on the chip embargo: It is pretty damning. We're told the chip embargo has failed, and smugglers have been running rampant for years, and China is about to jump light years beyond the West and enslave us with AXiI (if you will) . . . And then an expert casually remarks that all of China put together, smuggling chips since 2022, has fewer H100s than Elon Musk orders for his datacenter while playing Elden Ring. And even with that huge bottleneck and 1.4 billion people, there's so little demand for them that they cost less per hour than in the West, where AI is redhot and we can't get enough H100s in datacenters. (And where the serious AI people are now discussing how to put that many into a single datacenter for a single run before the next scaleup with B200s obsoletes those...) 14: A company called Cosm has raised $250 million to build “immersive sports experiences”, ie giant buildings sort of like a cross between a stadium and a movie theater where people can get together and watch high-quality televised sports games in a “realistic” setting; they already have facilities in Dallas and Los Angeles. 15: Cremieux: The Ottoman Origins Of Modernity. The “Ottoman” bit is a distractor; the Ottomans fought the Catholics long enough for the Protestants to get a foothold, and then the Protestants established modernity. A useful pushback against the pushback that the Catholic Church never persecuted scientists or held back progress. I’m most interested in this post in the context of Cremieux saying he wrote it in two hours. Even I can’t work that fast! 16: The Green Party, a US third party, tried to put their candidate Jill Stein on the ballot in November. The Nevada election office sent them the wrong forms and gave them false advice about the process. The Greens filed the wrong forms, the Democrats sued, and the Supreme Court disqualified Stein, calling the election office’s incorrect advice an “unfortunate mistake”. I’m disappointed in this outcome - partly for the obvious reasons, but also because the incorrect forms they submitted technically should have added a state referendum to the ballot containing only the text “Jill Stein”. If they’re going to disqualify her candidacy, then I think they should at least hold the state referendum! 17: Nostalgebraist: Google has a new tool out that will create an AI podcast for any text; you hand it the text (could be a blog post, article, or work of fiction), and the tool generates a podcast of two AI hosts discussing it. You can find podcast discussions of Nostalgebraist’s fiction (Northern Caves and Almost Nowhere) at the link, but the acknowledged peak of the genre is Podcast Hosts Discover They’re AI, Not Human, And Spiral Into Existential Meltdown. 18: Also Nostalgebraist: The Case For Chain Of Thought Unfaithfulness Is Overstated. New AIs like o1 give “chain of thought”, ie display what they’re thinking after each step. This seems like a promising avenue to solve alignment - just see whether they’re thinking “and now I will plot against humans”. Unfortunately it’s not so easy; the chain of thought isn’t always accurate (you can sometimes catch the AI “hiding” thoughts it doesn’t want its human overseers to know, like when it’s using a racial stereotype). This article argues that these examples aren’t as exciting as they sound, and chain-of-thought accurately reflects reasoning for most tasks. 19: Australian government considers making doxxing a crime punishable by up to seven years in jail. 20: Getting your brain cryogenically frozen after your death is now free. 21: Cube Flipper: Hypercomputation without bothering the cactus people. The visual system must solve difficult math problems when translating the 2D visual field into a 3D world. Can we harness this innate mathematical ability to do arbitrary work? Cognitive scientist Mark Changizi developed a series of visual circuits (eg XOR gates) based on Necker cubes, probably easier seen than described: After surveying the field, Cube Flipper proposes a more advanced visual computer based on taking DMT and viewing certain types of tiles with slight deviations: …and makes the extreme claim that something like this might demonstrate hypercomputation, ie the visual system has semi-magic computational properties beyond those permitted by normal physical laws. I am skeptical but appreciate the survey of visual computing (as well as the callback to one of my older posts). 22: Material implication in Mormonism: In the book Doctrines and Covenants, Joseph Smith reports that God told him that if he lived to be 85, he would see the Second Coming (which would place it in 1890 - 1891). Mormon apologists note that Joseph Smith did not live to be 85, so no conclusion can be drawn. 23: More old-timey psychiatric ads (this one is from 1952, source: @justin_garson): This was before they invented what we would call antidepressants today; Dexedrine is an amphetamine related to Adderall. 24: Congratulations to Open Philanthropy, the biggest effective altruist foundation… …whose grantee David Baker recently won a Nobel Prize for his research on synthetic proteins. Potential applications include new drugs, vaccines, and materials. 25: Rich Kid Memes And The Online Culture Of The One Percent. Rich people who want to signal group membership to other rich people online can’t boast about how rich they are; that would be gauche. Instead, they’ve settled on the solution of making fun of rich people in hyperspecific language that proves familiarity with the culture. 26: Tap Water Sommelier: Vladimir Putin has two sons, ages 5 and 9. They are kept in luxurious but total isolation from the outside world and raised by flunkies who are too scared to punish/restrain them in any way. Also some discussion of an unexpected historical analogue. 27: Experiment from Colombia: replacing experienced teachers with less-experience but higher-scoring-on-tests teachers significantly decreased student performance. Got to admit I was expecting the opposite of this, I’d seen US data saying that experience didn’t matter and teacher intelligence did. Looking over this more, I find lots of studies on both sides and will go back to agnosticism on this question until someone I trust investigates further. 28: Large scale-formal Intellectual Turing Test finds that people can imitate partisans effectively; ie nobody on either side can tell the difference between a Democrat arguing for Democrat values vs. a Republican-pretending-to-be-a-Democrat arguing for Democrat values (and vice versa). This study used a 100 word essay on why you supported your party (you can see if you can do better here), but past attempts with different structures (religion, vegetarianism, polyamory) have shown broadly the same results. The researchers try to put this in the context of various studies showing that people do misunderstand their opponents (eg think they’re more extreme, underestimate the level of common ground), but it seems like intellectual Turing Tests aren’t a good way to measure or tease out this misunderstanding. 29: Congratulations to Substacker WoolyAI for doing the impossible and providing a genuinely novel and interesting (to me) take on pickup artistry: 30: Did you know: if you Google “cool websites”, our subreddit (r/slatestarcodex) is the first result. 31: Moshe Koppel, who works at the intersection of computer science and Talmud, is writing a series of posts (presumably) based off of my Every Bay Area House Party, titled Jerusalem Area House Party (it’s multiple part, you have to go to the main Substack page to find the others). I won’t necessarily link everyone who riffs off one of my posts - but honestly I probably will if you also have a Wikipedia page that describes you as working on computational Talmudology. 32: David Roman says it’s a myth that Arabic scholars rescued and preserved the works of the great classical authors. 33: Medications often decrease “secondary endpoints” (eg stroke, heart attack), but the holy grail of pharma studies is proving that a certain drug decreases all-cause mortality. This is much harder (not all heart attacks kill people, and people die from lots of other things), but is the strongest possible endorsement for the drug (without it, you might worry that it only prevented non-fatal heart attacks, or that it killed as many people through side effects as it saves through heart attack prevention). Even great medications that we’re confident in can’t always clear this bar. But a new JAMA article adds another member to this select club: Adderall decreases all-cause mortality in ADHD, probably because it prevents drug addiction, car accidents, and impulsive actions. 34: Before the Gulf War got in the way, Saddam Hussein was building some crazy mosques: 35: Italy bans surrogacy - quite strictly, too, Italians aren’t even allowed to go abroad and do it. I am so sorry for all the Italians who will never get to be mothers and fathers because their government hates progress. You might hope that, whatever the other disadvantages of anti-immigrant parties, at least they’re incentivized to let natives have children, but looks like they can’t even get that one right. Starting to wonder whether the trains even run on time. 36: Elsewhere in “Italy sucks” news - did you know Italy’s tax code effectively bans startups? Companies are taxed before making any money, based on how many assets they have. If they have lots of assets but aren’t making money (eg because they’re still doing research / in stealth) then tax officials get confused and hostile and run increasingly punitive audits. Related: size of the European tech sector. It’s the red line on this chart; if you can’t see a red line at your screen resolution, then you’ve learned something important about the the EU tech sector. 37: Seen on @cremieuxrecuel’s twitter (preliminary, needs replication): Jews may have gone from 65-29 Democrat/Republican in 2020 to 58-40 this election. 38: Extelligence has a post responding to my critique of the cultural Christianity argument (among, uh, many other things), but I don’t really think it connects. I’m not telling atheists they can’t go to church/synagogue if it makes them feel happy and fulfilled - I’ve done this myself sometimes. My post was meant to argue against the claim that, for pragmatic reasons, atheists should support the Christianization of society as a defense against Islam or postmodernism or some other philosophical enemy. 39: Related: Extelligence is finally going for their Trust Assembly project/idea/startup for online consensus-based truth-seeking (I think something like a cross between Community Notes and Wikipedia, but as a browser extension, and for everything). He’s looking for potential developers/testers/users. 40: Jiankui He is the Chinese geneticist who made history with the first germline gene editing in humans (resulting in three babies supposedly immune to AIDS, although nobody has tested this). China sentenced him to three years in prison for unauthorized experimentation, but now he’s out of jail, has an English-language Twitter account, has a new lab, wants to work on Alzheimers, and seems pretty based (although not infinitely based): 41: Anthropic has a new version of their AI Claude which can use your computer. You give it permission, put it on a virtual desktop, and ask it to do things for you (eg “please find and download a picture of a cat” or “please research these ten things and put them in a text file”.) It moves your cursor, browses the Internet, and creates and saves files. People keep saying they’ll care about AI “when it operates autonomously” or “when it becomes an agent”. But this is a trivial barrier, and one which Computer Use Claude has arguably already passed. So far this feature is limited to developers (though anyone with computer knowledge can sign up for it) but I expect it to be the near future of consumer AI, to get better quickly, and to shade gradually into the “autonomous” “agentic” AI that you all think will require a paradigm shift. 42: Claim (from the IDF): Hamas faked polls showing that most Palestinians supported the October 7 attack; the real numbers are 31% in favor, 64% against. 43: Otto von Bismarck wanted to trick France into declaring war on Germany. In order to provoke the French, he sent the Ems Dispatch, a statement describing recent diplomatic events in a way that sounded maximally offensive. The French were so offended that “crowds” in Paris demanded war, and the Franco-Prussian War was declared soon afterwards. The part of this that I find most interesting is the text of the dispatch itself, which read: After the news of the renunciation of the Prince von Hohenzollern had been communicated to the Imperial French government by the Royal Spanish government, the French Ambassador in Ems made a further demand on His Majesty the King that he should authorize him to telegraph to Paris that His Majesty the King undertook for all time never again to give his assent should the Hohenzollerns once more take up their candidature. His Majesty the King thereupon refused to receive the Ambassador again and had the latter informed by the Adjutant of the day that His Majesty had no further communication to make to the Ambassador. I’m fascinated by the idea that only 150 years ago, it was obvious that if someone sent you this statement, you had to declare war or abandon all honor. If I read it carefully, I can sort of parse out that it sounds like the Prussians are unhappy, but that’s the most emotion I gather from it. Anyway, the Franco-Prussian War led to World War I which led to World War II - so if you don’t like 50 million people dying and the total devastation of Europe, blame this statement about ambassadors. 44: The first use of artificial insemination in humans: The first recorded case of artificial insemination by donor didn’t occur until 1884, when Dr. William Pancoast decided to treat a couple’s infertility by secretly inseminating the woman with sperm obtained from a medical student. The insemination happened while the patient was under anesthesia and Dr. Pancoast did not tell her what had occurred. She gave birth to a baby boy nine months later, but it was several years before the doctor finally confessed to her husband what he had done. Neither man ever informed the mother. It was 25 years later the result of this case was published. Dr. Pancoast was roundly condemned for his actions, but it did open the door for consensual sperm donor insemination. 45: ClearerThinking administers several personality tests to the same people to learn more about their comparative accuracy. I am most interested in their finding that tests with “factors” (eg the Big Five, where you rate people on a numeric scale) are inherently more accurate than those with “types” (eg Myers-Briggs, where you assign someone a specific category) and that, adjusting for this, Big Five is no more predictive than the Enneagram: 46: In 2022, I wrote Whither Tartaria, where I asked why ornate classical styles switched to more austere modernist styles around 1900 - 1950 in a variety of different arts (painting, architecture, literature, poetry, etc). I proposed seven theories, but was unsure which if any were true. Since then, Samuel Hughes of Works In Progress has been investigating. In May, he wrote a well-researched article showing that it wasn’t just increasing cost, because ornate classical architecture now costs less than ever. Now in a new article he demolishes a different theory - it’s not just decreasing cost (and subsequent lack of ability to signal wealth) - because costs didn’t decrease in several other arts, and the change was led by artists with rich people as reluctant followers. He concludes: Modernism may well be a status game of some kind; it may well signal taste more than it signals wealth; and this latter feature may be one of the things that distinguishes it from older artistic styles. But the mechanism by which this change came about must be different to the one Alexander describes. 47: Sort of kind of related - When Hamilton Lost Its Snob Appeal. The musical Hamilton was briefly an artistic/cultural phenomenon, but tastemakers eventually switched to making fun of it. Why? Rob Henderson says it happened after ticket prices came down and the common people could enjoy it. I disagree: everyone I knew who was into Hamilton got into it from the free online soundtrack long before they’d seen the show; I think this is more likely the usual fad cycle where anybody who’s too into yesterday’s fad is behind the curve and therefore uncool. 48: Related: Why are people such jerks to public intellectuals? And more. I agree this is a great mystery. 49: Some prominent Substack psychiatrists doing a video Q&A, submit your questions here. 50: Naomi Kanakia: The Literacy Delusion had a number of explanations for why reading books seemed to be so much worse for human beings (in terms of emotional wellness and productivity) than other forms of narrative entertainment, but its main theory was the integration hypothesis. That the stream of words in a book trained the human brain into a habit of self-consciousness, that reading books forced human beings to think of themselves as a stream of text, processed through time, making a coherent argument of some sort. And that this overall flattening effect forced readers to ignore aspects of their personality or their situation that were not otherwise in line with the overarching story they'd created about themselves. Basically, reading books causes repression and neurosis. The Literacy Delusion argued that, yes, human beings are storytelling machines, but that a stream of written text is a particular kind of story—a story that is particularly flat, particularly devoid of conflicting or harmonizing information—and that this flatness creates a peculiar effect on the human brain. 51: Last month, I linked Sasha Gusev’s No, Intelligence Is Not Like Height and asked people who disagreed to share their arguments; they sure did. First, several people pointed me to a new preprint, Family-GWAS Reveals Effects Of Environment And Mating On Genetic Associations, which finds that one of the main papers Gusev cited to make his case, Howe 2022, made a mistake - imputing sibling genotypes using a process designed for non-sibling genotypes - and that once that mistake is corrected, the finding disappears and intelligence and height appear similar. Second, Joseph Bronski has a more specific post where he responds to Gusev’s points one by one. He accuses Gusev of “[making] up his own chart to remove the error bars [from the originals], to obscure the fact that the study found no evidence for this in IQ”, and says that the cases where he didn’t do that are just “population stratification and range restriction”. Third, Noah Carl at Aporia, instead of writing a direct response like Bronski, argues that the usual method of attacking twin studies is obsolete; not only have the most-debated assumptions behind twin studies been thoroughly validated, but there are now other lines of evidence besides twin studies which confirm high IQ heritability. Fourth, Leonardo Parro (not framed as a response to Gusev) goes into more depth about one of those ways, a “pedigree-based analysis” demonstrating heritability of 54 - 69%, ie no “missing heritability” compared to twin studies. He summarizes this as the effect of “rare variants” compared to the usual SNPs - ie if you only look at the most common genes that are easiest to find, you get “missing heritability” compared to twin studies, but if you widen your search to rare genes that are hard to find, you don’t. 52: Extremely related: Heliospect is a startup promising polygenic selection for IQ and other traits; they were trying to stay in stealth mode but The Guardian spied on them and nonconsensually revealed their existence. The discussion on the r/ssc subreddit centered on their claim that (given enough embryos to choose from) they could increase a baby’s expected IQ by 6 points (I’ve also heard 7.5). Sasha Gusev had previously argued that current technology maxed out at 3.5 and future technology would max out at 6, so a claim of 6 - 7.5 is pretty extreme; Gwern, who wrote the pioneering analysis of this technology, was also skeptical. But Heliospect says they’ve got better predictors than academia that use the rare variants everyone else misses; after talking to the company, Gwern retracted his objections and says he finds their claim “pretty plausible”. Local ACX commenter geneticist Gene Smith also redid some calculations, changed his mind, and says “probably pretty realistic”. I find this interesting not just because of the polygenic selection angle, but because if Heliospect is right then their predictor is able to predict more genetic IQ than the “missing heritability” people believe exists, and it should be able to put this argument to bed once and for all. 53: This month in censorship: X/Twitter banned journalist Ken Klippenstein for sharing the Trump campaign’s dossier on JD Vance. Twitter’s side of the story is that the dossier was probably originally stolen by Iranian agents and they don’t want to support that kind of thing by letting people signal-boost the illicitly obtained goods; you can read Klippenstein’s side here. He appears to be unbanned now.
Inline links: see here, got agriculture earlier, some evidence suggests this is true of schizophrenia, Marxism, John Rawls, nor very good, /r/BadMTGCombos, can be used, Twin Prime Conjecture, the feeder rodent industry and efforts to make it more humane, decided to have a regiment of giants in his army, Edison’s Conquest Of Mars, click for link to video, Gwern on the chip embargo, Cosm, The Ottoman Origins Of Modernity, sent them the wrong forms and gave them false advice about the process, added a state referendum to the ballot containing only the text “Jill Stein”., Nostalgebraist, Podcast Hosts Discover They’re AI, Not Human, And Spiral Into Existential Meltdown, The Case For Chain Of Thought Unfaithfulness Is Overstated, isn’t always accurate, considers making doxxing a crime, is now free, Hypercomputation without bothering the cactus people, developed, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!FcOr!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbee8dfa6-4d7b-41c9-972a-5fbaa792b9ec_3566x2888.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!x34r!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F413f5fc2-2391-4734-904f-8401dd968488_1024x1024.png, one of my older posts, reports, note, @justin_garson, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!EF4p!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4b7af4c0-ac0f-4c9a-88bc-6c00e57ca977_479x639.jpeg, https://x.com/albrgr/status/1844527064956928009, won a Nobel Prize, Rich Kid Memes And The Online Culture Of The One Percent, Tap Water Sommelier, Experiment from Colombia, experience didn’t matter, teacher intelligence did, Large scale-formal Intellectual Turing Test, you can see if you can do better here, religion, vegetarianism, polyamory, WoolyAI, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!4FRI!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F558ad67a-bfca-469e-abd8-2edc7c8b888a_590x916.png, if you Google “cool websites”, r/slatestarcodex, who works at the intersection of computer science and Talmud, Jerusalem Area House Party, says it’s a myth, Adderall decreases all-cause mortality in ADHD, some crazy mosques, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!2W0c!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc2be0549-aa2b-411d-b6a6-da50c34f7f86_1000x572.jpeg, Italy bans surrogacy, Italy’s tax code effectively bans startups?, Related, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!T3h-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F08b011b3-ef20-42e5-91b2-33946b8ca7b6_1761x1355.jpeg, @cremieuxrecuel, responding to my critique of the cultural Christianity argument, My post, is finally going for, Trust Assembly, has an English-language Twitter account, has a new lab, wants to work on Alzheimers, and seems pretty based, not infinitely based, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!fY_K!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6b3b61c8-6c48-4eb7-9608-426b738ab9c8_592x111.png, which can use your computer, Claim, Ems Dispatch, The first use of artificial insemination in humans, administers several personality tests to the same people, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!epEc!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F47c474c6-d68a-41e4-954e-d24cd00ec040_740x388.webp, Whither Tartaria, a well-researched article showing, in a new article he demolishes a different theory, When Hamilton Lost Its Snob Appeal, Why are people such jerks to public intellectuals?, more, Some prominent Substack psychiatrists doing a video Q&A, submit your questions here, Naomi Kanakia, No, Intelligence Is Not Like Height, Family-GWAS Reveals Effects Of Environment And Mating On Genetic Associations, Howe 2022, a more specific post where he responds to Gusev’s points one by one, argues that the usual method of attacking twin studies is obsolete, goes into more depth about one of those ways, The Guardian spied on them and nonconsensually revealed their existence, discussion, previously argued, the pioneering analysis of this technology, Gwern retracted his objections, says, polygenic selection, banned journalist Ken Klippenstein, you can read Klippenstein’s side here., appears to be unbanned now
Why We're Polarized2 mentions across 2 issues

