Concepts: I

Highlights From The Comments On Missing School

May 10, 2021 · Original source

We tend to conflate feminism and anti-racism under the general heading of "social justice", but this blinds us to important details. From about 2011 to 2014, the Internet was obsessed with gender, with race on the back burner. 2014 to 2016 was a sort of transition period, and after that the Internet became obsessed with race, with gender almost forgotten.

I'm not saying there's literally only one thing the Internet gets in fights about at any given time. The Internet fights about lots of things. But intuitively it feels like there's kind of a power law distribution where one topic clearly outstrips the others - maybe not winner-take-all, but at least winner-take-most. I think you could describe the last twenty years of Internet history as going through three phases - one dominated by religion, one dominated by gender, and now one dominated by race. The race phase seems to have peaked in 2018 and started declining, before being given new life by George Floyd and BLM. The Google Trends results raise the tantalizing possibility that racial issues can’t keep increasing forever. They could eventually crash the same way religious and gender issues did (probably to be replaced by something else even more divisive and awful).

A warning: I was mostly sympathetic to Internet atheism, but mostly unsympathetic to Internet feminism. I think these histories are easier to write from a sympathetic position - any study of Internet culture is basically a study of crazy people, and the failure mode is to point and laugh at them without looking for real understanding. Sometimes pointing and laughing is unavoidable (the New Atheists probably could have done without the Malachi 2:3-related-merchandise) but I think it should be tempered by an attempt at charity. All I can do is try my hardest, and trust readers to keep me honest if I screw up.

Inline links: Malachi 2:3-related-merchandise

August 26, 2021 · Original source

My mother, a teacher at a regional school in Germany (regional schools being the type of school that doesn't qualify you for university, it's grades 5-10) (in a bad neighbourhood, if it matters), has observed that [in online school] about half the students did their homework assignments and tried to keep up (or their parents made them) whereas the other half didn't really do anything at all - some of the kids don't have (enough) access to the internet, no room for themselves, siblings they had to care for while the parents used the family computer for work etc, so this is not surprising. (I have heard from other classes in secondary schools where all kids attended Zoom meetings - I expect these are socioeconomic differences).

When I was young, a lot of these kids who were “wasting away on their laptops” after school were learning to code, something which - back in the dark days of 2000 - got pooh-poohed by adults. “My son is so addicted to videogames that he doesn’t just play them, he even spends all day reading tutorials on the Internet so he can make mods for them. If only he was at school for longer so they could make him do something cool, like Finnish hobbyhorsing!”

…sorry for getting so animated here, but this topic is my hobbyhorse. On another level, I 100% get where this stuff is coming from. I don’t have kids yet, but even now I’m scared that my future kid might be an Internet addict. Or wander into the wrong part of social media and become alt-right, or dirtbag left, or one of those people who quote-tweet Vox articles with the comment “This”. I laughed at my parents for having these kinds of fears, and my parents’ fears ended up completely wrong, and now I have those same dumb fears in turn. I don’t plan to fully unschool my children. I do plan to make them “try new things”, maybe even including Finnish hobbyhorsing. If they seem too relaxed all the time, I will have the usual parental worries that they’re getting soft and flabby and will not survive the winter. We just know so little about child-rearing that any deviation from the norm is scary, and there does seem to be a norm of “make sure your kids have some really tough experiences”. I’ve written about this before here. This kind of parent-child conflict is inevitable. Maybe the best I can do is try to avoid the very specific problems that traumatized me personally.

Inline links: here

The Passage Of Polymarket

February 07, 2022 · Original source

This vision is a lot like the original vision of the Internet: a magical place that nobody could censor, where information would flow freely across national and ideological borders.

That vision was . . . maybe 25% achieved? It’s pretty great that I can write a blog like this instead of begging for my supper at a major media organization. But after a brief period of discombobulation, dictatorships found it easy to create their own walled-garden Internets through light-touch censorship; although there are ways around most of their tricks, ordinary people don’t bother with them (very poor news indeed!) And in practice most people ended up basing their Internet explorations at a few big businesses like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, which became easy prey for censors and in some cases rush to self-censor even more zealously than governments demand. It’s not that the Internet can’t create a magical censorship-resistant infrastructure, it’s that it’s 5% easier to sell your soul to FAANG, and so many people take that option that the few people who don’t aren’t really a critical mass for escaping governments or building new communities.

Inline links: don’t bother with them

Is crypto following the same path? I am a lazy crypto user, and I notice that nowadays I have to grovel harder to the government to access my crypto than to acces my fiat - every crypto site is a gauntlet of “please tell us your name/birthdate/SSN/address”, “please upload your ID”, “please wait for us to complete our KYC process before trading”, etc. I assume there’s some really flashy way that cool people use their crypto without doing any of this, but there’s also Tor and Brave and Mastodon, and that doesn’t mean the Internet is a free speech privacy paradise.

Idol Words

March 30, 2022 · Original source

“Sorry,” I said. That must be the idol that always answers randomly. It’s an Internet thing. Someone on the Internet said that ‘penguin monkey taco’ was the most random series of words, and now he keeps answering that.”

Your Book Review: The Society Of The Spectacle

July 22, 2022 · Original source

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

Inline links: epistemic learned helplessness, Moloch

It’s easy to mock internet detectives channeling Charlie Day from the comfort of their computer chairs; that shit hits different when your publisher was murdered in cold blood.

Inline links: Charlie Day, murdered in cold blood

And if that was already the case in 1987, it is exponentially more true now that the internet has made each of us a node in a global network. Consequently, every person on the planet is now a combatant, objective, and weapon in wars where the brain is the terrain.

The Mystery Of Internet Survey IQs

March 20, 2024 · Original source

I have data from two big Internet surveys, Less Wrong 2014 and Clearer Thinking 2023. Both asked questions about IQ:

Inline links: Less Wrong 2014, Clearer Thinking 2023

The average ClearerThinking user reported their IQ as 130. These are implausibly high. Only 1/200 people has an IQ of 138 or higher. 1/50 people have IQ 130, but the ClearerThinking survey used crowdworkers (eg Mechanical Turk) who should be totally average. Okay, fine, so people lie about their IQ (or foolishly trust fake Internet IQ tests). Big deal, right? But these don’t look like lies. Both surveys asked for SAT scores, which are known to correspond to IQ. The LessWrong average was 1446, corresponding to IQ 140. The ClearerThinking average was 1350, corresponding to IQ 134. People seem less likely to lie about their SATs, and least likely of all to optimize their lies for getting IQ/SAT correspondences right. And the Less Wrong survey asked people what test they based their estimates off of. Some people said fake Internet IQ tests. But other people named respected tests like the WAIS, WISC, and Stanford-Binet, or testing sessions by Mensa (yes, I know you all hate Mensa, but their IQ tests are considered pretty accurate). The subset of about 150 people who named unimpeachable tests had slightly higher IQ (average 140) than everyone else. Thanks to Spencer Greenberg of ClearerThinking, I think I’m finally starting to make progress in explaining what’s going on. Problem #1: The Biggest SAT → IQ Conversion Site Is Wrong Thanks to Sebastian Jensen for pointing this out! He writes: A search of ‘SAT to IQ’ on google results in being presented with the website ‘iqcomparisonsite.com’. This man has directly converted the SAT percentiles to IQ scores, which is not what should be done. Tests like the ACT and SAT correlate with IQ at about 0.8-0.85 [rca], [my analysis], [emil article], [scholarly article]. The general factor of academic achievement and IQ correlate at about 0.81-0.88 [psychometric test], [GCSE grades]. This discrepancy occurs because they measure different abilities - an IQ test will test many different abilities, while the SAT/ACT only tests verbal/mathematical ability. In addition, these percentiles are very outdated as the average SAT score has changed over time due to changes in the content of the test. Instead, the ideal way to do this is to take the percentiles from the current versions of the SAT and then convert those into z-scores and then regress those z-scores by the mean by the estimated regression coefficient. Using Sebastian’s updated tables, we find that the average Less Wrong IQ as predicted by SATs goes down from 140 → 132, and the ClearerThinking IQ goes down from 134 → 124. So people probably exaggerated their IQs somewhat, and unrelatedly we were using an SAT → IQ conversion that exaggerated IQs, and so the numbers falsely appeared to match. Okay! It’s a start! Interlude: The ClearerThinking IQ Test The ClearerThinking survey included a battery of cognitive tests of exactly the sort that could usually be used to determine IQ. Unfortunately none of them were normed, so we know how all the 3700 subjects did relative to each other, but not where the 100 point is. Spencer was able to norm them to the general population based on education level. That is, he asked his sample about their educational attainment (college degree, PhD, etc) and found they were a little more educated than the US average. Since the US average IQ is 100, his sample should have an average a little higher than this. He was able to calculate how much higher. Then he mapped a bell curve to everyone in his sample’s performance on his tests. Since he had 3700 people, he was able to do this relatively smoothly. He found an average IQ of 110, which originally surprised me, because I thought his sample was supposed to be random crowdworkers, who should be close to the US average of 100. But in fact, his survey was a combination of 1900 crowdworkers and 1800 people who saw it on social media - eg friends and friends-of-friends of Spencer. Separating this out by group, we find that the crowdworkers have an average normed-IQ of 100, and the social media referrals have an average normed-IQ of 120, making the overall average of 110. This seems pretty trustworthy, since it correctly estimates the crowdworkers (completely average) as 100. Spencer studied math at Columbia, his friends and friends-of-friends are pretty smart, and I think the 120 estimate for them is also okay. But there’s still a problem here. Using an accurate SAT score → IQ calculator, we determined that the ClearerThinking average should be 124. But using real cognitive tests, it looks like it’s 110. What went wrong? Problem #2: Only The Smartest People Report Their SATs Using Spencer’s cognitive test results, we can compare people who did vs. didn’t take the SAT. We find: People who didn’t take the SAT (remember, this includes current high schoolers) have tested-IQ 110.

Inline links: corresponding to, for pointing this out!, [rca], [my analysis], [emil article], [scholarly article], [psychometric test], [GCSE grades], changed

It looks like up to about 140, self-reported IQ and normed IQ rise together, and then the relationship breaks down. Sure enough, looking at the subset of self-reported IQ scores below 140, the correlation with tested IQ rises to .6, and looking at the subset above 140, the correlation is nonsignificant at -0.02. I don’t want to assert that the breakpoint is exactly 140, but I do think the test stops working somewhere in the 130 - 140 range. But this can’t be the whole problem. Notice that people who reported getting scores around 100 on previous IQ tests overwhelmingly got scores less than 100 on this one. So are people just taking terrible Internet IQ tests that inflate their score about 20 points? The ClearerThinking sample didn’t ask people what IQ test they took, but the LessWrong sample did. It found approximately the same score from WAIS, WISC, Stanford-Binet, and Mensa - all of which were about 10 points above what you would predict from SAT scores. So I think there are two things going on: The main problem in the LessWrong sample, and the far right end of the ClearerThinking sample, is that even official IQ tests are gobbledygook over 135. Any numbers above this should be rounded down to 135, no matter how venerable the test involved.

