French is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 7 times across 7 issues between November 04, 2021 and August 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "refugees from globalism - 'Germans, Dutch, French and Italians'"; "English wasn’t the dominant intellectual language back in the 19th century: French and German were more important"; "trying to play the English, French, and Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee off against each other". It most often appears alongside English, Europe, France.
- Article page
- French
- Mention count
- 7
- Issue count
- 7
- First seen
- November 04, 2021
- Last seen
- August 01, 2025
Outbound links
- https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-consequences-of-radical-reform
- https://journals.troy.edu/index.php/test/article/view/444/360
- https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.101.7.3286
- https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_POPU_1504_0705--fewer-singles-among-highly-educated.htm
- https://www.francetvinfo.fr/sante/maladie/coronavirus/deux-ans-apres-le-debut-de-la-pandemie-de-covid-19-ou-en-est-l-enquete-sur-les-origines-du-sars-cov-2_4911225.html
- https://www.metaculus.com/questions/6763/marine-le-pen-french-president-in-2022/
- https://www.nber.org/papers/w14831?fbclid=IwAR00ZDIQG538wVy0vcs_nWPFnIlz2FBvLAnyIFrc0IqMkAymw0sByYkicow
- https://www.parisschoolofeconomics.eu/docs/tenand-marianne/acemoglu_2011.pdf
- https://x.com/michael_wiebe/status/1854963949407813742
Issue trail
Source context
To that end, he - probably sarcastically - opened Hungary to “genuine refugees”, by which he meant refugees from globalism - “Germans, Dutch, French and Italians, terrified politicians and journalists, who here in Hungary want to find the Europe they have lost in their homeland”. A few right-wingers took him up on it and resettled in Hungary. Potentially his most famous admirer is former Trump campaign strategist Steve Bannon, who’s been going back and forth to Hungary as part of his plan to build a populist network across Europe.
Inline links: former Trump campaign strategist Steve Bannon
Thomas Huxley. Also known for establishing a network of other famous Huxleys, such as his grandson Aldous, the author of Brave New World. Victorian Britain’s most beloved scientist — yes, I’m talking about Darwin again — also enjoyed publishing in Nature. Darwin was an elderly and highly respected scientist by the time of the journal’s founding, and the abstracts and letters he frequently sent to Lockyer’s publication certainly gave it a status boost. And this was only the start of a long list of household names who got involved with Nature at one point or another. In physics, for instance, Lord Kelvin, Ernest Rutherford, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, and Lise Meitner were all important contributors. Some of the most famous papers in the field, such as James Chadwick’s 1932 report on the possible existence of the neutron, or Meitner and Otto Frisch’s 1939 letter proposing the idea of nuclear fission, were published in Nature. In biology, James Watson and Francis Crick’s 1953 work on the structure of DNA is probably the most historic paper to have appeared within its pages. Since Nature in the mid-20th century was popular but still not very prestigious, I’m comfortable assuming that these famous scientists and discoveries helped its reputation rather than the other way around. Today, the arrow of causation is mostly reversed: scientists become influential because they publish research in the most prestigious journal, rather than the journal becoming prestigious because it publishes big names and big papers. Of course, this is a self-reinforcing feedback loop that keeps benefiting Nature, thanks to network effects. Finally, a word about language. Nature, obviously, is published in English. But English wasn’t the dominant intellectual language back in the 19th century: French and German were more important. The rise of English as the lingua franca of science occurred during the 20th century, thanks to the political dominance of the British Empire and then the United States. As a result, Nature and its American equivalent Science gained a major advantage over their French (e.g. La Nature) and German (e.g. Naturwissenschaften) counterparts. Making Nature doesn’t belabor this self-evident point, but it’s worth mentioning that Nature benefitted from a global network effect that would have been far less attainable outside the Anglosphere. Survival and Conservatism Speed, elite networks, and English are great, but they won’t help if your publication fails to turn a profit and shuts down. As they say, the lesson of survivorship bias is that you should optimize for being a survivor. Thus the story of Nature is also the story of how it managed to stay alive, unlike most of its contemporaries. Nature was (and still is!) a venture of a London publisher called Macmillan and Company. It was very much intended to make money. But Victorian Britain was a crowded market for periodicals. It was common for publications to last just a few years after proving unable to attract enough subscribers. Lockyer himself had been briefly involved as the co-founder and science editor of a generalist magazine called The Reader, which existed only from 1863 to 1867 (and lost its science section in 1865). It would be tempting to contrast this with the popular success of Nature, but as we saw, most of Nature’s target audience couldn’t even understand the journal, and as a result both its subscriber base and revenue remained small. The survival of Nature therefore depended on the goodwill of its owner, Alexander Macmillan. And it took a lot of goodwill! Nature operated at a loss for an entire 30 years. Only at the very end of the 19th century did it manage to turn a profit. This surprising