Why We're Polarized is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between February 09, 2021 and February 20, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "I was happy to be able to read his Why We're Polarized"; "Why We're Polarized was published too early to mention Biden"; "notes a book like this should hit, but I don't feel too much more enlightened about Why We're Polarized". It most often appears alongside America, California, Ezra Klein.

Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
February 09, 2021
Last seen
February 20, 2021
Book title
Why We're Polarized
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Book Review: Why We're Polarized
February 09, 2021 · Original source
Ezra Klein is great. I know a lot of people throw shade on him for founding Vox. But as Van Gogh said about God creating the world, "We must not hold it against Him; only a master could make such a mistake". Ezra is a master and I was happy to be able to read his Why We're Polarized.
Inline links: Why We're Polarized
(Amazon recommended it to me as "Why We're Polarized By Ezra Klein", which I would also have been happy to read.)
But after a bit of this he regains his footing and segues into a stronger argument that might give even conservatives some food for thought. Klein notes that although both Democrats and Republicans have some extremists in their coalition, the institutional Democrats seem to be doing a better job preventing them from gaining power. In a purely structural sense, without getting into whether you believe they're morally equivalent or whatever, the democratic socialists/Bernie Sanders seem to be an "insurrection" comparable to the Tea Party/Trump on the Republican side. But the mainstream neoliberal Republicans surrendered to the Tea Party and to Trump in rapid succession, and the mainstream neoliberal Democrats are still resisting. The Democrats' Tea Party equivalent is probably AOC, but she and her allies are still a small minority in the Democratic caucus. And the Dem presidential nomination went to Joe Biden, a moderate who wouldn't look out of place running for president in 1988 (in fact...). Why We're Polarized was published too early to mention Biden in this context, but we can count him as a correct prediction for its theory.
Ezra Klein On Vetocracy
February 20, 2021 · Original source
In my review last week of Ezra Klein's Why We're Polarized, I linked to a related Vox article on vetocracy:
Inline links: Why We're Polarized, Vox article on vetocracy
First, is vetocracy the same as polarization? Klein sometimes treats the two concepts interchangeably; for example, he says he's written a book about "how the US government has becoming a dysfunctional vetocracy" (presumably Why We're Polarized). But elsewhere he doesn't treat them interchangably; for example, he talks about some kinds of shareholder activism in corporations as examples of vetocracy. But these don't seem linked to partisan politics. And a lot NIMBYism is unrelated to the Democrat/Republican divide.
Win Bigly2 mentions across 2 issues

Win Bigly is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between January 16, 2026 and January 21, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "I followed up with my book Win Bigly"; "Adams’ book Win Bigly includes Persuasion Tips"; "the cover of Win Bigly shows a mashup of Dogbert and Trump". It most often appears alongside Adams, Alice, Coffee With Scott Adams.