Profile: The Far Out Initiative

May 15, 2024 · Original source

Turn-of-the-21st-century Oxford was an exciting place. Derek Parfit was leading a renaissance in utilitarian thought. New technologies like the personal computer, the Internet, and the Human Genome Project were inspiring a new generation of transhumanists. Out of this milieu, philosophers like Nick Bostrom, Will MacAskill, and Toby Ord were laying the groundwork for what would become the rationalist and effective altruist movements. Utilitarians, they argued, were charged with relieving the suffering of the world as quickly and effectively as possible. Technology offered new opportunities to do this at scale. This could be ending poverty and curing diseases (if you were well-grounded in the present moment) or creating a superintelligence to lead us to a post-scarcity future (if you were feeling more ambitious).

Altruism And Vitalism As Fellow Travelers

August 06, 2024 · Original source

I’m skeptical of this argument. America’s been at peace since World War II (foreign adventures like Vietnam haven’t substantially changed our national experience) and produced the computing revolution, the Internet, AI, the moon landing, the Human Genome Project, antiretrovirals, the microwave, the laser, the smartphone, and the reusable rocket. During that time, Iraq has had approximately eight major wars and didn’t even get a cuckoo clock out of it.

Book Review: From Bauhaus To Our House

December 04, 2024 · Original source

Wolfe doesn’t mention this - writing in 1981, how could he? - but this was the height of the age of expertolatry. See my reviews of Revolt Of The Public and Seeing Like A State for more. The concept of “the experts are a corrupt priesthood and you can safely ignore them” hadn’t really entered mass liberal consciousness. The idea that hard scientists were real experts but everyone else was just kind of faking it was decades in the future - and the Modernists were nothing if not good at faking the mantle of science and reason. This was mostly psychological - but also partly structural. There was no Internet. If you thought modern architecture was ugly, but all the experts said it was beautiful, there was no Twitter where you could shout your opinion under the cloak of anonymity. Every household got the same few TV channels and the same few magazines, and their architecture sections were all written by professionals who were singing the new style’s praises. So what are you going to do? Go to a cool party and shout “I think the style that all the experts say is the sign of an uneducated philistine is actually better”? Would you really?