tolerance for financial loss seems to have stemmed from the other activities of Macmillan and Company: they sold scientific books, and Nature was a good way to reach that market. Still, without a wealthy publisher who was committed to back up Lockyer’s project for a long time, it would likely not have survived. Lockyer also displayed impressive commitment. He remained at the helm of the journal for a full half-century, from 1869 to 1919. Although none of his successors would hold the position that long, most would last at least twenty years, resulting in a strikingly short list of eight editors-in-chief over a 153-year history. Meanwhile, the journal was never sold: Macmillan and Company still exists and still owns Nature, even though corporate mergers have made the exact ownership structure difficult to figure out. (Springer Nature, a company created in 2015 by merging some divisions of Macmillan and other entities, is the immediate parent company of Nature.) The picture that emerges is that of a stable, conservative institution, with committed owners and editors, that has changed slowly even as it was a witness to the changes in science itself. This is nicely reflected in the stability of Nature’s mission and visual identity. The original mission statement was left unchanged from 1869 to 2000, including gendered references to “Scientific men” and “men eminent in Science.” The current version is shorter and gender-neutral, but overall similar, although I note that the ordering of the two main aims has been reversed: First, to serve scientists through prompt publication of significant advances in any branch of science, and to provide a forum for the reporting and discussion of news and issues concerning science. Second, to ensure that the results of science are rapidly disseminated to the public throughout the world, in a fashion that conveys their significance for knowledge, culture and daily life. Similarly, the original masthead image, which dates from the very first issue, appeared at the top of the journal for 89 years, until 1958 (with slight variations). A central point of Making Nature is that Nature co-evolved with the British and international institutions of science. To do so, it had to strike a balance between conservatism and innovation. My impression is that Nature was more often on the conservative end of the spectrum, serving as a rock-solid stage where the rest of science could take place. Such an attitude was helpful from the beginning, but it probably became even more important after the 1970s, when everything changed. III. WTF Happened in the 1970s? A fun puzzle from the social sciences: what happened in the early seventies? As evidenced from a multitude of charts, various patterns in society seem to have veered off course around 1971, including growth in wages, inflation, housing costs, energy consumption, number of lawyers, divorce rates, fertility rates, and meat consumption. Whether it was a coincidence or part of the same mysterious phenomenon, we can add to this list the rise of prestige in the science publishing industry. To be clear, I’m the one who claims that this shift was a specific and momentous event. Melinda Baldwin acknowledges many times that Nature went from a low-grade magazine to a prestigious journal, but she remains vague as to what, exactly, was the turning point. In the chapter on the 1970s, she treats the increased selectivity and reputation as just one of many things that happened during this period. It was only in the course of writing this review — with a deliberate focus on prestige — that I realized something significant had occurred in that decade, and that this something affected more than just Nature. Let’s see what the book does tell us, and then I’ll offer a plausible explanation from elsewhere. Changes to Nature in the 1970s The 1970s mostly coincide with the leadership of Nature’s shortest-tenured editor, David Davies. Davies took over from John Maddox in 1973 and proceeded to make a number of changes. He made Nature a unitary publication again, after a short-lived experiment to split it into three journals. He reformed the style guide for contributors. He allowed for cartoons and some humor in his editorials. He also overhauled the journal’s physical appearance: from now on, Nature’s covers would feature interesting images as opposed to articles or advertisements. Today’s covers are still in that tradition. Here’s the Nature cover from 2016, as used on the Wikipedia page of the journal. Nature under Maddox and Davies followed the same trend of internationalization as in the previous decades, but the seventies saw what was perhaps the fastest growth outside the UK. Consider these approximate statistics on the origin of research articles from the years when there was a change in editorship: 1966 (when Maddox became editor): 40% British and 60% international
Inline links: a network of other famous Huxleys, report, letter, work, La Nature, Naturwissenschaften, The Reader, still exists, Springer Nature, original mission statement, current version, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!wOmg!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1a1567d4-73fa-4fa9-9a65-f73b6dd233a1_800x320.png, a multitude of charts, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!CaUh!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F783677da-78c8-4b94-b0c5-673658b060f8_454x599.jpeg, Wikipedia page of the journal
The conversational nature of the Wendat government led to most Jesuits describing French-speaking Native Americans as highly eloquent, as, at least among those who spoke Iroquoian languages, open conversation and debate were how tribe decisions got made, a process that rewarded the more eloquent and convincing of its members (although not all Native American states valued the reasonable debate of the Iroquois).