Article page
Win Bigly
Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
January 16, 2026
Last seen
January 21, 2026
Book title
Win Bigly
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The Dilbert Afterlife
January 16, 2026 · Original source
This paragraph is the absolute center of Adams’ worldview (later expanded to book length several times in tomes named things like Win Bigly: Persuasion In A World Where Facts Don’t Matter). People don’t respond to logic and evidence, so the world is ruled by people who are good at making catchy slogans. Sufficiently advanced sloganeering is indistinguishable from hypnosis, and so when Adams has some cute turns of phrase in his previous book, he describes it as “[I] used a variety of hypnosis techniques in an attempt to produce a feeling of euphoric enlightenment in the reader”. This is the cringiest way possible to describe cute turns of phrase, and turns me off from believing any his further claims to hypnotic mastery.
For the first part of my life, I was focused on making myself a worthy husband and parent, as a way to find meaning. That worked. But marriages don't always last forever, and mine eventually ended, in a highly amicable way. I'm grateful for those years and for the people I came to call my family. Once the marriage unwound, I needed a new focus. A new meaning. And so I donated myself to "the world," literally speaking the words out loud in my otherwise silent home. From that point on, I looked for ways I could add the most to people's lives, one way or another. That marked the start of my evolution from Dilbert cartoonist to an author of - what I hoped would be - useful books. By then, I believed I had condensed enough life lessons that I could start passing them on. I continued making Dilbert comics, of course. As luck would have it, I'm a good writer. My first book in the "useful" genre was How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. That book turned out to be a huge success, often imitated, and influencing a wide variety of people. I still hear every day how much that book changed lives. My plan to be useful was working. I followed up with my book Win Bigly, that trained an army of citizens how to be more persuasive, which they correctly saw as a minor super power. I know that book changed lives because I hear it often. You'll probably never know the impact the book had on the world, but I know, and it pleases me while giving me a sense of meaning that is impossible to describe. My next book, Loserthink, tried to teach people how to think better, especially if they were displaying their thinking on social media. That one didn't put much of a dent in the universe, but I tried. Finally, my book Reframe Your Brain taught readers how to program their own thoughts to make their personal and professional lives better. I was surprised and delighted at how much positive impact that book is having. I also started podcasting a live show called Coffee With Scott Adams, dedicated to helping people think about the world, and their lives, in a more productive way. I didn't plan it this way, but it ended up helping lots of lonely people find a community that made them feel less lonely. Again, that had great meaning for me. I had an amazing life. I gave it everything I had. If you got any benefits from my work, I'm asking you to pay it forward as best you can. That is the legacy I want.
Highlights From The Comments On Scott Adams
January 21, 2026 · Original source
…which makes me more confident that I landed on the tone I wanted. And several people commented that the essay seemed pro-Adams, or made them like Adams more: Joel McKinnon writes: As a chronic sufferer of TDS I've fallen into the "the friend of my enemy is my enemy," and long stopped having any respect for this other Scott A. The post did a great job of contextualizing a complicated and intelligent man's life and ideas. Jonathan Lipschutz writes: I loved Dilbert! He had a remarkable ability to identify the absurdity of life/reality. I was not aware of so much other material/information/‘wisdom’?!/ideas. It seems to me he was a true, great contributor to America and Americans and Western intellectual discourse in the vain of other greats like Mark Twain. What I learned from your piece, which was absolutely amazing in its own right and shined throughout as a tribute and labor of love, was [Adams’] humanity. He was labeled as a racist, which i believe to be bunk and a lack of honesty/courage with addressing the point/argument he was making. He was an eminently flawed human being, like all humans, but he was also acutely aware of this and tried to help others with humor and honesty. Pointing out ways humans fall short, including himself. But he used his special powers in the service of intellectual honesty/inquisitiveness/love for his fellow human beings. Banjo Kildeer writes: This is a wonderful piece. Your love for Scott Adams shines through. @disgruntledcho1 writes: [This] made me actually feel warmly for Scott Adams, a thus-far unparalleled feat. The most important question is whether Scott Adams himself would have appreciated the post, and this convinces me that he would have. One of Adams’ favorite persuasion topics was what he called “Two Movies On One Screen”, where people would come away from the same event with totally different narratives - for example, a Democrat might watch a Trump speech and conclude that Trump had openly and clearly announced his racism, while a Republican watching the same speech might think that Trump had just said something patriotic and hadn’t mentioned race at all. Whatever his opinion on what I said, I’m sure he would have found your reactions hilarious. … 2: Was I Unfair To Adams? … Leo Abstract writes: [The problem with your eulogy] isn’t that it was harsh--he was harsher to himself, frequently. (i.e. when he said he realized at age 8, sadly looking at his nerdy little face in the mirror, he was gonna have to ‘get rich’). [The] problem is it was just wrong, and seemed badly(or un-)researched. His interest in persuasion was teaching people when others were doing it to them, not teaching them to do it to others. His interest in Trump was Trump doing it BACK at the media, not on his poor voters. Disagree. Adams’ book Win Bigly includes Persuasion Tips, persuasion checklists, and a Persuasion Resource Reading List, all of which take it as a given that he is teaching you to persuade others: I haven’t watched his videos, but they have names like You Could Be MUCH More Persuasive, The Persuasion Playbook (“Learn practical techniques to harness the power of persuasion”), and Persuasion Techniques That Will Improve Your Business And Life. Adams absolutely did not limit his interest in Trump’s persuasion to the media, and praised Trump (for example) using persuasion techniques to take down other Republican candidates. You can find his discussion of how Adams “publicly predicted Ben Carson’s demise” after Trump acted out a mocking version of Carson’s description of getting stabbed in the belt buckle (according to Adams, a masterful example of “visual persuasion”). Leo continues: A good example would be spinning a whole tale about him as an ‘ivermectin true believer’, when he was open about his skepticism. if you knew his history with medically-assisted suicide, you’d know he didn’t plan on fighting the cancer and only did IVM because his fans begged him. I half-apologize for this one. I didn’t try to “spin a whole tale” about Adams as “an ivermectin true believer”. What I said was: » “In 2024, diagnosed with terminal cancer, Adams decided to treat it via ivermectin, according to a protocol recommended by fellow right-wing contrarian Dr. William Makis. This doesn’t seem to me like a story about a cynic milking right-wingers for the grift. It sounds like a true believer.” I stand by that paragraph. I don’t think someone who was milking right-wingers as a cynical grift would have gone so far as to trust their recommendations on what to take for his cancer. I think Adams became a sincere right-winger, and so was willing to listen to right-wing medical advice. But I agree that it was written sloppily and sort of suggests he was an ivermectin true believer. He wasn’t, and I apologize for that. I later realized I didn’t need to read tea leaves about this - he says, very explicitly, in one of his books, that yes, after getting attacked by too many left-wing trolls, he decided to commit to fully joining the right wing: » “If you want to see the world more clearly, avoid joining a tribe. But if you are going to war, leave your clear thinking behind and join a tribe. Trumped joined the Republican tribe to win the presidency. Now I was joining the Trump tribe. For a war against Hillbullies [ie pro-Hillary Clinton bullies]. I was all in.” After I made some of these arguments to Leo, he said: I do think that people who listened to thousands of hours of him speaking off-the-cuff might have a better understanding than someone attempting to gain the same by reading a few of his old blog posts. This is a fair criticism. I tried listening to a couple of his shows, and they had a different, friendlier tone than his books / interviews / tweets. Arguably Adams thought of formal written communication as a place to do manipulation, and verbal communication as a cozier spot where he could relate to people normally and explain all the manipulation he was doing. @Ashwin V writes: If you knew anything about Scott, you would know that he never considered anyone a "lesser human" as you've so confidently asserted. He was streaming and trying to pass on his wisdom on his death bed. This was a response to my claim that Adams “longed to be a manipulator of lesser humans”. Several people including Ashwin objected that Adams didn’t see anyone as lesser, nor think of manipulation as demeaning. For example, nutter_just: “Your error is in thinking you must be a lesser human to be manipulable. My impression was Scott believed everyone was like this even himself which is why he believed self affirmations worked. It’s you manipulating your dumb self.” Again, I’ll half-apologize. I regret my exact framing (“lesser humans”), which I think was unnecessarily inflammatory since it implies he was sort of thinking in those terms. But I think he was doing a bad thing which requires that on some philosophical level he has to be treating other people as his lessers in an unacceptable way, even if he wasn’t consciously thinking that they were. I think trying to manipulate people is inherently demeaning to the dignity of humankind. Nor is it exonerating to say “I also manipulate myself” (even if this is true). For analogy, suppose that Adams was a literal telepathic mind controller. If he used his powers on himself (mind controlling himself to work harder), that sounds like a good lifehack. But if he used his powers to turn everyone else into his zombie slaves, he would be offending the dignity of humankind, and “I also use my powers on myself!” would be no excuse. There are a thousand edge cases, complications, things that are sort of manipulation but not quite, and ways that some of those things might be permissible for the greater good. But none of them change the fact that in the simplest and most typical of cases, like the telepathic mind controller with his zombie slaves, manipulation is wrong. One might object that there are simple, typical cases on the other side too. When a job candidate shaves, dresses nicely, and gives a firm handshake, this is in some sense “manipulating” the interviewer, since it’s an attempt to influence his decision through some channel other than facts. I can’t draw a perfect bright line here between the good and the bad cases, but I would apply tests like “is this an attempt to more effectively convey true information?” (eg when I shave, it conveys that I’m capable of remembering to shave and care a lot about the interview), “is this something where failing to do the thing would also convey even more information?” (eg if I didn’t shave, it would falsely suggest I really didn’t want the job), and “is this something where the target has basically given implied consent to this level of manipulation” (eg the interviewer wants and even hopes that people will dress nicely for the interview). I think some of Adams’ manipulations seem closer to the bad cases than the good ones. He wrote about the moment he decided to use his persuasion powers to convince America to elect Trump. One day when he was doing his dispassionate observer act, he heard about Hillary’s estate tax plan and realized it would cost his estate lots of money. He had no particular principled stance against it (“You can argue whether an estate tax is fair or unfair, but fairness is an argument for idiots and children”) but concluded that: This was personal. This was also the day I decided to move from observer to persuader. Until then I was happy to simply observe and predict. But once Clinton announced her plans to use government force to rob me on my deathbed, it was war. Persuasion war.” Accepting for the sake of argument that Adams’ persuasive powers are as impressive as he thinks, he manipulated thousands of people who might have stood to benefit from an estate tax, or who sincerely believed in fairness-based arguments for an estate tax, to vote against their own interests/beliefs, in order to enrich him personally1. I think this requires some sort of standpoint where you consider their agency and interests less important than your own, and that’s why I described him as wanting to manipulate “lesser humans”. This coexists with him often being very nice, with many people saying his podcast helped them become better people, etc. @janiesaysyay writes: This essay is a great demonstration of the kind of leftist, myopic thinking Scott [Adams] was fighting. This is how [Alexander] describes [Coffee With Scott Adams], one of the most influential online shows: » "I had been vaguely aware that he had some community around him, but on the event of his death, I tried watching an episode or two of his show. I couldn’t entirely follow..." “Some community"?! CWSA was one of the first long running, online, interactive, alternative news shows. Scott was a trailblazer host with his reasonable, thoughtful take on current events, often describing the "2 screens” views of both the left and right political opinions on current events. Scott [Adams]' question and answer discussions with his audience brought varied insights, and gave Americans a nuanced view of news. At the end of his life, Scott was highly influential in American thought, culture and politics. CWSA made it acceptable to be an American, someone who was proud of the country, unashamed of their race; proud of the culture, and proud of the heritage which built the country. This made me wonder whether I was underestimating the reach of Adams’ podcast, so I tried to find statistics. CWSA ranks 50th on Apple’s top 100 news/politics podcasts2. It’s very close to the rankings of Jen Psaki (Biden’s ex-press-secretary) and Al Franken (ex-Senator), but also to very many people I have never heard of. I’m not sure how to interpret this. Comparing YouTube subscribers of Adams and various other podcasts I’ve heard of, all numbers in thousands: Joe Rogan: 21,000
Inline links: writes, writes, writes, writes, writes, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!8Dya!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6aea0e56-b1a1-48ca-84ab-406017ae27a1_1618x462.png, You Could Be MUCH More Persuasive, The Persuasion Playbook, Persuasion Techniques That Will Improve Your Business And Life, writes, nutter_just, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!r4fL!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7d643c5f-b24c-4f01-baad-963686d680da_560x174.jpeg, 1, writes, 2, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!wOcC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F141d78d7-8756-4ed6-bc53-081bac795a0a_728x250.png