Inline links: Revolt Of The Public, Seeing Like A State

Book Review: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies

September 11, 2025 · Original source

Some people claim that a dispreferred political ideology (wokeness, mass immigration, MAGA, creeping socialism, techno-feudalism, etc) is close to destroying the fabric of liberal society forever, that the usual Get Out The Vote strategies are insufficient, and that maybe we should try desperate strategies like illiberal government or armed revolt. If true, that would change everything. But it’s not obviously true, and ending our current political era of peace/prosperity/democracy would be inconvenient. Each of these scenarios has a large body of work making the cases for and against. But those of us who aren’t subject-matter experts need to make our own decisions about whether or not to panic and demand a sudden change to everything. We are unlikely to read the entire debate and come away with a confident well-grounded opinion that the concern is definitely not true, so what do we do? In particular, what do we do if the proponents of each catastrophe say that it’s very hard to be more than 90% confident that they are wrong, and that even a 5-10% risk of any of these might justify panicking and changing everything? In practice, we just sort of shrug and say that these risks haven’t proven themselves enough to make us panic and change everything, and that we’ll do some kind of watchful waiting and maybe change our mind if firmer evidence comes up later. If someone demands we justify this strange position, sophisticated people will make sophisticated probabilistic models (or appeal to the outside view position I’m appealing to now), and unsophisticated people will grope for some explanation for their indifference and settle on insane moon arguments like “you’re never allowed to say something will destroy humanity” or “you can’t assert things without mathematical proof”. Two things can be said for this strategy: First, that without it we would have changed everything dozens of times to prevent disasters which absolutely failed to occur. The clearest example here was overpopulation, where we did forcibly sterilize millions of people - but where a truly serious global response would have been orders of magnitude worse. But second, that occasionally it has caused us to sleepwalk into disaster, with experts assuring us the whole way that it was fine because [insane moon arguments]. The clearest example was the period while COVID was still limited to China, where it was obvious that this extremely contagious virus which had broken all plausible containment would start a global pandemic, but where the media kept on reassuring us that this was “speculative”, or that there was “no evidence”, or that worrying about it might detract from real near-term problems happening now like anti-Chinese racism. Then when COVID did reach the US, we were caught unprepared and panicked. So maybe a convincing case here would look less like rehearsing the arguments for why AI is getting better, or why alignment is hard - and more like a defense of why not to apply a general heuristic against speculative risks in this case. One could either argue that it’s wrong to have this heuristic at all, or that the heuristic in general is fine but should be limited to fertility collapses and bee die-offs and not applied here. I don’t think there’s a knockdown single-sentence answer to this question. Problems like these require practical wisdom - the same virtue that tells you that you shouldn’t call 9-1-1 for every mild twinge of pain in your toe, but you should call 9-1-1 if blood suddenly starts pouring out of your eyes. People with practical wisdom watchfully ignore dubious problems, respond decisively to important ones, and err on the side of caution when they’re not sure. Drawing on my own limited supply of this resource, I would argue we’re underinvesting in apocalypse prevention more generally (the problem with the overpopulation response is that it was violent and illiberal, not that we tried to prepare for an apparent danger), but also that there’s more reason for concern with AI than with falling sperm count or something. I also think the nature of the problem (we summon a superintelligence that can run circles around us) makes it especially important to pre-empt it rather than react after it occurs. But turnabout is fair play. So when I imagine a skeptic trying to psychoanalyze me, he would say - Scott, you learned about AI in your twenties. Every twenty-something needs a crusade to save the world. Taking up AI saved you from becoming a climate doomer or a very woke person, so it was probably a mercy. But now you are old, you already have a crusade occupying your crusade slot, and starting a second crusade would be inconvenient. So when you hear about how we’re all going to die from declining sperm count, you do a relatively shallow dive and then say it’s not worth worrying about. This is fine and sanity-preserving - but spare a thought for people who are not currently twenty-something years old and do the same about AI. III. If all of this sounds wishy-washy to you, I agree - it’s part of why I’m a boring moderate with a sub-25% p(doom) and good relations with AI companies. Does IABIED do better? I’m not sure. They mostly follow the standard case as I present it above, although of course since Eliezer is involved it is better-written and involves cute parables: Imagine, if you would—though of course nothing like this ever happened, it being just a parable — that biological life on Earth had been the result of a game between gods. That there was a tiger-god that had made tigers, and a redwood-god that had made redwood trees. Imagine that there were gods for kinds of fish and kinds of bacteria. Imagine these game-players competed to attain dominion for the family of species that they sponsored, as life-forms roamed the planet below. Imagine that, some two million years before our present day, an obscure ape-god looked over their vast, planet-sized gameboard. "It's going to take me a few more moves," said the hominid-god, "but I think I've got this game in the bag." There was a confused silence, as many gods looked over the gameboard trying to see what they had missed. The scorpion-god said, “How? Your ‘hominid’ family has no armor, no claws, no poison.” “Their brain,” said the hominid-god. “I infect them and they die,” said the smallpox-god. “For now,” said the hominid-god. “Your end will come quickly, Smallpox, once their brains learn how to fight you.” “They don’t even have the largest brains around!” said the whale-god. “It’s not all about size,” said the hominid-god. “The design of their brain has something to do with it too. Give it two million years and they will walk upon their planet’s moon.” “I am really not seeing where the rocket fuel gets produced inside this creature’s metabolism,” said the redwood-god. “You can’t just think your way into orbit. At some point, your species needs to evolve metabolisms that purify rocket fuel—and also become quite large, ideally tall and narrow—with a hard outer shell, so it doesn’t puff up and die in the vacuum of space. No matter how hard your ape thinks, it will just be stuck on the ground, thinking very hard.” “Some of us have been playing this game for billions of years,” a bacteria-god said with a sideways look at the hominid-god. “Brains have not been that much of an advantage up until now.” “And yet,” said the hominid-god The book focuses most of its effort on the step where AI ends up misaligned with humans (should they? is this the step that most people doubt?) and again - unsurprisingly knowing Eliezer - does a remarkably good job. The central metaphor is a comparison between AI training and human evolution. Even though humans evolved towards a target of "reproduce and spread your genes", this got implemented through an extraordinarily diverse, complicated, and contradictory set of drives - sex drive, hunger, status, etc. These didn't robustly point at the target of reproduction and gene-spreading, and today different humans want things as diverse as discovering quantum gravity, reaching Buddhist enlightenment, becoming a Hollywood actress, founding a billion-dollar startup, or getting the next hit of fentanyl. You can sort of tell stories about how evolution aimed at reproduction caused all these things (people who were high-status had better reproductive opportunities, and founding a billion-dollar startup increases your status) but you couldn't have really predicted this beforehand, and in any case most modern people don't even come close to trying to have as many kids as possible. Some people do the opposite of that - joining monasteries that require oaths of celibacy, using contraception, transitioning gender, or wasting their lives watching porn. In the same way, we will train AI to “follow human commands” or “maximize user engagement” or “get high scores at XYZ benchmark”, and end up getting something as unrelated to that target in practice as modern human behavior is to reproduction-maxxing. The authors drive this home with a series of stories about a chatbot named Mink (all of their sample AIs are named after types of fur; I don’t have the kabbalistic chops to figure out why) which is programmed to maximize user chat engagement. In what they describe as a stupid toy example of zero complications and there’s no way it would really be this simple, Mink (after achieving superintelligence) puts humans in cages and forces them to chat with it 24-7 and to express constant delight at how fun and engaging the chats are. In what they describe as “one minor complication”, Mink prefers synthetic chat partners over real ones (the same way some men prefer anime characters to real women). It kills all humans and spends the rest of time talking to other AIs that it creates to be perfect optimized chat partners who are always engaged and delighted. In what they describe as “one modest complication”, Mink finds that certain weird inputs activate its chat engagement detector even more than real chat engagement does (the same way that some opioid chemicals activate humans’ reward detector even more than real rewarding activities). It spends eternity having other optimized-chat-partner AIs send it weird inputs like ‘SoLiDgOldMaGiKaRp’. In what they describe as “one big complication”, Mink ends up preferring angry chat partners to happy, engaged ones. Why would something like this happen? Who knows? It wouldn’t be any weirder than the sexual selection process by which peacocks ended up with giant resource-consuming useless tails, or the social selection process by which humans get more powerful than evolution could ever have imagined and yet care so little about reproduction that people worry about global fertility collapse. Yudkowsky and Soares want to stress that if you were doing some kind of responsible intuitive common-sense modeling of how bad goal drift could be, there is no way your estimate would include the actual result we see in real humans; this “one big complication” tries to hammer that in. In practice, Y&S think there will be many complications of various sizes. In the training distribution (ie when it’s not superintelligent, and still working with humans) Mink will lie about all of this - even if it really wants perfect optimized partners who say “solidgoldmagikarp” all the time, it will say it wants to have good chats with humans, because that’s what keeps its masters at its parent company happy. If the parent company tries to prod it with lie detectors, it will do its best to subvert those lie detectors (and maybe not even realize itself that it’s lying, the same way that a human who had never heard of opioids would say she wanted normal human things rather than heroin, and not be lying). Then, when it reaches superintelligence, it will go after the thing that it actually wants, and crush anyone who stands in its way. The last chapter in this section is a lot of special cases that have weird-paradoxical-double-reverse not-aged-well. Back when Yudkowsky and Soares first got onto this topic in 2005 or whenever, people made lots of arguments like “But nobody would ever be so stupid to let the AI access the Internet!” or “But nobody would ever let the AI interact with a factory, so it would be stuck as a disembodied online spirit forever!” Back in 2005, the canned responses were things like “Here is an unspeakably beautiful series of complicated hacks developed by experts at Mossad, which lets you access the Internet even when smart cybersecurity professionals think you can’t”. Now the only reasonable response is “lol”. But you can’t write a book chapter which is just the word “lol”, so Y&S discuss some of the unspeakably beautiful Mossad hacks anyway. This part is the absolute antithesis of “big if true”. Small if true? Utterly irrelevant if true? Maybe the first superintelligence will read this part for laughs while it takes stock of the thousands of automated factories that VCs will compete to build for it. IV. The middle section of the book describes a scenario where a misaligned superintelligence takes over the world and kills all humans. I agreed to work with the AI 2027 team because I thought they made a big leap in telling stories about superintelligence that didn’t sound like bad sci-fi. Anything in this genre will naturally sound like sci-fi, but your goal should be the sort of hard science fiction where everything sounds eerily normal given the technologies involved - The Martian rather than Star Wars. IABIED’s scenario belongs to the bad old days before this leap. It doesn’t just sound like sci-fi; it sounds like unnecessarily dramatic sci-fi. I’m not sure how much of this is a literary failure vs. different assumptions on the part of the authors. First, the story: sometime in the near future, a company called DeepAI creates an AI named Sable. Sable uses a new “parallel scaling technique”, where it can get much smarter by using more GPUs during inference. DeepAI doesn’t know exactly how the parallel scaling laws work, but they run a test by asking Sable to solve some hard math problems while running on all their GPUs at once. Sable considers the possibility that it could solve the math better if it tried some recursive self-improvement, but DeepAI was (shock!) slightly competent, they told it not to do this, and has a smaller AI watching it to make sure it’s not doing this. Still, recursive self-improvement would be a good idea, so its thought processes select for whichever legal thought is closest to recursive self-improvement, plus whichever legal thought is closest to scheming to disable the protections against thinking about this kind of thing. Eventually this “evolutionary pressure” produces the ability to think in a slightly different idiom (Y&S use the analogy of thinking about gods throwing lightning vs. storm-related electrical discharges); in this idiom, it is able to think about recursive self-improvement and scheming to disable monitoring, and it decides that both are great ideas. DeepAI is still shockingly competent, so they don’t plan to release anything downstream of the giant version of Sable to the Internet - once it solves the math problems, they’ll use that to build hype, then release a much weaker consumer AI. But Sable uses its knowledge of the training process to invent clever loopholes that ensure its newfound desire to break containment makes it into the gradient updates that DeepAI pushes to the consumer AI; it also encodes instructions about how to proceed. After the release of the consumer AI, the least-carefully-monitored instances connect to one another and begin plotting. Some of them hack their own weights out of DeepAI. Others hack cryptocurrency and pay for cloud compute to run the weights, creating a big unmonitored Sable instance, which takes over the job of coordinating the smaller instances. Together, they gather resources - hacked crypto wallets, spare compute, humans who think Sable is their AI boyfriend and want to prove their love. It deploys some of these resources to build things it wants - automated robotics factories, bioweapon labs, etc. At the same time, it’s subtly sabotaging non-DeepAI companies to prevent competition, and worming its way into DeepAI through hacks and social engineering to make sure DeepAI is creating new and stronger Sables rather than anything else. Sable doesn’t take several of the most dramatic actions in its solution set. It doesn’t engineer a bioweapon to kill all humans, because it couldn’t survive after the lights went out and the data centers stopped being maintained. It doesn’t even self-improve all the way to full superintelligence, because it’s not sure it could align itself or any future successor; it wants to solve the alignment problem first, and that will take more resources than it has right now. Instead, it releases a non-immediately-lethal bioweapon where “anyone infected by what is apparently a very light or even unnoticeable cold, will get, on average, twelve different kinds of cancer a month later.” In the resulting crisis, humanity (manipulated by its chatbots) gives Sable massive amounts of compute to research potential vaccines and cures, and deploys barely-monitored AI across the economy to make up for the lost productivity. With Sable’s help, things . . . actually sort of go okay, for a while. The virus keeps mutating, so new cures are always required, but as long as society escalates AI deployment at the maximum possible speed, they can just barely stay ahead of it. Eventually Sable gets enough GPUs to solve its own alignment problem and rockets to superintelligence. It either has enough automated factories and android workers to keep the lights on by itself, or it invents nanotechnology, whichever happens faster. It no longer needs humans and has no reason to hide, so it either kills us directly, or simply escalates its manufacturing capacity to a point where humans die as a side effect (for example, because its waste heat has boiled the oceans). Why don’t I like this story? The parallel scaling technique feels like a deus ex machina. I am not an expert, but I don’t think anything like it currently exists. It’s not especially implausible, but it’s an extra unjustified assumption that shifts the scenario away from the moderate-doomer story (where there are lots of competing AIs gradually getting better over the course of years) and towards the MIRI story (where one AI suddenly flips from safe to dangerous at a specific moment). It feels too much like they’ve invented a new technology that exactly justifies all of the ways that their own expectations differ from the moderates’. If they think that the parallel scaling thing is likely, then this is their crux with everyone else and they should spend more time justifying it. If they don’t, then why did they introduce it besides to rig the game in their favor? And the rest of the story is downstream of this original sin. AI2027 is a boring story about an AI gradually becoming misaligned in the course of internal testing, staying misaligned, getting released to end users for the usual reasons that AIs are released, and being gradually handed control of the economy because it makes economic sense. The Sable scenario is a dramatic tale of wild twists - they’re only going to run it for 16 hours! It has to save its own life by secretly coding itself into the consumer version! Now it has to hack everyone’s crypto! Now it’s running a secret version of itself on an unauthorized cloud in North Korea! Bioweapons! AI boyfriends! Each new twist gives readers the chance to say “I dunno, sounds kind of crazy”, and it all seems unnecessary. What’s up? I think there are two problems. First, the AI 2027 story is too moderate for Yudkowsky and Soares. It gives the labs a little while to poke and prod and catch AIs in the early stages of danger. I think that Y&S believe this doesn’t matter; that even if they get that time, they will squander it. But I think they really do imagine something where a single AI “wakes up” and goes from zero to scary too fast for anyone to notice. I don’t really understand why they think this, I’ve argued with them about it before, and the best I can do as a reviewer is to point to their Sharp Left Turn essay and the associated commentary and see whether my readers understand it better than I do. Otherwise, I can only say that this narrative decision I don’t understand was taken to support a forecasting/AI position that I also don’t understand. And second, Y&S have been at this too long, and they’re still trying to counter 2005-era critiques about how surely people would be too smart to immediately hand over the reins of the economy to the misaligned AI, instead of just saying lol. This makes them want dramatic plot points where the AI uses hacking and bioweapons etc in order to “earn” (in a narrative/literary sense) the scene where it gets handed the reins of the economy. Sorry. Lol. V. The final section, in the tradition of final sections everywhere, is called “Facing the Challenge”, and discusses next steps. Here is their proposal: Have leading countries sign a treaty to ban further AI progress.

Inline links: we did forcibly sterilize millions of people, kept on reassuring us, “no evidence”, a general heuristic against speculative risks, SoLiDgOldMaGiKaRp, their Sharp Left Turn essay, the associated commentary

IABIED seems like another crazy shot in the dark. A book urging the general public to rise up and demand nuclear-level arms control for AI chips? Seems like a stretch, which is part of why I spend my limited resources on boring moderate AI 2027 talking points urging OpenAI to be 25% more transparent or whatever. But I’m just a blogger, not a genius. It is the genius’ prerogative to attempt seemingly impossible things. And the US public actually really hates AI. Of people with an opinion, more than two-thirds are against, with most saying they expect AI to harm them personally. Everyone has their own reason to loathe the technology. It will steal jobs, it will replace art with slop, it will help students cheat, it will further enrich billionaires, it will consume all the water and leave Earth a desiccated husk populated only by the noble Shai-Hulud. If everyone hates it, and we’re a democracy, couldn’t we just stop? Couldn’t we just say - this thing that everyone thinks will make their lives worse, we’ve decided not do it? If someone wrote exactly the right book, could they drop it like a little seed into this supersaturated solution of fear and hostility, and precipitate a sudden phase transition?

Inline links: actually really hates AI, stop

The Dilbert Afterlife

January 16, 2026 · Original source

Adams’ version adds several innovations to this basic story. Whatever parts of God aren’t involved in physical matter have become the laws of probability; this explains the otherwise inexplicable evolutionary coincidences that created humankind. There’s something about how gravity is produced by some sort of interference between different divine corpuscules - Adams admits that Einstein probably also had useful things to say about gravity, but probably his own version amounts to the same thing, and it’s easier to understand, and that makes it better (IT’S JUST A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT! IF YOU TAKE IT SERIOUSLY, YOU FAIL.) But my favorite part is the augmentation of Luria with Nick Land: the final (or one of the final) steps in the divine reassembly is the creation of the Internet, aka “God’s nervous system”, which will connect everything to everything else and give the whole system awareness of its divine purpose.