The reality was quite different, the Davids suggest, once you investigate evidence from the Great Lakes region where tribes like the Wendat, and Jesuits and fur traders, all mixed together. In the late 1600s, Lahontan, a French aristocrat, spent much time in New France, and there met the Kandiaronk (also called ‘Le Rat’, since his name meant ‘muskrat’). Kandiaronk was
at the time engaged in a complex geopolitical game, trying to play the English, French, and Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee off against each other. . . with the long-term goal of creating a comprehensive indigenous alliance to hold off the settler advance. . . Everyone who met him, friend or foe, admitted he was a truly remarkable individual: a courageous warrior, brilliant orator, and unusually skillful politician.
By age 6, he could divide eight-digit numbers in his head. At the same age, he spoke conversational ancient Greek; later, he would add Latin, French, German, English, and Yiddish (sometimes he joked about also speaking Spanish, but he would just put "el" before English words and add -o to the end) . Rumor had it he memorized everything he ever read. A fellow mathematician once tried to test this by asking him to recite Tale Of Two Cities, and reported that “he immediately began to recite the first chapter and continued until asked to stop after about ten or fifteen minutes”.
The third - coalitional self-interest - is the wild card. During some eras, Europeans found it in their self-interest to include Natives in their coalitions - for example, the French and Indian War, where the French and Indians joined forces against the British - but also today, when Natives have normal civil rights in European-dominated societies. During other eras, Europeans have built coalitions with each other that excluded Natives, going as far as to enslave or kill them. At some point humans might be so obviously different from AIs that it's easy for them to agree to kill all humans without any substantial faction of AIs nervously reciting Martin Niemoller poems to themselves.
The Europeans vs. natives analogy suggests otherwise. Native people understood that Europeans threatened their independence, but still frequently invited them to intervene in their disputes. Some leader would be losing a civil war, and offer the British a foothold in exchange for military aid. Then the other side of the war had to make a deal with the French in order to maintain parity. After enough of these steps, the whole country belonged to Europeans of one stripe or another. Everyone could see it happening, but they couldn’t coordinate well enough to stop it.
Inline links: offer the British, couldn’t coordinate well enough to stop it
A degenerate Englishman may be brutal and coarse, but he could never be guilty of the inane or the outrageous things which the Cubists, the Imagists, the Futurists, and the other Ists among the French have turned out.
Clement Wood writes this book as an honest appraisal of poetry as it existed in 1936. And the consensus he accurately reproduces was that the old ways of poetry, the rhyme and strict metre and the various fixed forms (almost all of which were stolen from France, and we didn’t even steal half the French ones), had been good things, once upon a time. But now, they were good only as a way of teaching, only as a transitional stage to something better. For instance, see his introduction to Chapter VI, teaching the various fixed forms:
In this light, the contradictions throughout the whole book make sense. There are two types of verse worth writing: actual poetry, mostly consisting of free verse, and training poetry. Rigidity isn’t suitable for actual poetry, argues Wood, since all the good sonnets have already been written, and all the possible 3,848 good Spenserian stanzas were used up by Spenser, and all the good ballades are in French. Come up with something new, when you have something new to say.
This was unwise. It had been a reasonable decision to attack Edward II, inept, oppressive, and so devoted to his favorites his lords had plotted his murder; Edward III took after his grandfathers on both sides, conquerors both, and what he had been busy with during his French grandfather’s death was plotting a coup against his regents. At age seventeen he imprisoned his mother, murdered her lover10 and invaded Scotland. After a decade or so the Scots wars pulled the French in - the Auld Alliance was not so Auld back then but it existed - and since the French wanted to get Guyenne back, why not?
Inline links: 10
In England, however, the practice of scutage (nobles paying money to get out of raising troops) had arisen, and also in England there existed that fantastically useful tool of kings for raising money, the English Parliament.11 With the combination of carrot - redress of grievances - and stick - pay or I'll impose costs on you perfectly legally - augmented by the patriotic pride of Englishmen who might not want to kill Frenchmen themselves but really wanted the Frenchmen dead, Edward collected money and used it to pay professionals drawn from England and Wales, and these professionals fought.
Inline links: 11
This was the army that landed in France. Since France had about five times as many people in it as England, this army was wildly outnumbered. The chroniclers describe the French army as variously seventy-two thousand or a hundred and twenty thousand men - to hysterical laughter from modern historians, who think they only had twenty or thirty thousand - but it was clear that when the armies met it would inevitably be a slaughter.