I have seen people try to walk this back by saying Adams only meant they would be persecuted in some way that was metaphorically equivalent to hunting, but I feel like “good chance you will be dead within the year” is saying he means the kind of hunting which literally kills you, and “police will stand down” means that it will be the sort of extremely illegal thing that police would normally react to. I have seen other people try to link this to examples of Republicans actually getting killed, such as Charlie Kirk. But Adams was telling his readers there was “a good chance” that “they” would be dead within a year, which I think implies this fate happening to a significant proportion of ordinary Republicans, not just one prominent person. Also, Kirk was five years after the comment was posted. Can we dismiss this as a joke? I think Adams has used the manipulation technique of saying things that might or might not be jokes and then strategically sticking to them or saying “What? Me? I was only joking! Haha! You can’t take a joke!” depending on which was more convenient to him at that exact second, enough times that I’m not comfortable letting him have that escape. Also, when I was replying to Joel Pollak about this, I happened to glance at his Twitter account, and one of the top tweets was a repost of someone saying that “The Democrat playbook is to arrest every single person who disagrees with them”. I think if I forced Pollak into some kind of extremely literal frame of mind - maybe asked him to bet money on whether I could tweet the words “the Democrats are wrong about immigration” in my Democrat-controlled state without getting arrested - he would admit that, okay, they don’t want to arrest literally every single person who disagrees with them. He was exaggerating for effect, probably in much the way he’s going to say that Scott Adams was exaggerating for effect. You say stuff like “The Democrats are going to HUNT YOU DOWN and LITERALLY MURDER YOU. They will TORTURE YOUR FAMILY and RAPE YOUR DAUGHTER and EAT YOUR PETS and TURN YOUR HOUSE INTO A CHURCH OF SATAN”, and what you mean is “I disagree with the Democrats and sometimes they go overboard cancelling people”. I have a post called If It’s Worth Your Time To Lie, It’s Worth My Time To Correct It. My thesis is that tolerating claims of “directional correctness” - the thing where someone asks to get a pass because even if they said wasn’t literally true, it “points to” an “emotionally correct” thing - is eventually totally corrosive. It means everyone ratchets up their claims to the highest level they think they can get away with (ie walk back later if challenged, as a motte and bailey). And then you end up with this miasma where maybe 5% of people totally believe you, and 50% of people sort of absorb the connotation and think something like that is true, and then people get terrified of the Democrats and think of them as monsters and treat politics as an existential struggle where they will genuinely get arrested or murdered unless they do it to the Democrats first, and then you get a civil war or something. I think Adams and Pollak’s milieu has in fact reached this point, and their love for these kinds of exaggerations is a big part of the cause. Adams was one of the funniest people in the world. If he was actually telling a joke, you could tell by the fact that you were laughing hysterically. “Democrats will hunt and kill you” isn’t funny. I’ll refrain from judgment about whether it was Adams’ sincerely held belief, some kind of annoying manipulation attempt, or whether Adams even recognized a difference between the two. But I think judging him on the fact that it didn’t happen is completely within bounds. … 3: Comments On The Substance Of The Piece … Zanzibar BuckBuck McFate writes: This business where boomers are tolerant of contradictions and find them amusing whereas millennials are horrified is a dynamic I've noticed as well, it seems to be true in politics also, I myself feel this hunger to be authentic all the time. I think it has something to do with the difficulty children have in putting negativity in context. They can't distinguish between a parent having a bad day and venting, or having an existential crisis. So the 50s guy was half right - you don't have to love your boss in your heart of hearts but careful what you say to your kids. Feral Finster writes: » “This is the basic engine of Dilbert: everyone is rewarded in exact inverse proportion to their virtue. Dilbert and Alice are brilliant and hard-working, so they get crumbs. Wally is brilliant but lazy, so he at least enjoys a fool’s paradise of endless coffee and donuts while his co-workers clean up his messes. The P.H.B. is neither smart nor industrious, so he is forever on top, reaping the rewards of everyone else’s toil. Dogbert, an inveterate scammer with a passing resemblance to various trickster deities, makes out best of all.” Compare with the famous observation that executives are sociopaths, management are clueless, and the workers losers. Yeah, it’s interesting to compare Rao and Adams. Rao formulated his Gervais Principle as a specific response to Adams’ Dilbert Principle, which I guess means Rao thought Adams got it wrong. Did he? The Pointy Haired Boss seems to go back and forth between Clueless and Sociopath, which is probably why Rao thought Adams’ work fell short. Dogbert is clearly Sociopath, but has no permanent role in the corporation, and doesn’t really represent a real thing you can be - his character was a ridiculous scammer who succeeded at near-impossible endeavours (like convincing people he was a Nostradamus-style mystical prophet) because the logic of the strip demanded it. Later, Adams foregrounded the CEO character more, maybe to create a purer Sociopath, letting the Boss go closer to Clueless. This is making me somewhat regret accusing Adams of wanting to be the Pointy-Haired Boss. It would have been fairer (and less of an accusation/surprise) to accuse him of wanting to be Dogbert. But again, Dogbert doesn’t represent a real thing you could be, which might have been why the PHB made a better metaphor. (contra my claim, the cover of Win Bigly shows a mashup of Dogbert and Trump. Fine, Dogbert is a thing one person can be.) You can read my full review of The Gervais Principle here. cincilator writes: Scott Alexander, former tribune of nerds now says that the sneerclub was right about everything all along? I didn’t expect that, let me tell you. Several people interpreted me as attacking nerds. I disagree - I think I was attacking self-hating nerds, because nerdiness is fine and you shouldn’t have to hate yourself for it. To spell it out more explicitly: All nerds must eventually realize they’re not going to immediately dominate everything by intellect alone. This isn’t because intellect isn’t great, it’s because 1) it’s only one of many skills, and 2) you probably aren’t even the person with the most intellect. Again, every mildly-talented person has to face this realization, whether it’s a nerd realizing he won’t be the next Einstein or a jock realizing he won’t be the next LeBron. If someone deals with this using denial (one of Freud’s maladaptive defenses), you get the nerd who says no, I really am the next Einstein, ie a crackpot, aka the sort of person who gets featured on Sneerclub. If they deal with it using reaction formation (another of Freud’s maladaptive defenses), you get the self-hating nerd, aka the sort of person who joins Sneerclub4. If they just deal with it maturely instead of spinning up maladaptive defenses against it, they’re a nerd who is hopefully good-natured and accepting of their nerdiness, and hopefully does some good work in some specific small area, and changes the world in some specific small way (or some very large way, if they can work together with other people and get lucky). Bugmaster writes: I think Adams is basically correct. Yes, facts and evidence do exist and are real; but they have virtually no impact on anything socially important -- i.e., on anything important whatsoever. Memes and charisma and persuasion are what matters if you want to achieve life goals that extend beyound yourself and your immediate family. I worry that Adams (and you) are doing something where unless the average person can solve every problem by facts and intelligence alone, then facts+intelligence lose and memes and persuasion win. But the average person also can’t solve every problem by memes+persuasion alone! If Dilbert is an 80th percentile nerd, the 80th percentile persuader is - I don’t know, a used-car salesman? Dilbert’s probably earning more money, especially nowadays when he could make L5 at Google. And if Donald Trump is a 99.9999th percentile persuader, the 99.9999th percentile nerd is Ilya Sutskever. Probably most people would slightly prefer being Trump to Sutskever, but Sutksever does have a couple billion dollars, plus the more ethereal rewards of genius; it still seems like a pretty good deal. I also think you’re doing a sort of black-and-white thinking here. Every day, great persuaders like Sam Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth Holmes end up in jail, because in fact the things that they said were true were not true. Every day, smooth-talking charismatic manipulators successfully seduce the girl into bed with them, then totally fail to turn it into a happy stable marriage, because after a few years even the dumbest woman catches on and figures out whether her mate provides real value or not. Even Donald Trump has only a 37% approval rating, because he can’t make “we should alienate our allies over Greenland” sound plausible to most of the American people. When someone’s very good at it, persuasion sometimes helps them blur facts around the edges. But that’s it. Nobody except Scott Adams and a few psychotherapists ever go to hypnotist school. Most don’t even go to any formal persuasion classes. That’s because hypnotism/persuasion isn’t really a lifehack that helps you win all the time at everything. If the world’s best hypnotist asked a room of VCs for money with a stupid business plan, he would probably fail. This isn’t to say persuasion is useless, and in certain fields it can be very powerful indeed. But let’s not go crazy and start worshipping it. The grass is always greener on the other side. The nerd sits in his cubicle and thinks “If only I were more charismatic.” But the salesman with the bright teeth and the firm handshake thinks “Man, I bet I could get out of this dead-end job if only I were smarter.”5 … 4: The Part On Race And Cancellation (INCLUDED UNDER PROTEST) … Ilya Lozovsky writes: Ninety percent of this essay is brilliant — smarter and realer than anything anyone else has written about Adams — but the end lost me. It's too generous, to the point of being a whitewash. Adams was vicious and hateful and played a material role in convincing Americans to vote for actual fascism. I don't think it's right to "hand it to him." JJ McCullough (JJM’s Shortstack) writes: Good essay, but I think you kinda yadda-yadda'd away his racist rant, which was extremely explicit and extended. I think it was the opposite of a "bog-standard cancellation," which we think of as being a slightly unfair, overzealous policing of an at least slightly subjectively offensive comment, often from years ago. But Scott went on quite a long diatribe about why black people, as a group, are dangerous and undesirable to be around, and why he, personally, goes out of his way to avoid them. Some conservatives have tried to use "bog-standard" anti-woke logic in defending him, but no, his comments really are quite explicitly and undeniably racist, if that term has any useful definition at all. Alex Wotbot writes: Now, you quoted Adams saying: “the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people; just get the fuck away” If this was the intended point, does it really make sense that only the far-left freaked out? It’s kind of important to mention this was within a hypothetical. Suppose a survey reported that 26% of a population believes “The phrase ‘It’s OK to be blonde’ is hate speech” and another 21% weren’t sure if they agree with the statement or not. Now suppose you were blonde, would you hang around that population? Now go read the February 2022 Rasmussen Reports survey. Please do better than this, I don’t want to have to Gell-Mann memoryhole this. Many people had strong opinions on this, so I have to respond to it. But first, I want to make it extra clear in capital letters: I AM DOING THIS IN THE COMMENTS POST, TO RESPOND TO YOUR COMMENTS, AND NOT BECAUSE I THINK IT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING. Certain people screenshotted the one paragraph of my ten thousand word essay that discussed this and posted it on Twitter, in order to make it look like I was joining in some kind of chorus of liberals reducing Adams to his worst moment. I posted what I thought was a no-nonsense, factual description of what happened, in order not to be accused of hiding it or covering it up. It was the least important part of my essay, I’m aware that writing about it at all opens me to attack from both sides, and I discuss it here only to respond to all of you who wanted to know my opinion on it. Just don’t screenshot it on Twitter and say “LOOK SCOTT IS STILL HARPING ON THE RACE THING”, that’s all I’m asking. That having been said… To make sure we’re all on the same page - Adams’ comments were prompted by this poll, conducted February 2023. The question was: “Do you agree or disagree with this statement: ‘It’s OK to be white’” Among blacks, 53% agreed, 26% disagreed, and 21% were “not sure”. Among whites, the numbers were 81/7/13. Here’s the video of Adams’ comments: Transcript: If nearly half of all blacks are not okay with white people - according to this poll, not according to me - that’s a hate group. And I don’t want to have anything to do with them. And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people. Just get the f**k away. Wherever you have to go. Just get away. Cause there’s no fixing this. This can’t be fixed. You just have to escape. That’s what I did. I went to a neighborhood with a very low black population. Because unfortunately, there’s a high correlation between the density - this is according to Don Lemon, here I’m just quoting Don Lemon, who said when he lived in a mostly black neighborhood, there were a bunch of problems he didn’t see in white neighborhoods. So even Don Lemon sees a big difference, for your quality of living, based on where you live and who’s there. So I think it makes no sense whatsoever as a white citizen of America to try to help black citizens anymore. It doesn’t make sense. Because there’s no longer a rational impulse. And so I’m… I’m gonna, uh, I’m gonna back off from being helpful to black America, because it doesn’t seem like it pays off. Like I’ve been doing it all my life, and I’ve been… the only outcome is I get called a racist. That’s the only outcome. [cackles] It makes no sense to help black Americans if you’re white… it’s over. Don’t even think it’s worth trying. Totally not trying. Is this racist? I have a piece called Against Murderism, where I talk about why it’s so hard for people to agree on questions about “racism”. The summary: although it would be possible to have someone be purely, axiomatically racist - having it be a premise of their reasoning that they hate black people - in practice few people are like this. More typically, people have some argument more like: I don’t like [specific bad thing]
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!KA_U!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa2cb6162-0262-4c4c-8048-e8355f38967a_900x280.gif, If It’s Worth Your Time To Lie, It’s Worth My Time To Correct It, writes, writes, the famous observation that executives are sociopaths, management are clueless, and the workers losers, The Gervais Principle, writes, 4, writes, 5, writes, JJM’s Shortstack, writes, writes, this poll, Against Murderism
War Against The Weak1 mentions across 1 issues