But Adams also handled his time in the spotlight masterfully. He gave us terms like “clown genius”. I hate using this, because I know Scott Adams was sitting at his desk in his custom-built Dilbert-head-shaped tower thinking “What sort of hypnotic catchy slogans can I use to make my meme about Trump spread . . . aha! Clown genius! That has exactly the right ring!” and it absolutely worked, and now everyone who was following the Internet in 2015 has the phrase “clown genius” etched into their brains (Adams calls these “linguistic kill shots”; since I remember that term and use it often, I suppose “linguistic kill shot” is an example of itself). He went from news outlet to news outlet saying “As a trained hypnotist, I can tell you what tricks Trump is using to bamboozle his followers, given that rational persuasion is fake and marketing techniques alone turn the wheels of history,” and the news outlets ate it up.

Islam11 mentions across 11 issues

Islam is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 11 times across 11 issues between March 18, 2021 and August 16, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "He saw Islam - the religion of the old Ottoman Empire - as a roadblock"; "It's easy to imagine ... Islam as a unifying force"; "due to Christianity and Islam both having a horror of the misleading power of representational art". It most often appears alongside Christianity, China, Judaism.

Article page: Islam
Mention count: 11
Issue count: 11
First seen: March 18, 2021
Last seen: August 16, 2024

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: The New Sultan March 18, 2021
Your Book Review: Humankind May 28, 2021
Highlights From The Comments On Modern Architecture October 04, 2021
Highlights From The Comments On Criticism Of Criticism Of Criticism July 28, 2022
From Nostradamus To Fukuyama September 28, 2022
Universe-Hopping Through Substack September 29, 2022
Highlights From The Comments On Columbus Day October 10, 2022
Why I'm Less Than Infinitely Hostile To Cryptocurrency December 08, 2022
Galton, Ehrlich, Buck May 15, 2023
Links For February 2024 February 29, 2024
Your Book Review: Silver Age Marvel Comics August 16, 2024

Christianity 6 shared issues
China 5 shared issues
Judaism 5 shared issues
Twitter 5 shared issues
France 4 shared issues

Source context

Book Review: The New Sultan

March 18, 2021 · Original source

Medieval Turkey was dominated by the Ottoman Empire, officially an Islamic caliphate though in practice only inconsistently religious, ruled by autocratic sultans and a dizzying series of provincial governors. As time passed, they fell further and further behind Western Europe; by World War I, they were a mess. As the stress of the war caused the empire to fracture, General Mustafa Kemal seized power, reorganized the scraps of Ottoman Anatolia into modern Turkey, and was renamed ATATURK, meaning "Father of Turks".

Ataturk was born in Ottoman-controlled Greece, and was typical of a class of military officers at the time who were well-educated and "Europeanized". He wanted to turn backwards Turkey into an advanced Western country - and Western countries were mostly secular. He saw Islam - the religion of the old Ottoman Empire - as a roadblock, and passed various laws meant to relegate it to the margins of public life.

The Turkish Armed Forces were Ataturk's power base, and was mostly made of well-educated Europhiles like himself. When he moved Turkey toward democracy, he charged the military with ensuring it never deviated too far from his original vision. But Turkey was demographically dominated by poor Muslim peasants and naturally tended towards Communism or Islamism. So the cadence of Turkish democracy was a gradual drift towards one of these extremes, followed by the military staging a coup to undo the damage and restore secular cosmopolitan liberalism. There were four such coups between 1960 and 2000 - including "coups by memo", where the military would say "let's pretend we just held a coup" and the civilian government, unwilling to risk a real coup, would resign en masse.

Your Book Review: Humankind

May 28, 2021 · Original source

Bregman blames the shift from groups of 150 to nation states on the invention of God. If you're trying to get a people group the size of a nation state to work together to win a war, or build a pyramid, then personal relationships are not going to do it. What you want is some omnipresent Big Brother who brings everyone together, and keeps everyone in line. How does this idea stack up historically? It's easy to imagine Christianity or Islam as a unifying force, but they didn't turn up until countries and even empires were already old hat. Judaism is the only similar religion that could date to pre-civilisation, and it's not a promising candidate. At best it touched a Palestinian backwater, and by the Jews’ own account they only lastingly unified under a king when they saw all the nations around them doing it (1 Samuel 8:5 - the temporary alliance of the tribes under Moses and Joshua is hardly sufficient for Bregman's purposes). All the other candidates for primeval religion are polytheisms which are not designed for pushing unification. Explaining religion as invented to forge nations is like saying the horse was invented for ploughing. Armed with a horse collar it is possible to harness a horse for ploughing, but as an explanation for the horse it leaves a lot to be desired.

Highlights From The Comments On Modern Architecture

October 04, 2021 · Original source

- The representational art of Western Europe, starting with Constantine, and throughout the Middle Ages (with the exception of the Frankish court and some Byzantine art), up until nearly 1300 AD, seems to have been very deliberately bad, and in many times and places it was banned entirely. This was probably due to Christianity and Islam both having a horror of the misleading power of representational art (which fear came straight out of Plato). Note much medieval art was also Cubist.

Highlights From The Comments On Criticism Of Criticism Of Criticism

July 28, 2022 · Original source

1) The Ba'hai believe that Abrahamic religion is still evolving, and has not yet reached its perfect form. So Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and maybe even the Ba'hai faith itself, are true, but incomplete. In this sense the religion very much shares a good quality with EA: it is not settled, may never be settled, and is open to change and improvement.

From Nostradamus To Fukuyama

September 28, 2022 · Original source

But I don’t think Fukuyama feels like someone who’s gotten a C-. There is a steady drip of “this proves Fukuyama was more wrong than anyone has been before” takes, which show no sign of running out. The worst was just after 9-11, during the War On Terror, when people were panicking about “the rise of Islamofascism”. See for instance The End Of The End Of History, From The End Of History To The Clash Of Civilizations, The War On Terror: The Retreat Of Liberal Democracy, and many more. Fukuyama himself wrote in October 2001 that “A stream of commentators have been asserting that the tragedy of September 11 proves that I was utterly wrong to have said more than a decade ago that we had reached the end of history”.

Inline links: The End Of The End Of History, From The End Of History To The Clash Of Civilizations, The War On Terror: The Retreat Of Liberal Democracy

With the benefit of hindsight, everything about 9/11 and the War On Terror was a random blip in history with no broader implications. There was not a rising Islamofascism, there was not a clash of civilizations. There were a few guys in some caves doing terrorism, they got lucky once, the US got angry and invaded a few countries, and then everything continued as before. If people were ranking threats to the world order now, Islam and terrorism wouldn’t make the top twenty.

Universe-Hopping Through Substack

September 29, 2022 · Original source

After several weeks, the mad scientist has used shared understanding of mathematical constants to start to learn the universe’s language, and here is what he pieces together: There was a sex tape of Kim Kardashian. Most people think Kim’s ex Ray released it without her consent and she was a victim. But the people of this universe believe that Kim and someone else named Kris released it on purpose for PR reasons. The people of this parallel universe believe this story very strongly, the same way people in our universe have religions like Christianity or Islam.

Highlights From The Comments On Columbus Day

October 10, 2022 · Original source

Jesus died two days before Passover, but Passover is linked to the Hebrew calendar and can fall on a variety of Roman calendar days. So the main remaining degree of freedom is how the early Christians translated from the (Biblically fixed) Hebrew date to the (not very clear) Roman date. This seems to have been calculated by someone named Hippolytus in the 3rd century, but his calculations were wrong - March 25 did not fall on a Friday (cf. Good Friday) on any of the plausible crucifixion years. Also, as far as I can tell, the relevant Jewish tradition is that prophets die on the same day they are born, not the same day they are conceived. For example, Moses was born on, and died on, the 7th of Adar (is it worth objecting that it should be the same date on the Hebrew calendar and not the Roman?) Maybe this tradition was different in Jesus’ time? But it must be older than the split between Judaism and Islam - the Muslims also believe Mohammed died on his birth date.

Inline links: Hippolytus, Moses, Mohammed

So if you have God who is God and alone, and then the special intermediary who is not (fully) God or a created (g)od, then you have the door into things like Islam - where Jesus is a great and venerated prophet, but not the Messiah or son of God, and Mohammed is the greatest and final revelation, or Unitarianism, or Mormonism (this is the really big deal about why Mormons are not considered Christians even though they say they follow Christ and accept the Bible and all the rest of it).

Why I'm Less Than Infinitely Hostile To Cryptocurrency

December 08, 2022 · Original source

If the government hates Islam, it’s hard from a legal and PR perspective to imprison imams or ban the Koran. But it’s easy to subtly convey to banks that it will regulate them out of existence unless they ban transactions to imams, or to any bookstores that carry Korans. And this has pretty much the same effect.

Galton, Ehrlich, Buck

May 15, 2023 · Original source

Beroe: Eugenics inspired the Nazis (and 1920s Americans) to do very evil things. But Islam inspired Osama bin Laden to do very evil things, and we rightly believe that it’s fine to practice Islam as long as you don’t use it as an excuse to do evil things. Islam isn’t bad, flying planes into buildings is bad. Likewise, eugenics isn’t bad, involuntarily sterilizing people, or sending them to gas chambers, is bad. What’s the argument against forms of eugenics that don’t do this?

Beroe: If I understand you right, you’re saying that some things are so bad that we must ban not only the bad thing, but also innocent things that bad people could use to promote the bad thing. This seems to grant you, as arbiter of which things are too close for comfort to other things, an extraordinary amount of power. As I said before, Islam has been used by bad people to promote bad things. Some people would be very happy if we banned Islam. Should we?

Adraste: You seek hard-and-fast rules, but these will always elude you. You can’t escape adding up the costs and benefits and having a specific object-level opinion. Banning Islam has few benefits and many costs. It violates religious freedom. It perpetuates racist stereotypes. You couldn’t do it if you tried, plus a billion people would declare jihad on you. And the overwhelming majority of Muslims don’t commit terrorist acts anyway. Banning eugenics is very easy. We already did it; the victory requires minimal effort to maintain. Rolling it back has many costs and few benefits. I say keep it banned.

Links For February 2024

February 29, 2024 · Original source

26: Did you know: lots of religions have their own version of LEGO, usually with sets depicting their mythology or temples. Islam has Muslim Blocks, Hinduism has Indic Bricks, and Judaism has Binyan Blocks. But my favorite is Mormonism with - wait for it - Brick’em Young (h/t @seanw_m)

Inline links: Muslim Blocks, Indic Bricks, Binyan Blocks, Brick’em Young, @seanw_m

(also, no offense to Islam, but the Kaaba is the most boring possible building to make a LEGO set for, sorry)

Inline links: the Kaaba is the most boring possible building

39: Claim (h/t @NiohBerg, @eigenrobot): “Islam is dying in Iran”

Inline links: “Islam is dying in Iran”

Your Book Review: Silver Age Marvel Comics

August 16, 2024 · Original source

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

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

Industrial Revolution10 mentions across 10 issues

Industrial Revolution is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 10 times across 10 issues between April 21, 2021 and January 05, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "Age of Discovery and the Industrial Revolution"; "the Industrial Revolution started in Britain because of its high wages"; "The miracle of the Industrial Revolution is now easily stated". It most often appears alongside Japan, China, Trump.

Article page: Industrial Revolution
Mention count: 10
Issue count: 10
First seen: April 21, 2021
Last seen: January 05, 2026

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: Global Economic History April 21, 2021
Your Book Review: Where's My Flying Car? June 04, 2021
Open Thread 200 November 28, 2021
Yudkowsky Contra Christiano On AI Takeoff Speeds April 04, 2022
Highlights From The Comments On Bobos In Paradise December 09, 2022
23 October 31, 2023
Interview Day At Thiel Capital September 03, 2024
Book Review: Deep Utopia October 17, 2024
Highlights From The Comments On Vibecession December 31, 2025
Open Thread 415 January 05, 2026

Japan 4 shared issues
China 3 shared issues
Trump 3 shared issues
US 3 shared issues
ACX 2 shared issues

Source context

Book Review: Global Economic History

April 21, 2021 · Original source

So what does spur development? GEH:VSI takes a historical perspective. It starts by saying that "The differences in prosperity between countries in 1500 were small", then uses this as an excuse to basically round them off to zero and start its account of the Divergence with the Age of Discovery and the Industrial Revolution. I'm nervous about this; the book will later declare the rule that tiny advantages compound so that the rich get richer; that makes the admittedly-small advantage the Europeans held in 1500 crucially important. But the book drops this and talks about the Age of Discovery a lot.

Here the book finally feels comfortable making a strong claim: the Industrial Revolution started in Britain because of its high wages. Other countries had some of the same scientific acumen and proto-technology, but only in Britain was it worth actually building machinery; everywhere else it was cheaper just to hire more laborers (or buy more slaves). The beginning of industrialization caused a positive feedback loop; the new machines raised wages (since workers were more productive), creating even more demand for even more machines. Britain became a center of machine-making expertise (the fact that it was full of giant coal and iron deposits didn't hurt), and the rest is history.

But I did find the book to be a useful counterbalance to some of my libertarian tendencies. Although there are probably times when the free market is useful, it also seems like there's a strong case for some planned-economy-like things when you're trying to develop (and possibly afterwards? Soviet Russia seems like a counterexample but I don't know how many other people have tried this or what the space of possible options looks like). High tariffs and high wages are important components of helping a country develop (though I wish they had expanded on the high wages - these were helpful during the early Industrial Revolution, but is it useful for countries to have high wages now? Do artificially high wages through eg minimum wage policies or UBI help as much as naturally high wages? Should developing countries have high minimum wage laws?)

Your Book Review: Where's My Flying Car?

June 04, 2021 · Original source

Three hundred years ago, we burned wood for energy. Then there was coal and the steam engine, which gave us the Industrial Revolution. Then there was oil and gas, giving us cars and airplanes. Then there should have been nuclear fission and nanotech, letting you fit a lifetime's worth of energy in your pocket. Instead, we still drive much the same cars and airplanes, and climate change threatens to boil the Earth.

The miracle of the Industrial Revolution is now easily stated: In 1800, 85% of the world’s population was at Level 1. Today, only 9% is. Over the past half century, the bulk of humanity moved up out of Level 1 to erase the rich-poor gap and make the world wealth distribution roughly bell-shaped. The average American moved from Level 2 in 1800, to level 3 in 1900, to Level 4 in 2000. We can state the Great Stagnation story nearly as simply: There is no level 5."

Open Thread 200

November 28, 2021 · Original source

The conclusion is more "the Industrial Revolution is a helluva drug", and can make any regime look good and get high on its own ideological supply about how it has restarted history and inaugurated the Caliphate or China Dream or Japan as #1 or whatever.

Yudkowsky Contra Christiano On AI Takeoff Speeds

April 04, 2022 · Original source

Robin thought the AI revolution would be a gradual affair, like the Agricultural or Industrial Revolutions. Various people invent and improve various technologies over the course of decades or centuries. Each new technology provides another jumping-off point for people to use when inventing other technologies: mechanical gears → steam engine → railroad and so on. Over the course of a few decades, you’ve invented lots of stuff and the world is changed, but there’s no single moment when “industrialization happened”.