War Against The Weak is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 20, 2021 and September 20, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "War Against The Weak, a book on early 20th century American eugenics". It most often appears alongside 4chan, A Clockwork Orange, Adrenochrome.

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War Against The Weak
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War Against The Weak
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Links For September
September 20, 2021 · Original source
12: Bobobob of DSL reviews War Against The Weak, a book on early 20th century American eugenics. I had always imagined this as a carefully-planned conspiracy by sinister eggheads, but the book argues that even by its own standards it was a total train wreck. Eugenicists launched a national campaign to sterilize blind people, even though 90%+ of blindness is non-hereditary. People who didn’t like their totally-normal-IQ family members sent them to the courts as “feebleminded”, and the courts ordered their sterilization after rubber-stamp examinations. Not sure if all of it was that bad or the book focused on the worst examples - but the worst were pretty awful.
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War and Peace1 mentions across 1 issues

War and Peace 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 "War and Peace". It most often appears alongside A Canticle For Leibowitz, A Farewell to Alms, A Husband.

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War and Peace
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War and Peace
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Choose Book Review Finalists 2024
May 17, 2024 · Original source
...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 At Pooh Corner...
Warrior's Woman1 mentions across 1 issues

Warrior's Woman 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 "Warrior's Woman". It most often appears alongside A Canticle For Leibowitz, A Farewell to Alms, A Husband.

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Warrior's Woman
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May 17, 2024
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May 17, 2024
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Warrior's Woman
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Choose Book Review Finalists 2024
May 17, 2024 · Original source
...d 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 At Pooh Corner Wonderful Life:...
Wealth of Nations1 mentions across 1 issues

Wealth of Nations 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 "here's Smith in Wealth of Nations for instance". It most often appears alongside "The Rent Is Too Damn High!", 16th amendment, 1886.

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Wealth of Nations
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April 16, 2021
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April 16, 2021
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Wealth of Nations
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Your Book Review: Progress And Poverty
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
WEIRD1 mentions across 1 issues

WEIRD is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 11, 2023 and August 11, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "So, after The Secret of Our Success and WEIRD, perhaps there is room to make it a trilogy". It most often appears alongside Achilles, ACX, Adam Smith.

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WEIRD
Mention count
1
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1
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August 11, 2023
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August 11, 2023
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WEIRD
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Your Book Review: The Weirdest People in the World
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
His hypothesis comes from cross-cultural psychology. The West got rich because Westerners are different. People from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic societies are WEIRD – the acronym comes from a previous article of his. In particular, compared to everyone else in the world and in history, modern Westerners:
Inline links: previous article
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
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
WEIRDest People In The World1 mentions across 1 issues

WEIRDest People In The World is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 20, 2021 and September 20, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Criticism of Henrich’s WEIRDest People In The World argument". It most often appears alongside 4chan, A Clockwork Orange, Adrenochrome.

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1
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1
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September 20, 2021
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September 20, 2021
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WEIRDest People In The World
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Links For September
September 20, 2021 · Original source
36: Criticism of Henrich’s WEIRDest People In The World argument.
Inline links: Criticism of Henrich’s
What Computers Can’t Do1 mentions across 1 issues

What Computers Can’t Do 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 "Hubert Dreyfus’ What Computers Can’t Do". It most often appears alongside 2023 book review contest, AGI, Alan Turing.

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Your Book Review: Why Machines Will Never Rule the World
June 03, 2023 · Original source
Arguments about computability aren’t new, and have fallen out of favor with many AI researchers. Landgrebe and Smith’s contention that the brain isn’t a Turing machine is reminiscent of Hubert Dreyfus’ What Computers Can’t Do and Roger Penrose’s Shadows of the Mind, both of which the authors discuss.
Inline links: What Computers Can’t Do, Shadows of the Mind
What Even Is Gender?1 mentions across 1 issues

What Even Is Gender? 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 "What Even Is Gender?". It most often appears alongside A Canticle For Leibowitz, A Farewell to Alms, A Husband.

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What Even Is Gender?
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What Even Is Gender?
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Choose Book Review Finalists 2024
May 17, 2024 · Original source
...arian 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 At Pooh Corner Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale an...
What Kind of Creatures Are We?1 mentions across 1 issues

What Kind of Creatures Are We? 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 "( What Kind of Creatures Are We? Ch. 1, pg. 15-16)". It most often appears alongside Alan Turing, Amazon, Amazon jungle.