Chess AI performance over time. Why does this matter? If there’s a slow takeoff (ie gradual exponential curve), it will become obvious that some kind of terrifying transformative AI revolution is happening, before the situation gets apocalyptic. There will be time to prepare, to test slightly-below-human AIs and see how they respond, to get governments and other stakeholders on board. We don’t have to get every single thing right ahead of time. On the other hand, because this is proceeding along the usual channels, it will be the usual variety of muddled and hard-to-control. With the exception of a few big actors like the US and Chinese government, and maybe the biggest corporations like Google, the outcome will be determined less by any one agent, and more by the usual multi-agent dynamics of political and economic competition. There will be lots of opportunities to affect things, but no real locus of control to do the affecting. If there’s a fast takeoff (ie sudden FOOM), there won’t be much warning. Conventional wisdom will still say that transformative AI is thirty years away. All the necessary pieces (ie AI alignment theory) will have to be ready ahead of time, prepared blindly without any experimental trial-and-error, to load into the AI as soon as it exists. On the plus side, a single actor (whoever has this first AI) will have complete control over the process. If this actor is smart (and presumably they’re a little smart, or they wouldn’t be the first team to invent transformative AI), they can do everything right without going through the usual government-lobbying channels. So the slower a takeoff you expect, the less you should be focusing on getting every technical detail right ahead of time, and the more you should be working on building the capacity to steer government and corporate policy to direct an incoming slew of new technologies. Yudkowsky Contra Christiano Eliezer counters that although progress may retroactively look gradual and continuous when you know what metric to graph it on, it doesn’t necessarily look that way in real life by the measures that real people care about. (one way to think of this: imagine that an AI’s effective IQ starts at 0.1 points, and triples every year, but that we can only measure this vaguely and indirectly. The year it goes from 5 to 15, you get a paper in a third-tier journal reporting that it seems to be improving on some benchmark. The year it goes from 66 to 200, you get a total transformation of everything in society. But later, once we identify the right metric, it was just the same rate of gradual progress the whole time. ) So Eliezer is much less impressed by the history of previous technologies than Paul is. He’s also skeptical of the “GDP will double in 4 years before it doubles in 1” claim, because of two contingent disagreements and two fundamental disagreements. The first contingent disagreement: government regulations make it hard to deploy imperfect things, and non-trivial to deploy things even after they’re perfect. Eliezer has non-jokingly said he thinks AI might destroy the world before the average person can buy a self-driving car. Why? Because the government has to approve self-driving cars (and can drag its feet on that), but the apocalypse can happen even without government approval. In Paul’s model, sometime long before superintelligence we should have AIs that can drive cars, and that increases GDP and contributes to a general sense that exciting things are going on. Eliezer says: fine, what if that’s true? Who cares if self-driving cars will be practical a few years before the world is destroyed? It’ll take longer than that to lobby the government to allow them on the road. The second contingent disagreement: superintelligent AIs can lie to us. Suppose you have an AI which wants to destroy humanity, whose IQ is doubling every six months. Right now it’s at IQ 200, and it suspects that it would take IQ 800 to build a human-destroying superweapon. Its best strategy is to lie low for a year. If it expects humans would turn it off if they knew how close it was to superweapons, it can pretend to be less intelligent than it really is. The period when AIs are holding back so we don’t discover their true power level looks like a period of lower-than-expected GDP growth - followed by a sudden FOOM once the AI gets its superweapon and doesn’t need to hold back. So even if Paul is conceptually right and fundamental progress proceeds along a nice smooth curve, it might not look to us like a nice smooth curve, because regulations and deceptive AIs could prevent mildly-transformative AI progress from showing up on graphs, but wouldn’t prevent the extreme kind of AI progress that leads to apocalypse. To an outside observer, it would just look like nothing much changed, nothing much changed, nothing much changed, and then suddenly, FOOM. But even aside from this, Eliezer doesn’t think Paul is conceptually right! He thinks that even on the fundamental level, AI progress is going to be discontinuous. It’s like a nuclear bomb. Either you don’t have a nuclear bomb yet, or you do have one and the world is forever transformed. There is a specific moment at which you go from “no nuke” to “nuke” without any kind of “slightly worse nuke” acting as a harbinger. He uses the example of chimps → humans. Evolution has spent hundreds of millions of years evolving brainier and brainier animals (not teleologically, of course, but in practice). For most of those hundreds of millions of years, that meant the animal could have slightly more instincts, or a better memory, or some other change that still stayed within the basic animal paradigm. At the chimp → human transition, we suddenly got tool use, language use, abstract thought, mathematics, swords, guns, nuclear bombs, spaceships, and a bunch of other stuff. The rhesus monkey → chimp transition and the chimp → human transition both involved the same ~quadrupling of neuron number, but the former was pretty boring and the latter unlocked enough new capabilities to easily conquer the world. The GPT-2 → GPT-3 transition involved centupling parameter count. Maybe we will keep centupling parameter count every few years, and most times it will be incremental improvement, and one time it will conquer the world. But even talking about centupling parameter points is giving Paul too much credit. Lots of past inventions didn’t come by quadrupling or centupling something, they came by discovering “the secret sauce”. The Wright brothers (he argues) didn’t make a plane with 4x the wingspan of the last plane that didn’t work, they invented the first plane that could fly at all. The Hiroshima bomb wasn’t some previous bomb but bigger, it was what happened after a lot of scientists spent a long time thinking about a fundamentally different paradigm of bomb-making and brought it to a point where it could work at all. The first transformative AI isn’t going to be GPT-3 with more parameters, it will be what happens after someone discovers how to make machines truly intelligent. (this is the same debate Eliezer had with Ajeya over the Biological Anchors post; have I mentioned that Ajeya and Paul are married?) Fine, Let’s Nitpick The Hell Out Of The Chimps Vs. Humans Example This is where the two of them end up, so let’s follow. Between chimps and humans, there were about seven million years of intermediate steps. These had some human capabilities, but not others. IE homo erectus probably had language, but not mathematics, and in terms of taking over the world it did make it to most of the Old World but was less dominant than moderns. But if we say evolutionary history started 500 million years ago (the Cambrian), and AI history started with the Dartmouth Conference in 1955, then the equivalent of 7 million years of evolutionary history is 1 year of AI history. In the very very unlikely and forced comparison where evolutionary history and AI history go at the same speed, there will be only about a year between chimp-level and human-level AIs. A chimp-level AI probably can’t double GDP, so this would count as a fast takeoff by Paul’s criterion. But even more than that, chimp → human feels like a discontinuity. It’s not just “animals kept getting smarter for hundreds of millions of years, and then ended up very smart indeed”. That happened for a while, and then all of sudden there was a near-instant phase transition into a totally different way of using intelligence with completely new abilities. If AI worked like this, we would have useful toys and interesting specialists for a few decades, until suddenly someone “got it right”, completed the package that was necessary for “true intelligence”, and then we would have a completely new category of thing. Paul admits this analogy is awkward for his position. He answers: Chimp evolution is not primarily selecting for making and using technology, for doing science, or for facilitating cultural accumulation. The task faced by a chimp is largely independent of the abilities that give humans such a huge fitness advantage. It’s not completely independent—the overlap is the only reason that evolution eventually produces humans—but it’s different enough that we should not be surprised if there are simple changes to chimps that would make them much better at designing technology or doing science or accumulating culture […] So I don’t think the example of evolution tells us much about whether the continuous change story applies to intelligence. This case is potentially missing the key element that drives the continuous change story—optimization for performance. Evolution changes continuously on the narrow metric it is optimizing, but can change extremely rapidly on other metrics. For human technology, features of the technology that aren’t being optimized change rapidly all the time. When humans build AI, they will be optimizing for usefulness, and so progress in usefulness is much more likely to be linear. That is, evolution wasn’t optimizing for tool use/language/intelligence, so we got an “overhang” where chimps could potentially have been very good at these, but evolution never bothered “closing the circuit” and turning those capabilities “on”. After a long time, evolution finally blundered into an area where marginal improvements in these capacities improved fitness, so evolution started improving them and it was easy. Imagine a company which, through some oversight, didn’t have a Sales department. They just sat around designing and manufacturing increasingly brilliant products, but not putting any effort into selling them. Then the CEO remembers they need a Sales department, starts one up, and the company goes from moving near zero units to moving millions of units overnight. It would look like the company had “suddenly” developed a “vast increase in capabilities”. But this is only possible when a CEO who is weirdly unconcerned about profit forgets to do obvious profit-increasing things for many years. This is Paul’s counterargument to the chimp analogy. Evolution isn’t directly concerned about various intellectual skills; it only wants them in the unusual cases where they’ll contribute to fitness on the margin. AI companies will be very concerned about various intellectual skills. If there’s a trivial change that can make their product 10x better, they’ll make it. So AI capabilities will grow in a “well-rounded” way, there won’t be any “overhangs”, and there won’t be any opportunities for a sudden overhang-solving phase transition with associated new-capability development like with chimps → humans. Eliezer answers: Chimps are nearly useless because they're not general, and doing anything on the scale of building a nuclear plant requires mastering so many different nonancestral domains that it's no wonder natural selection didn't happen to separately train any single creature across enough different domains that it had evolved to solve every kind of domain-specific problem involved in solving nuclear physics and chemistry and metallurgy and thermics in order to build the first nuclear plant in advance of any old nuclear plants existing. Humans are general enough that the same braintech selected just for chipping flint handaxes and making water-pouches and outwitting other humans, happened to be general enough that it could scale up to solving all the problems of building a nuclear plant - albeit with some added cognitive tech that didn't require new brainware, and so could happen incredibly fast relative to the generation times for evolutionarily optimized brainware. Now, since neither humans nor chimps were optimized to be "useful" (general), and humans just wandered into a sufficiently general part of the space that it cascaded up to wider generality, we should legit expect the curve of generality to look at least somewhat different if we're optimizing for that. Eg, right now people are trying to optimize for generality with AIs like Mu Zero and GPT-3. In both cases we have a weirdly shallow kind of generality. Neither is as smart or as deeply general as a chimp, but they are respectively better than chimps at a wide variety of Atari games, or a wide variety of problems that can be superposed onto generating typical human text. They are, in a sense, more general than a biological organism at a similar stage of cognitive evolution, with much less complex and architected brains, in virtue of having been trained, not just on wider datasets, but on bigger datasets using gradient-descent memorization of shallower patterns, so they can cover those wide domains while being stupider and lacking some deep aspects of architecture. It is not clear to me that we can go from observations like this, to conclude that there is a dominant mainline probability for how the future clearly ought to go and that this dominant mainline is, "Well, before you get human-level depth and generalization of general intelligence, you get something with 95% depth that covers 80% of the domains for 10% of the pragmatic impact". ...or whatever the concept is here, because this whole conversation is, on my own worldview, being conducted in a shallow way relative to the kind of analysis I did in Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics, where I was like, "here is the historical observation, here is what I think it tells us that puts a lower bound on this input-output curve". Here Eliezer sort of kind of grants Paul’s point that AIs will be optimized for generality in a way chimps aren’t, but points to his previous “Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics” essay to argue that we should expect a fast takeoff anyway. IEM has a lot of stuff in it, but one key point is that instead of using analogies to predict the course of future AI, we should open that black box and try to actually reason about how it will work, in which case we realize that recursive self-improvement common-sensically has to cause an intelligence explosion. I am sort of okay with this, but I feel like a commitment to avoiding analogies should involve not bringing up the chimp-human analogy further, which Eliezer continues to do, quite a lot. I do feel like Paul succeeded in convincing me that we shouldn’t place too much evidential weight on it. The Wimbledon Of Reference Class Tennis “Reference class tennis” is an old rationalist idiom for people throwing analogies back and forth. “AI will be slow, because it’s an economic transition like the Agricultural or Industrial Revolution, and those were slow!” “No, AI will be fast, because it’s an evolutionary step like chimps → humans, and that was fast!” “No, AI will be slow, because it’s an invention, like the computer, and computers were invented piecemeal and required decades of innovation to be useful.” “No, AI will be fast, because it’s an invention, like the nuclear bomb, and nuclear bombs went from impossible to city-killing in a single day.” “No, AI will be slow, because it will be surrounded by a shell-like metallic computer case, which makes it like a turtle, and turtles are slow.” “No, AI will be fast, because it’s dangerous and powerful, like a tiger, and tigers are fast!” And so on. Comparing things to other things is a time-tested way of speculating about them. But there are so many other things to compare to that you can get whatever result you want. This is the failure mode that the term “reference class tennis” was supposed to point to. Both participants in this debate are very smart and trying their hardest to avoid reference-class tennis, but neither entirely succeeds. Eliezer’s preferred classes are Bitcoin (“there wasn't a cryptocurrency developed a year before Bitcoin using 95% of the ideas which did 10% of the transaction volume”), nukes, humans/chimps, the Wright Brothers, AlphaGo (which really was a discontinuous improvement on previous Go engines), and AlphaFold (ditto for proteins). Paul’s preferred classes are the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, chess engines (which have gotten better along a gradual, well-behaved curve), all sorts of inventions like computers and ships (likewise), and world GDP. Eliezer already listed most of these in his Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics paper in 2013, and concluded that the space of possible analogies was contradictory enough that we needed to operate at a higher level. Maybe so, but when someone lobs a reference class tennis ball at you, it’s hard to resist the urge to hit it back. Recursive Self-Improvement This is where I think Eliezer most wants to take the discussion. The idea is: once AI is smarter than humans, it can do a superhuman job of developing new AI. In his Microeconomics paper, he writes about an argument he (semi-hypothetically) had with Ray Kurzweil about Moore’s Law. Kurzweil expected Moore’s Law to continue forever, even after the development of superintelligence. Eliezer objects: Suppose we were dealing with minds running a million times as fast as a human, at which rate they could do a year of internal thinking in thirty-one seconds, such that the total subjective time from the birth of Socrates to the death of Turing would pass in 20.9 hours. Do you still think the best estimate for how long it would take them to produce their next generation of computing hardware would be 1.5 orbits of the Earth around the Sun? That is: the fact that it took 1.5 years for transistor density to double isn’t a natural law. It’s pointing to a law that the amount of resources (most notably intelligence) that civilization focused on the transistor-densifying problem equalled the amount it takes to double it every 1.5 years. If some shock drastically changed available resources (by eg speeding up human minds a million times), this would change the resources involved, and the same laws would predict transistor speed doubling in some shorter amount of time (naively 0.000015 years, although realistically at that scale other inputs would dominate). So when Paul derives clean laws of economics showing that things move along slow growth curves, Eliezer asks: why do you think they would keep doing this when one of the discoveries they make along that curve might be “speeding up intelligence a million times”? (Eliezer actually thinks improvements in the quality of intelligence will dominate improvements in speed - AIs will mostly be smarter, not just faster - but speed is a useful example here and we’ll stick with it) Paul answers: Summary of my response: Before there is AI that is great at self-improvement there will be AI that is mediocre at self-improvement. Powerful AI can be used to develop better AI (amongst other things). This will lead to runaway growth. This on its own is not an argument for discontinuity: before we have AI that radically accelerates AI development, the slow takeoff argument suggests we will have AI that significantly accelerates AI development (and before that, slightly accelerates development). That is, an AI is just another, faster step in the hyperbolic growth we are currently experiencing, which corresponds to a further increase in rate but not a discontinuity (or even a discontinuity in rate). The most common argument for recursive self-improvement introducing a new discontinuity seems be: some systems “fizzle out” when they try to design a better AI, generating a few improvements before running out of steam, while others are able to autonomously generate more and more improvements. This is basically the same as the universality argument in a previous section. Eliezer: Oh, come on. That is straight-up not how simple continuous toy models of RSI work. Between a neutron multiplication factor of 0.999 and 1.001 there is a very huge gap in output behavior. Outside of toy models: Over the last 10,000 years we had humans going from mediocre at improving their mental systems to being (barely) able to throw together AI systems, but 10,000 years is the equivalent of an eyeblink in evolutionary time - outside the metaphor, this says, "A month before there is AI that is great at self-improvement, there will be AI that is mediocre at self-improvement." (Or possibly an hour before, if reality is again more extreme along the Eliezer-Hanson axis than Eliezer. But it makes little difference whether it's an hour or a month, given anything like current setups.) This is just pumping hard again on the intuition that says incremental design changes yield smooth output changes, which (the meta-level of the essay informs us wordlessly) is such a strong default that we are entitled to believe it if we can do a good job of weakening the evidence and arguments against it. And the argument is: Before there are systems great at self-improvement, there will be systems mediocre at self-improvement; implicitly: "before" implies "5 years before" not "5 days before"; implicitly: this will correspond to smooth changes in output between the two regimes even though that is not how continuous feedback loops work. I got a bit confused trying to understand the criticality metaphor here. There’s no equivalent of neutron decay, so any AI that can consistently improve its intelligence is “critical” in some sense. Imagine Elon Musk replaces his brain with a Neuralink computer which - aside from having read-write access - exactly matches his current brain in capabilities. Also he becomes immortal. He secludes himself from the world, studying AI and tinkering with his brain’s algorithms. Does he become a superintelligence? I think under the assumptions Paul and Eliezer are using, eventually maybe. After some amount of time he’ll come across a breakthrough he can use to increase his intelligence. Then, armed with that extra intelligence, he’ll be able to pursue more such breakthroughs. However intelligent the AI you’re scared of is, Musk will get there eventually. How long will it take? A good guess might be “years” - Musk starts out as an ordinary human, and ordinary humans are known to take years to make breakthroughs. Suppose it takes Musk one year to come up with a first breakthrough that raises his IQ 1 point. How long will his second breakthrough take? It might take longer, because he has picked the lowest-hanging fruit, and all the other possible breakthroughs are much harder. Or it might take shorter, because he’s slightly smarter than he was before, and maybe some extra intelligence goes a really long way in AI research. The concept of an intelligence explosion seems to assume the second effect dominates the first. This would match the observation that human researchers, who aren’t getting any smarter over time, continue making new discoveries. That suggests the range of possible discoveries at a given intelligence level is pretty vast. Some research finds that the usual pattern in science is constant rate of discovery from exponentially increasing number of researchers, suggesting strong low-hanging fruit effects, but these seem to be overwhelmed by other considerations in AI right now. I think Eliezer’s position on this subject is shaped by assumptions like: If you have an AI as intelligent as Elon Musk today, then tomorrow you can run it on more hardware with a bit of normal human algorithmic progress, and get one twice as intelligent. So even if it would take Elon years to make a breakthrough, long before those years are up you’ll have an AI that can make breakthroughs much faster.