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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
What Lies Dreaming1 mentions across 1 issues

What Lies Dreaming 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 "He has also published the novel What Lies Dreaming , a Lovecraftian horror set in 2nd century Rome". It most often appears alongside 80,000 Hours, ACX, ACX.

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What Lies Dreaming
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What Lies Dreaming
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Non-Book Review Contest 2025 Winners
October 17, 2025 · Original source
‘Red Means No’ Orgies, reviewed by Eneasz Brodski. Eneasz is best known for creating the full-cast HPMOR audiobook/podcast, and he now podcasts at The Bayesian Conspiracy covering rationalist general-interest topics. He has also published the novel What Lies Dreaming, a Lovecraftian horror set in 2nd century Rome. He blogs at Death Is Bad and will be participating in the Inkhaven residency this November.
Inline links: ‘Red Means No’ Orgies, full-cast HPMOR audiobook/podcast, The Bayesian Conspiracy, What Lies Dreaming, Death Is Bad, Inkhaven
What’s Our Problem1 mentions across 1 issues

What’s Our Problem is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 18, 2024 and January 18, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Book Review: What’s Our Problem - Tim Urban’s book on political polarization". It most often appears alongside America Against America, Are We All Doxastic Voluntarists?, Assistant Dictator Book Club.

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What’s Our Problem
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Subscrive Drive 2024 + Free Unlocked Posts
January 18, 2024 · Original source
Book Review: What’s Our Problem - Tim Urban’s book on political polarization.
Inline links: Book Review: What’s Our Problem
When Genius Failed1 mentions across 1 issues

When Genius Failed 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 "Tales of Icarus flying too close to the sun, where readers revel in schadenfreude, e.g., When Genius Failed". It most often appears alongside 2008 Financial Crisis, 2023 book review contest, 30-Year Mortgage.

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When Genius Failed
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When Genius Failed
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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.
When Prophecy Fails1 mentions across 1 issues

When Prophecy Fails is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 10, 2021 and March 10, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Festinger, Rieken, and Schachter's classic book on the subject, When Prophecy Fails". It most often appears alongside apocalypse cultism, Black Lives Matter, cynophobia.

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When Prophecy Fails
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When Prophecy Fails
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Trapped Priors As A Basic Problem Of Rationality
March 10, 2021 · Original source
(...but now I'm thinking of the stories of apocalypse cultists who, when the predicted apocalypse doesn't arrive, double down on their cult in one way or another. Festinger, Rieken, and Schachter's classic book on the subject,When Prophecy Fails, finds that these people "become a more fervent believer after a failure or disconfirmation". I'm not sure what level of evidence could possibly convince them. My usual metaphor is "if God came down from the heavens and told you..." - but God coming down from the heavens and telling you anything probably makes apocalypse cultism more probable, not less.)
Inline links: When Prophecy Fails
When We Cease To Understand The World1 mentions across 1 issues

When We Cease To Understand The World 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 "When We Cease To Understand The World". It most often appears alongside A Canticle For Leibowitz, A Farewell to Alms, A Husband.

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Choose Book Review Finalists 2024
May 17, 2024 · Original source
...struction 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 At Pooh Corner Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History World Empire L...
Where is my Flying Car?1 mentions across 1 issues

Where is my Flying Car? is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 04, 2021 and June 04, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as ""Where is my Flying Car?", by J. Storrs Hall". It most often appears alongside A.I.M., Aerocar, America.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
June 04, 2021
Last seen
June 04, 2021
Book title
Where is my Flying Car?
Instagram handle
@shoppingtheatre.inc
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Your Book Review: Where's My Flying Car?
June 04, 2021 · Original source
"Where is my Flying Car?", by J. Storrs Hall, is an attempt to answer that question. His answer is: the Great Stagnation was caused by energy usage flatlining, which was caused by our failure to switch to nuclear energy, which was caused by excessive regulation, which was caused by "green fundamentalism".
Inline links: "Where is my Flying Car?"
Where's My Flying Car1 mentions across 1 issues

Where's My Flying Car is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 10, 2021 and July 10, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Where's My Flying Car , reviewed by Jonathan P". It most often appears alongside Addiction By Design, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are, Astral Codex Ten.

Reference entry
Where's My Flying Car
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
July 10, 2021
Last seen
July 10, 2021
Book title
Where's My Flying Car
Instagram handle
@shoppingtheatre.inc
Likely author
Jonathan
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Book Review Contest: Winners
July 10, 2021 · Original source
Order Without Law, reviewed by Phil Hazelden Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are, reviewed by Jeff Russell Why Buddhism Is True, reviewed by Eve Bigaj Double Fold, reviewed by Boštjan P The Wizard And The Prophet, reviewed by Maryana Through The Eye Of A Needle, reviewed by Tom Powell Years Of Lyndon Johnson, reviewed by Theodore Ehrenborg Addiction By Design, reviewed by Ketchup Duck The Accidental Superpower, reviewed by Jon Boguth Humankind, reviewed by Neil Roques The Collapse Of Complex Societies, reviewed by Etirabys Where's My Flying Car, reviewed by Jonathan P How Children Fail, reviewed by HonoreDB Plagues And Peoples, reviewed by Joel Ferris (who is looking for a job, email here)
Inline links: Order Without Law, Phil Hazelden, Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are, Jeff Russell, Why Buddhism Is True, Eve Bigaj, Double Fold, Boštjan P, The Wizard And The Prophet, Through The Eye Of A Needle, Years Of Lyndon Johnson, Addiction By Design, The Accidental Superpower, Humankind, The Collapse Of Complex Societies, Etirabys, Where's My Flying Car, How Children Fail, Plagues And Peoples, here
Where’s My Flying Car1 mentions across 1 issues

Where’s My Flying Car is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 04, 2021 and June 04, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "there is a second excellent review of Where’s My Flying Car". It most often appears alongside A.I.M., Aerocar, America.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
June 04, 2021
Last seen
June 04, 2021
Book title
Where’s My Flying Car
Instagram handle
@shoppingtheatre.inc
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Your Book Review: Where's My Flying Car?
June 04, 2021 · Original source
[Editor’s note: there is a second excellent review of Where’s My Flying Car in the Runners Up packet. I didn’t consider it for the contest because the author submitted a second entry, and I figured since Flying Car was a duplicate I would consider the second entry instead. In retrospect I regret this and it was pretty great. Read it here, and if you like it you can vote on it in the Runners Up vote - see point 3 here for more details.]
Inline links: here, Runners Up vote, here
Where’s My Flying Car?1 mentions across 1 issues

Where’s My Flying Car? is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 18, 2021 and June 18, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "the finalists are: 14: Where’s My Flying Car?". It most often appears alongside Addiction By Design, Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are?, Double Fold.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
June 18, 2021
Last seen
June 18, 2021
Book title
Where’s My Flying Car?
Instagram handle
@shoppingtheatre.inc
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Vote In The Book Review Contest!
June 18, 2021 · Original source
1: Order Without Law 2: On The Natural Faculties 3: Progress And Poverty 4: Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are? 5: Why Buddhism Is True 6: Double Fold 7: The Wizard And The Prophet 8: Through The Eye Of A Needle 9: The Years Of Lyndon Johnson 10: Addiction By Design 11: The Accidental Superpower 12: Humankind 13: The Collapse Of Complex Societies 14: Where’s My Flying Car? 15: Down And Out In Paris And London 16: How Children Fail 17: Plagues And Peoples
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
Where’s the Evidence? Debates in Modern Medicine1 mentions across 1 issues

Where’s the Evidence? Debates in Modern Medicine 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 other secondary sources I found seem to lead back to the 1998 book, Where’s the Evidence? Debates in Modern Medicine". It most often appears alongside 1913 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Alexandria, Aristotelian.

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1
Issue count
1
First seen
April 09, 2021
Last seen
April 09, 2021
Book title
Where’s the Evidence? Debates in Modern Medicine
Instagram handle
@shoppingtheatre.inc
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Your Book Review: On The Natural Faculties
April 09, 2021 · Original source
The other secondary sources I found seem to lead back to the 1998 book, Where’s the Evidence? Debates in Modern Medicine, by William A. Silverman, but he doesn’t say which of Galen’s works this quote supposedly comes from. In fact I can’t find any sources from before 1998 that include any fragment of this quote at all. It’s not looking good for the authenticity of this quote.
Which Country Has The World’s Best Health Care1 mentions across 1 issues

Which Country Has The World’s Best Health Care is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 19, 2022 and January 19, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Our guide to this question will be Which Country Has The World’s Best Health Care , by Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel". It most often appears alongside Alinea, Alp Blossom, Alpha Tolman.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
January 19, 2022
Last seen
January 19, 2022
Book title
Which Country Has The World’s Best Health Care
Likely author
Dr
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Book Review: Which Country Has The World's Best Health Care?
January 19, 2022 · Original source
Our guide to this question will be Which Country Has The World’s Best Health Care, by Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel. Emanuel is a professor of bioethics, but I’ve been told to be less reflexively hostile to bioethicists. He got in trouble a few years ago for a comment that got summed up as “life after 75 is not worth living”, but he never used those exact words, and his point about the dangers of excessive life-prolonging medical care is well-taken. He opposes euthanasia, which I interpret as demanding state-sponsored coercive violence to prevent torture victims from escaping, but I know other people interpret it differently. And he’s the brother of former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, but ... nope, can’t think of any extenuating circumstances for this one.
Inline links: Which Country Has The World’s Best Health Care, less reflexively hostile, life after 75 is not worth living, his point about, well-taken
So: which country has the world’s best health care?
White Fang1 mentions across 1 issues

White Fang is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 28, 2024 and June 28, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "He liberally quotes from books like Bambi, Charlotte’s Web, and White Fang". It most often appears alongside 2023 special, ACX grant winners, African Gray Parrot.

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White Fang
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1
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1
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June 28, 2024
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June 28, 2024
Book title
White Fang
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Your Book Review: Dominion
June 28, 2024 · Original source
Scully’s approach can appear almost childish at times. He liberally quotes from books like Bambi, Charlotte’s Web, and White Fang as ways to express what animals might be thinking and feeling. But I think there’s a method to his madness. He’s getting us to tap into the feeling many of us get when we look at our pet and just know that they have an inner life that matters. Something like that happens to Daniel Dennet himself, he who was once so sure that animals are unfeeling automatons. The incident occurs during an appearance on NPR in the late 90’s. Dennet is on the show with an African Gray Parrot named Alex, as well as Alex’s trainer. After witnessing Alex do things like count out how many blocks of each color were in front of him, Dennet is bowled over, apparently convinced of Alex’s consciousness. He proclaims to all the viewers that:
Whither Socialism1 mentions across 1 issues

Whither Socialism 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 Whither Socialism". It most often appears alongside A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Psychoanalysis, ACX Grants, Akhorahil.

Reference entry
Whither Socialism
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1
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1
First seen
February 21, 2022
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February 21, 2022
Book title
Whither Socialism
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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
Who We Are And How We Got Here1 mentions across 1 issues

Who We Are And How We Got Here 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 "Who We Are And How We Got Here". It most often appears alongside A Canticle For Leibowitz, A Farewell to Alms, A Husband.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
May 17, 2024
Last seen
May 17, 2024
Book title
Who We Are And How We Got Here
Instagram handle
@shoppingtheatre.inc
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Choose Book Review Finalists 2024
May 17, 2024 · Original source
...ist'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 At Pooh Corner Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History World Empire Lost Young Adults
Why Do I Suck1 mentions across 1 issues

Why Do I Suck is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 04, 2022 and May 04, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "I wrote a post called Why Do I Suck". It most often appears alongside Apple, facebook, MySpace.

Reference entry
Why Do I Suck
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1
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1
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May 04, 2022
Last seen
May 04, 2022
Book title
Why Do I Suck
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Why Do People Prefer My Old Blog's Layout To Substack's?
May 04, 2022 · Original source
A few months ago, I wrote a post called Why Do I Suck, which discussed some people’s complaints about the new blog. In the comments, lots of people said their main complaint was that Substack’s design was worse than SSC’s. EG:
Inline links: Why Do I Suck
Why Do I Suck?1 mentions across 1 issues

Why Do I Suck? 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 "Scott wrote Why Do I Suck? at close to the lowest period of engagement". It most often appears alongside 4chan, ACX, ACX.

Reference entry
Why Do I Suck?
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1
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1
First seen
July 26, 2025
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July 26, 2025
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Why Do I Suck?
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Your Review: The Astral Codex Ten Commentariat (“Why Do We Suck?”)
July 26, 2025 · Original source
A couple of years ago Scott asked, Why Do I Suck?. This was a largely tongue-in-cheek springboard to discuss a substantive criticism he regularly received - that his earlier writing was better than his writing now. How far back do we need to go before his writing was ‘good’? Accounts seemed to differ; Scott said that the feedback he got was of two sorts:
Inline links: Why Do I Suck?
“Do you feel like you’ve shifted to less ambitious forms of writing with the new Substack?”, which dates the decline to 2021 Quite a few people responded in the comments that Scott’s writing hadn’t changed, but it was the experience of being a commentor which had worsened. For example, David Friedman, a prolific commentor on the blog in the SSC-era, writes: A lot of what I liked about SSC was the commenting community, and I find the comments here less interesting than they were on SSC, fewer interesting arguments, which is probably why I spend more time on [an alternative forum] than on ACX. Similarly, kfix seems to be a long-time lurker (from as early as 2016) who has become more active in the ACX-era, writes: I would definitely agree that the commenting community here is 'worse' than at SSC along the lines you describe, along with the also unwelcome hurt feelings post whenever Scott makes an offhand joke about a political/cultural topic. And of course, this position wasn’t unanimous. Verbamundi Consulting is a true lurker who has only ever made one post on the blog – this one: Ok, I've been lurking for a while, but I have to say: I don't think you suck… You have a good variety of topics, your commenting community remains excellent, and you're one of the few bloggers I continue to follow. The ACX Commentariat is somewhat unique in that it self-styles itself as a major reason to come and read Scott’s writing – Scott offers up some insights on an issue, and then the comments section engages unusually open and unusually respectful discussion of the theme, and the total becomes greater than the sum of the parts. Therefore, if the Commentariat has declined in quality it may disproportionately affect people’s experience of Scott’s posts. The joint value of each Scott-plus-Commentariat offering declines if the Commentariat are not pulling their weight, even if Scott himself remains just as good as ever. In Why Do I Suck? Scott suggests that there is weak to no evidence of a decline in his writing quality, so I propose this review as something of a companion piece; is the (alleged) problem with the blog, in fact, staring at us in the mirror? My personal view aligns with Verbamundi Consulting and many other commentors - I’ve enjoyed participating in both the SSC and ACX comments, and I haven’t noticed any decline in Commentariat quality. So, I was extremely surprised to find the data totally contradicted my anecdotal experience, and indicated a very clear dropoff in a number of markers of quality at almost exactly the points Scott mentioned in Why Do I Suck? – one in mid-2016 and one in early 2021 during the switch from SSC to ACX. Setting Out the Case for Decline There’s a pretty basic question that needs to be answered before we compare the Commentariat today to that of yesteryear. That question is - does ‘the Commentariat’ actually exist? It is easy to understand what it means for Scott’s writing to have got better or worse over time, or to track the evolution of a specific commentor’s engagement with the blog. But in order to review ‘the Commentariat’ as a whole we would have to treat it as a single entity with discernible patterns and tendencies. I believe this approach is justified; the Commentariat has a distinct culture, voice and its own unique animal spirits that react to both Scott’s interests and the interests of the external world. Since it is not just generating random noise, it is possible to explore the Commentariat over time to build a case that its overall quality is declining (or not). To demonstrate this, I have displayed below a graph of comments per post across the lifetime of the blogs. It may not be quite fair to say that ‘engagement’ is the same thing as ‘quality’, but I certainly think it raises a question that needs to be answered; something massively affects comment engagement in 2016 and then again in 2021. In this graph, each datapoint represents a month that Scott has been blogging. A typical month will have between 15-20 posts, of which around half will be authored by Scott and half will be ‘authored’ in some way by the Commentariat, which are mostly Open Threads. I’ve averaged by month because certain types of post get much less engagement than others, and so looking at individual posts ended up too noisy to make attractive graphs (the true goal of any honest statistician). 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: writes, writes, this one, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!04Ny!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F67ab1e15-6e36-4500-8980-ad652af543c6_745x421.png, The Control Group is Out of Control, Toxoplasmosa of Rage, Untitled
The ACX-era begins in 2021 and is highlighted in green. You can see engagement starts lower than the SSC steady-state of 400-600 comments per post (maybe more like 300-400 per post) but increases over time to at least that level by 2024, getting close to the peak engagement era. In one of life’s small ironies, Scott wrote Why Do I Suck? at close to the lowest period of engagement the blog had experienced for nearly a decade.
Why Fish Don't Exist1 mentions across 1 issues

Why Fish Don't Exist 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 "Why Fish Don't Exist". It most often appears alongside A Canticle For Leibowitz, A Farewell to Alms, A Husband.

Reference entry
Why Fish Don't Exist
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1
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1
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May 17, 2024
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May 17, 2024
Book title
Why Fish Don't Exist
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Choose Book Review Finalists 2024
May 17, 2024 · Original source
...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 At Pooh Corner Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History World Empire Lost Young Adults
Why I Am Not A Conflict Theorist1 mentions across 1 issues

Why I Am Not A Conflict Theorist is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 03, 2025 and March 03, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "In Why I Am Not A Conflict Theorist , I speculated". It most often appears alongside ACX, Astralcodexten Com, Harihar Prasad.

Mention count
1
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1
First seen
March 03, 2025
Last seen
March 03, 2025
Book title
Why I Am Not A Conflict Theorist
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Open Thread 371
March 03, 2025 · Original source
1: In Why I Am Not A Conflict Theorist, I speculated that someone might be able to mathematically model identity polarization. In response, Harihar Prasad made an Identity Alignment Simulation app.
Inline links: Why I Am Not A Conflict Theorist, Identity Alignment Simulation
Why Liberalism Failed1 mentions across 1 issues

Why Liberalism Failed 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 "Patrick Deneen’s contention in Why Liberalism Failed". It most often appears alongside @docneto, Americans, Andy G.

Reference entry
Why Liberalism Failed
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1
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1
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January 06, 2026
Last seen
January 06, 2026
Book title
Why Liberalism Failed
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Highlights From The Comments On Boomers
January 06, 2026 · Original source
This is also, in miniature, Patrick Deneen’s contention in Why Liberalism Failed: that, gradually, people dismantled the traditions they themselves had benefited from, because they saw them as cruft, not realizing they were load bearing.
Why Nations Fail 21 mentions across 1 issues

Why Nations Fail 2 is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 25, 2023 and August 25, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "The word "institutions" occurs over 1000 times in Why Nations Fail 2". It most often appears alongside 5G, Acemoglu and Robinson, ACX comments.

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Why Nations Fail 2
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1
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1
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August 25, 2023
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August 25, 2023
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Why Nations Fail 2
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Your Book Review: Why Nations Fail
August 25, 2023 · Original source
...tions” anyway? (The economic and political kind, not the prison and mental hospital kind.) Basically, AR mean politics. The word "institutions" occurs over 1000 times in Why Nations Fail 2 . I'll just focus on how AR use it without worrying about the dictionary , different schools of economics , or other social sciences . They begin with what institutions...
...ntage of economic opportunities. What are “institutions” anyway? (The economic and political kind, not the prison and mental hospital kind.) Basically, AR mean politics. The word "institutions" occurs over 1000 times in Why Nations Fail 2 . I'll just focus on how AR use it without worrying about the dictionary , different schools of economics , or other social sciences . They begin with what institutions...
Why Viruses Must Die1 mentions across 1 issues

Why Viruses Must Die is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 11, 2023 and May 11, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Chris Buck (author of Why Viruses Must Die)". It most often appears alongside 15th Commandment, ACX, ADHD.

Reference entry
Why Viruses Must Die
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1
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1
First seen
May 11, 2023
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May 11, 2023
Book title
Why Viruses Must Die
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Highlights From The Comments On Long COVID And Bisexuality
May 11, 2023 · Original source
Chris Buck (author of Why Viruses Must Die) writes:
Inline links: Why Viruses Must Die, writes
Why We’re Polarized1 mentions across 1 issues

Why We’re Polarized is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 26, 2025 and February 26, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "reading Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized". It most often appears alongside Democrats, Elon Musk, Ezra Klein.

Reference entry
Why We’re Polarized
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1
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1
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February 26, 2025
Last seen
February 26, 2025
Book title
Why We’re Polarized
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Why I Am Not A Conflict Theorist
February 26, 2025 · Original source
Every bad thing that happened in the past five years is downstream of these two cartoons, sorry. In some other time, comics like these might have been accepted as friendly teasing. But the experts were joining in the coalition’s project of humiliating working-class white people (to flatter their educated and minority constituents), and it all proved too much. The working-class white people, along with everyone else caught in the crossfire (tech, religious people, etc) reoriented their entire politics around trying to humiliate and enrage the experts. If the experts like vaccines, the rest of us have to prove them wrong (so that the experts’ power is shown to be undeserved, we can be the smart ones, and it’s the experts who should feel humiliated). If the experts got caught flat-footed saying COVID couldn’t be a lab leak, when in fact they secretly knew that it could be, we’ll reorient our entire lives around arguing again and again that COVID is a lab leak with 1000% certainty, the most certain anything has ever been in all of history. If the experts and libs support Ukraine, the rest of us must at least make a favorable reference to Putin in the House of Commons. An alternate objection: sure, you can explain any position through epicycles like these. But isn’t this theory so powerful that it can explain anything? In particular, the virtue-signaling vs. vice-signaling thing alone seems to cover all possible signaling, and maybe all possible policies. I don’t think it’s realistic to ask a sociological theory like this one to be infinitely elegant with only one main driver and zero epicycles. Political positions need to be explained in historical terms. This doesn’t make such a theory disprovable - the examples above at least claim to discredit conflict theory. But debate would have to be at a similarly careful level of analysis and not just a simple predictive checklist. I hope this theory is natural enough that most people will be less interested in demanding a formal test than in discussing whether it effectively captures a position which is already widely shared but rarely put into words. Why Identity Alignment? I think this solves one of the things that confused me when reading Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized. Klein talked about a fairly recent process of “identity alignment”. That is, people used to have unpredictable beliefs from all over the political spectrum - someone might support the environment but want lower taxes, or oppose abortion but support gun control. Over the past few decades, this complexity has collapsed, so that most people are pretty representative of their chosen party. Someone should demonstrate this more mathematically, but it seems to me that if you start with a random assortment of identities, small fluctuations plus reactions should force polarization. That is, if a chance fluctuation makes environmentalists slightly more likely to support gun control, and this new bloc goes around insulting polluters and gun owners, then the gun owners affected will reactively start hating the environmentalists and insult them, the environmentalists will notice they’re being attacked by gun owners and polarize even more against them, and so on until (environmentalists + gun haters) and (polluters + gun lovers) have become two relatively consistent groups. Then if one guy from the (environmentalist + gun hater) group happens to insult a Catholic, the same process starts again until it’s (environmentalists + gun haters + atheists) and (polluters + gun lovers + Catholics), and so on until there are just two big groups. So What Of Mistake Theory? If this is true, it’s at least half-unconscious. Anti-vaxxers will (usually) admit that they don’t like experts, or that they feel like the experts betrayed them, or that they get a thrill out of owning the libs. But they’ll also insist that they honestly believe vaccines don’t work. I believe them when they say this. Partly because nobody would give their child measles just to own the libs. Partly because - instead of merely talking about how many libs they’re owning - they talk about thimerosal and neuroimmunology and autism diagnosis rates, and study these things carefully, and seem very interested in defending them. And partly because when I’ve been wrong about political or scientific questions, even in cases where looking back it’s obvious that I had ulterior motives for my position, I know I wasn’t making it up - at the time, it just seemed like the arguments in favor outweighed those against. But this is normal cognitive bias - specifically, motivated reasoning. It’s hard to overcome, but it’s not impossible. People overcome it all the time. The Miller-Rootclaim debate changed lots of people’s minds on lab leak. Some people who promised never to vote for Trump changed their minds in November, and some of them have changed their minds again after he took office. Why does this happen? Because biases can put their finger on the evidentiary scale, but sufficiently strong evidence can still break through. It would be flattering to Democrats if they had won by a landslide in 2024, but this was obviously false, and there was no way to spin it to be true, so they just accepted the humiliating defeat.
Inline links: Why We’re Polarized, motivated reasoning, Miller-Rootclaim
Whyte's Organization Man1 mentions across 1 issues

Whyte's Organization Man is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 09, 2022 and December 09, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "books that are contemporaneous with those changes like Whyte's *Organization Man*". It most often appears alongside 417th Marquess of Cornwallshireshire, ACX, ACX.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
December 09, 2022
Last seen
December 09, 2022
Book title
Whyte's Organization Man
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Highlights From The Comments On Bobos In Paradise
December 09, 2022 · Original source
-The general phenomenon of the power of the WASP aristocracy being displaced by a managerial upper-middle class predates the changes to university admissions that Brooks is discussing--there are books that are contemporaneous with those changes like Whyte's *Organization Man* and Burnham's *Managerial Revolution* that were already observing the trend. The decades before the 50s saw WWII, the New Deal, and the general enrichment and empowerment of the various ethnic immigrant groups--all of these were vastly more convincing causal factors of the decline of the WASP aristocracy than one individual university president deciding to admit a moderately larger amount of non-WASPs. The dominant social orthodoxy that the bohemians were challenging was *this* orthodoxy, which had already displaced the WASP aristocracy by the time that they emerged--he postwar social order features as something of a glaring missing link for all of Brooks' analysis.
Wicked Songs1 mentions across 1 issues

Wicked Songs 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 "The first 'edition' of the 'Wicked Songs', containing forty sonnets, was hand-written by Yuri". It most often appears alongside A Poet in Paradise, Agrippa d'Aubigné, Alfred Adler.

Reference entry
Wicked Songs
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
June 10, 2023
Last seen
June 10, 2023
Book title
Wicked Songs
Likely author
Yuri
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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 first “edition” of the “Wicked Songs”, containing forty sonnets, was hand-written by Yuri on the thinnest tracing paper in five copies and sent to their friends and relatives. This type of “package” by itself could be a reason for an arrest; luckily some of their contacts were brave and decent people. They distributed the sonnets through a “pigeon network”, in secret. One of the people who read them this way was young Stella Kopytnaya. Some years later, after meeting him in person, she married Yakov Charon. They named their first child Yuri. In 1954 Yakov was “rehabilitated”, a soviet judicial term meaning that the state made a mistake ever arresting him in the first place. He died in 1972 from tuberculosis that he got in the camp. (On the two side-by-side photos he is on the right)
Wicked Songs of Guillaume du Vintrais1 mentions across 1 issues

Wicked Songs of Guillaume du Vintrais 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 "His book of one hundred sonnets, called “ Wicked Songs of Guillaume du Vintrais ”". It most often appears alongside A Poet in Paradise, Agrippa d'Aubigné, Alfred Adler.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
June 10, 2023
Last seen
June 10, 2023
Book title
Wicked Songs of Guillaume du Vintrais
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
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”.
Win Bigly: Persuasion In A World Where Facts Don’t Matter1 mentions across 1 issues

Win Bigly: Persuasion In A World Where Facts Don’t Matter 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 "expanded to book length several times in tomes named things like Win Bigly: Persuasion In A World Where Facts Don’t Matter". It most often appears alongside Adams, Alice, All-Seeing Eye.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
January 16, 2026
Last seen
January 16, 2026
Book title
Win Bigly: Persuasion In A World Where Facts Don’t Matter
Instagram handle
@shoppingtheatre.inc
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Source context
The Dilbert Afterlife
January 16, 2026 · Original source
This paragraph is the absolute center of Adams’ worldview (later expanded to book length several times in tomes named things like Win Bigly: Persuasion In A World Where Facts Don’t Matter). People don’t respond to logic and evidence, so the world is ruled by people who are good at making catchy slogans. Sufficiently advanced sloganeering is indistinguishable from hypnosis, and so when Adams has some cute turns of phrase in his previous book, he describes it as “[I] used a variety of hypnosis techniques in an attempt to produce a feeling of euphoric enlightenment in the reader”. This is the cringiest way possible to describe cute turns of phrase, and turns me off from believing any his further claims to hypnotic mastery.
The House At Pooh Corner1 mentions across 1 issues

Winnie-the-Pooh / The House At Pooh Corner 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 "Winnie-the-Pooh / The House At Pooh Corner". It most often appears alongside A Canticle For Leibowitz, A Farewell to Alms, A Husband.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
May 17, 2024
Last seen
May 17, 2024
Book title
Winnie-the-Pooh / The House At Pooh Corner
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Issue trail
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Source context
Choose Book Review Finalists 2024
May 17, 2024 · Original source
...me 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 At Pooh Corner Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History World Empire Lost Young Adults
...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 At Pooh Corner Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History World Empire Lost Young Adults
Wishsong of Shannara1 mentions across 1 issues

Wishsong of Shannara is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 28, 2023 and April 28, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "In the third book, Wishsong of Shannara, a wise wizard tells Brin Ohmsford". It most often appears alongside Ancient Progenitor Civilization, Aragorn, Arya Stark.

Reference entry
Wishsong of Shannara
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
April 28, 2023
Last seen
April 28, 2023
Book title
Wishsong of Shannara
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Issue trail
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Source context
The Psychology Of Fantasy
April 28, 2023 · Original source
The most perfect fantasy series, in the sense of hitting the exact center of every trope, might be Terry Brooks’ Shannara. In the third book, Wishsong of Shannara, a wise wizard tells Brin Ohmsford that because her ancestors used powerful magics, she has had those magics rub off in her blood in the form of the Wishsong, some sort of incomprehensible ability to get anything she wants as long as she can master herself and her emotions enough to use it correctly. She is charged with fighting the Dark Lord, and has various adventures which she can’t really solve with her Wishsong because she’s not able to master her emotions well enough to control it. Finally she confronts the Dark Lord, who tries to corrupt her, but her brother shows up at the last moment, reminds her how much she loves her family, and she realizes this is who she truly is, masters her Wishsong, and destroys the Dark Lord.
Woke Polyamorous Ayahuasca Meditation -- a Spiritual Path for the Intrepidly Sensitive1 mentions across 1 issues

Woke Polyamorous Ayahuasca Meditation -- a Spiritual Path for the Intrepidly Sensitive 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: Woke Polyamorous Ayahuasca Meditation -- a Spiritual Path for the Intrepidly Sensitive". It most often appears alongside 2017 SSC survey, A Woman First: First Woman: A Memoir, Aella.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
February 21, 2024
Last seen
February 21, 2024
Book title
Woke Polyamorous Ayahuasca Meditation -- a Spiritual Path for the Intrepidly Sensitive
Outbound links
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Source context
Highlights From The Comments On Polyamory
February 21, 2024 · Original source
Woke Polyamorous Ayahuasca Meditation -- a Spiritual Path for the Intrepidly Sensitive
Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History1 mentions across 1 issues

Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History 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 "Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History". It most often appears alongside A Canticle For Leibowitz, A Farewell to Alms, A Husband.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
May 17, 2024
Last seen
May 17, 2024
Book title
Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Choose Book Review Finalists 2024
May 17, 2024 · Original source
...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 At Pooh Corner Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History World Empire Lost Young Adults
Working1 mentions across 1 issues

Working is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 07, 2021 and May 07, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as ""In December I started reading Working, a book Caro wrote about his research process"". It most often appears alongside 22nd Amendment, Abe Fortas, Alvin Wirtz.

Reference entry
Working
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
May 07, 2021
Last seen
May 07, 2021
Book title
Working
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Source context
Your Book Review: The Years Of Lyndon Johnson
May 07, 2021 · Original source
And he's an excellent writer. In December I started reading Working, a book Caro wrote about his research process. This sounds like a book that bores people to tears, but instead it literally brought tears to my eyes.