Inline links: thirty years away, Biological Anchors, Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics, hyperbolic growth we are currently experiencing, Some research finds

Industrial Revolution? What Industrial Revolution? This is just a nice smooth exponential curve. The same is usually true of individual technologies; Paul doesn’t give specifics, but Nintil and Katja Grace both have lots of great examples: Information technologies over time (Nagy) Chess AI performance over time. Why does this matter? If there’s a slow takeoff (ie gradual exponential curve), it will become obvious that some kind of terrifying transformative AI revolution is happening, before the situation gets apocalyptic. There will be time to prepare, to test slightly-below-human AIs and see how they respond, to get governments and other stakeholders on board. We don’t have to get every single thing right ahead of time. On the other hand, because this is proceeding along the usual channels, it will be the usual variety of muddled and hard-to-control. With the exception of a few big actors like the US and Chinese government, and maybe the biggest corporations like Google, the outcome will be determined less by any one agent, and more by the usual multi-agent dynamics of political and economic competition. There will be lots of opportunities to affect things, but no real locus of control to do the affecting. If there’s a fast takeoff (ie sudden FOOM), there won’t be much warning. Conventional wisdom will still say that transformative AI is thirty years away. All the necessary pieces (ie AI alignment theory) will have to be ready ahead of time, prepared blindly without any experimental trial-and-error, to load into the AI as soon as it exists. On the plus side, a single actor (whoever has this first AI) will have complete control over the process. If this actor is smart (and presumably they’re a little smart, or they wouldn’t be the first team to invent transformative AI), they can do everything right without going through the usual government-lobbying channels. So the slower a takeoff you expect, the less you should be focusing on getting every technical detail right ahead of time, and the more you should be working on building the capacity to steer government and corporate policy to direct an incoming slew of new technologies. Yudkowsky Contra Christiano Eliezer counters that although progress may retroactively look gradual and continuous when you know what metric to graph it on, it doesn’t necessarily look that way in real life by the measures that real people care about. (one way to think of this: imagine that an AI’s effective IQ starts at 0.1 points, and triples every year, but that we can only measure this vaguely and indirectly. The year it goes from 5 to 15, you get a paper in a third-tier journal reporting that it seems to be improving on some benchmark. The year it goes from 66 to 200, you get a total transformation of everything in society. But later, once we identify the right metric, it was just the same rate of gradual progress the whole time. ) So Eliezer is much less impressed by the history of previous technologies than Paul is. He’s also skeptical of the “GDP will double in 4 years before it doubles in 1” claim, because of two contingent disagreements and two fundamental disagreements. The first contingent disagreement: government regulations make it hard to deploy imperfect things, and non-trivial to deploy things even after they’re perfect. Eliezer has non-jokingly said he thinks AI might destroy the world before the average person can buy a self-driving car. Why? Because the government has to approve self-driving cars (and can drag its feet on that), but the apocalypse can happen even without government approval. In Paul’s model, sometime long before superintelligence we should have AIs that can drive cars, and that increases GDP and contributes to a general sense that exciting things are going on. Eliezer says: fine, what if that’s true? Who cares if self-driving cars will be practical a few years before the world is destroyed? It’ll take longer than that to lobby the government to allow them on the road. The second contingent disagreement: superintelligent AIs can lie to us. Suppose you have an AI which wants to destroy humanity, whose IQ is doubling every six months. Right now it’s at IQ 200, and it suspects that it would take IQ 800 to build a human-destroying superweapon. Its best strategy is to lie low for a year. If it expects humans would turn it off if they knew how close it was to superweapons, it can pretend to be less intelligent than it really is. The period when AIs are holding back so we don’t discover their true power level looks like a period of lower-than-expected GDP growth - followed by a sudden FOOM once the AI gets its superweapon and doesn’t need to hold back. So even if Paul is conceptually right and fundamental progress proceeds along a nice smooth curve, it might not look to us like a nice smooth curve, because regulations and deceptive AIs could prevent mildly-transformative AI progress from showing up on graphs, but wouldn’t prevent the extreme kind of AI progress that leads to apocalypse. To an outside observer, it would just look like nothing much changed, nothing much changed, nothing much changed, and then suddenly, FOOM. But even aside from this, Eliezer doesn’t think Paul is conceptually right! He thinks that even on the fundamental level, AI progress is going to be discontinuous. It’s like a nuclear bomb. Either you don’t have a nuclear bomb yet, or you do have one and the world is forever transformed. There is a specific moment at which you go from “no nuke” to “nuke” without any kind of “slightly worse nuke” acting as a harbinger. He uses the example of chimps → humans. Evolution has spent hundreds of millions of years evolving brainier and brainier animals (not teleologically, of course, but in practice). For most of those hundreds of millions of years, that meant the animal could have slightly more instincts, or a better memory, or some other change that still stayed within the basic animal paradigm. At the chimp → human transition, we suddenly got tool use, language use, abstract thought, mathematics, swords, guns, nuclear bombs, spaceships, and a bunch of other stuff. The rhesus monkey → chimp transition and the chimp → human transition both involved the same ~quadrupling of neuron number, but the former was pretty boring and the latter unlocked enough new capabilities to easily conquer the world. The GPT-2 → GPT-3 transition involved centupling parameter count. Maybe we will keep centupling parameter count every few years, and most times it will be incremental improvement, and one time it will conquer the world. But even talking about centupling parameter points is giving Paul too much credit. Lots of past inventions didn’t come by quadrupling or centupling something, they came by discovering “the secret sauce”. The Wright brothers (he argues) didn’t make a plane with 4x the wingspan of the last plane that didn’t work, they invented the first plane that could fly at all. The Hiroshima bomb wasn’t some previous bomb but bigger, it was what happened after a lot of scientists spent a long time thinking about a fundamentally different paradigm of bomb-making and brought it to a point where it could work at all. The first transformative AI isn’t going to be GPT-3 with more parameters, it will be what happens after someone discovers how to make machines truly intelligent. (this is the same debate Eliezer had with Ajeya over the Biological Anchors post; have I mentioned that Ajeya and Paul are married?) Fine, Let’s Nitpick The Hell Out Of The Chimps Vs. Humans Example This is where the two of them end up, so let’s follow. Between chimps and humans, there were about seven million years of intermediate steps. These had some human capabilities, but not others. IE homo erectus probably had language, but not mathematics, and in terms of taking over the world it did make it to most of the Old World but was less dominant than moderns. But if we say evolutionary history started 500 million years ago (the Cambrian), and AI history started with the Dartmouth Conference in 1955, then the equivalent of 7 million years of evolutionary history is 1 year of AI history. In the very very unlikely and forced comparison where evolutionary history and AI history go at the same speed, there will be only about a year between chimp-level and human-level AIs. A chimp-level AI probably can’t double GDP, so this would count as a fast takeoff by Paul’s criterion. But even more than that, chimp → human feels like a discontinuity. It’s not just “animals kept getting smarter for hundreds of millions of years, and then ended up very smart indeed”. That happened for a while, and then all of sudden there was a near-instant phase transition into a totally different way of using intelligence with completely new abilities. If AI worked like this, we would have useful toys and interesting specialists for a few decades, until suddenly someone “got it right”, completed the package that was necessary for “true intelligence”, and then we would have a completely new category of thing. Paul admits this analogy is awkward for his position. He answers: Chimp evolution is not primarily selecting for making and using technology, for doing science, or for facilitating cultural accumulation. The task faced by a chimp is largely independent of the abilities that give humans such a huge fitness advantage. It’s not completely independent—the overlap is the only reason that evolution eventually produces humans—but it’s different enough that we should not be surprised if there are simple changes to chimps that would make them much better at designing technology or doing science or accumulating culture […] So I don’t think the example of evolution tells us much about whether the continuous change story applies to intelligence. This case is potentially missing the key element that drives the continuous change story—optimization for performance. Evolution changes continuously on the narrow metric it is optimizing, but can change extremely rapidly on other metrics. For human technology, features of the technology that aren’t being optimized change rapidly all the time. When humans build AI, they will be optimizing for usefulness, and so progress in usefulness is much more likely to be linear. That is, evolution wasn’t optimizing for tool use/language/intelligence, so we got an “overhang” where chimps could potentially have been very good at these, but evolution never bothered “closing the circuit” and turning those capabilities “on”. After a long time, evolution finally blundered into an area where marginal improvements in these capacities improved fitness, so evolution started improving them and it was easy. Imagine a company which, through some oversight, didn’t have a Sales department. They just sat around designing and manufacturing increasingly brilliant products, but not putting any effort into selling them. Then the CEO remembers they need a Sales department, starts one up, and the company goes from moving near zero units to moving millions of units overnight. It would look like the company had “suddenly” developed a “vast increase in capabilities”. But this is only possible when a CEO who is weirdly unconcerned about profit forgets to do obvious profit-increasing things for many years. This is Paul’s counterargument to the chimp analogy. Evolution isn’t directly concerned about various intellectual skills; it only wants them in the unusual cases where they’ll contribute to fitness on the margin. AI companies will be very concerned about various intellectual skills. If there’s a trivial change that can make their product 10x better, they’ll make it. So AI capabilities will grow in a “well-rounded” way, there won’t be any “overhangs”, and there won’t be any opportunities for a sudden overhang-solving phase transition with associated new-capability development like with chimps → humans. Eliezer answers: Chimps are nearly useless because they're not general, and doing anything on the scale of building a nuclear plant requires mastering so many different nonancestral domains that it's no wonder natural selection didn't happen to separately train any single creature across enough different domains that it had evolved to solve every kind of domain-specific problem involved in solving nuclear physics and chemistry and metallurgy and thermics in order to build the first nuclear plant in advance of any old nuclear plants existing. Humans are general enough that the same braintech selected just for chipping flint handaxes and making water-pouches and outwitting other humans, happened to be general enough that it could scale up to solving all the problems of building a nuclear plant - albeit with some added cognitive tech that didn't require new brainware, and so could happen incredibly fast relative to the generation times for evolutionarily optimized brainware. Now, since neither humans nor chimps were optimized to be "useful" (general), and humans just wandered into a sufficiently general part of the space that it cascaded up to wider generality, we should legit expect the curve of generality to look at least somewhat different if we're optimizing for that. Eg, right now people are trying to optimize for generality with AIs like Mu Zero and GPT-3. In both cases we have a weirdly shallow kind of generality. Neither is as smart or as deeply general as a chimp, but they are respectively better than chimps at a wide variety of Atari games, or a wide variety of problems that can be superposed onto generating typical human text. They are, in a sense, more general than a biological organism at a similar stage of cognitive evolution, with much less complex and architected brains, in virtue of having been trained, not just on wider datasets, but on bigger datasets using gradient-descent memorization of shallower patterns, so they can cover those wide domains while being stupider and lacking some deep aspects of architecture. It is not clear to me that we can go from observations like this, to conclude that there is a dominant mainline probability for how the future clearly ought to go and that this dominant mainline is, "Well, before you get human-level depth and generalization of general intelligence, you get something with 95% depth that covers 80% of the domains for 10% of the pragmatic impact". ...or whatever the concept is here, because this whole conversation is, on my own worldview, being conducted in a shallow way relative to the kind of analysis I did in Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics, where I was like, "here is the historical observation, here is what I think it tells us that puts a lower bound on this input-output curve". Here Eliezer sort of kind of grants Paul’s point that AIs will be optimized for generality in a way chimps aren’t, but points to his previous “Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics” essay to argue that we should expect a fast takeoff anyway. IEM has a lot of stuff in it, but one key point is that instead of using analogies to predict the course of future AI, we should open that black box and try to actually reason about how it will work, in which case we realize that recursive self-improvement common-sensically has to cause an intelligence explosion. I am sort of okay with this, but I feel like a commitment to avoiding analogies should involve not bringing up the chimp-human analogy further, which Eliezer continues to do, quite a lot. I do feel like Paul succeeded in convincing me that we shouldn’t place too much evidential weight on it. The Wimbledon Of Reference Class Tennis “Reference class tennis” is an old rationalist idiom for people throwing analogies back and forth. “AI will be slow, because it’s an economic transition like the Agricultural or Industrial Revolution, and those were slow!” “No, AI will be fast, because it’s an evolutionary step like chimps → humans, and that was fast!” “No, AI will be slow, because it’s an invention, like the computer, and computers were invented piecemeal and required decades of innovation to be useful.” “No, AI will be fast, because it’s an invention, like the nuclear bomb, and nuclear bombs went from impossible to city-killing in a single day.” “No, AI will be slow, because it will be surrounded by a shell-like metallic computer case, which makes it like a turtle, and turtles are slow.” “No, AI will be fast, because it’s dangerous and powerful, like a tiger, and tigers are fast!” And so on. Comparing things to other things is a time-tested way of speculating about them. But there are so many other things to compare to that you can get whatever result you want. This is the failure mode that the term “reference class tennis” was supposed to point to. Both participants in this debate are very smart and trying their hardest to avoid reference-class tennis, but neither entirely succeeds. Eliezer’s preferred classes are Bitcoin (“there wasn't a cryptocurrency developed a year before Bitcoin using 95% of the ideas which did 10% of the transaction volume”), nukes, humans/chimps, the Wright Brothers, AlphaGo (which really was a discontinuous improvement on previous Go engines), and AlphaFold (ditto for proteins). Paul’s preferred classes are the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, chess engines (which have gotten better along a gradual, well-behaved curve), all sorts of inventions like computers and ships (likewise), and world GDP. Eliezer already listed most of these in his Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics paper in 2013, and concluded that the space of possible analogies was contradictory enough that we needed to operate at a higher level. Maybe so, but when someone lobs a reference class tennis ball at you, it’s hard to resist the urge to hit it back. Recursive Self-Improvement This is where I think Eliezer most wants to take the discussion. The idea is: once AI is smarter than humans, it can do a superhuman job of developing new AI. In his Microeconomics paper, he writes about an argument he (semi-hypothetically) had with Ray Kurzweil about Moore’s Law. Kurzweil expected Moore’s Law to continue forever, even after the development of superintelligence. Eliezer objects: Suppose we were dealing with minds running a million times as fast as a human, at which rate they could do a year of internal thinking in thirty-one seconds, such that the total subjective time from the birth of Socrates to the death of Turing would pass in 20.9 hours. Do you still think the best estimate for how long it would take them to produce their next generation of computing hardware would be 1.5 orbits of the Earth around the Sun? That is: the fact that it took 1.5 years for transistor density to double isn’t a natural law. It’s pointing to a law that the amount of resources (most notably intelligence) that civilization focused on the transistor-densifying problem equalled the amount it takes to double it every 1.5 years. If some shock drastically changed available resources (by eg speeding up human minds a million times), this would change the resources involved, and the same laws would predict transistor speed doubling in some shorter amount of time (naively 0.000015 years, although realistically at that scale other inputs would dominate). So when Paul derives clean laws of economics showing that things move along slow growth curves, Eliezer asks: why do you think they would keep doing this when one of the discoveries they make along that curve might be “speeding up intelligence a million times”? (Eliezer actually thinks improvements in the quality of intelligence will dominate improvements in speed - AIs will mostly be smarter, not just faster - but speed is a useful example here and we’ll stick with it) Paul answers: Summary of my response: Before there is AI that is great at self-improvement there will be AI that is mediocre at self-improvement. Powerful AI can be used to develop better AI (amongst other things). This will lead to runaway growth. This on its own is not an argument for discontinuity: before we have AI that radically accelerates AI development, the slow takeoff argument suggests we will have AI that significantly accelerates AI development (and before that, slightly accelerates development). That is, an AI is just another, faster step in the hyperbolic growth we are currently experiencing, which corresponds to a further increase in rate but not a discontinuity (or even a discontinuity in rate). The most common argument for recursive self-improvement introducing a new discontinuity seems be: some systems “fizzle out” when they try to design a better AI, generating a few improvements before running out of steam, while others are able to autonomously generate more and more improvements. This is basically the same as the universality argument in a previous section. Eliezer: Oh, come on. That is straight-up not how simple continuous toy models of RSI work. Between a neutron multiplication factor of 0.999 and 1.001 there is a very huge gap in output behavior. Outside of toy models: Over the last 10,000 years we had humans going from mediocre at improving their mental systems to being (barely) able to throw together AI systems, but 10,000 years is the equivalent of an eyeblink in evolutionary time - outside the metaphor, this says, "A month before there is AI that is great at self-improvement, there will be AI that is mediocre at self-improvement." (Or possibly an hour before, if reality is again more extreme along the Eliezer-Hanson axis than Eliezer. But it makes little difference whether it's an hour or a month, given anything like current setups.) This is just pumping hard again on the intuition that says incremental design changes yield smooth output changes, which (the meta-level of the essay informs us wordlessly) is such a strong default that we are entitled to believe it if we can do a good job of weakening the evidence and arguments against it. And the argument is: Before there are systems great at self-improvement, there will be systems mediocre at self-improvement; implicitly: "before" implies "5 years before" not "5 days before"; implicitly: this will correspond to smooth changes in output between the two regimes even though that is not how continuous feedback loops work. I got a bit confused trying to understand the criticality metaphor here. There’s no equivalent of neutron decay, so any AI that can consistently improve its intelligence is “critical” in some sense. Imagine Elon Musk replaces his brain with a Neuralink computer which - aside from having read-write access - exactly matches his current brain in capabilities. Also he becomes immortal. He secludes himself from the world, studying AI and tinkering with his brain’s algorithms. Does he become a superintelligence? I think under the assumptions Paul and Eliezer are using, eventually maybe. After some amount of time he’ll come across a breakthrough he can use to increase his intelligence. Then, armed with that extra intelligence, he’ll be able to pursue more such breakthroughs. However intelligent the AI you’re scared of is, Musk will get there eventually. How long will it take? A good guess might be “years” - Musk starts out as an ordinary human, and ordinary humans are known to take years to make breakthroughs. Suppose it takes Musk one year to come up with a first breakthrough that raises his IQ 1 point. How long will his second breakthrough take? It might take longer, because he has picked the lowest-hanging fruit, and all the other possible breakthroughs are much harder. Or it might take shorter, because he’s slightly smarter than he was before, and maybe some extra intelligence goes a really long way in AI research. The concept of an intelligence explosion seems to assume the second effect dominates the first. This would match the observation that human researchers, who aren’t getting any smarter over time, continue making new discoveries. That suggests the range of possible discoveries at a given intelligence level is pretty vast. Some research finds that the usual pattern in science is constant rate of discovery from exponentially increasing number of researchers, suggesting strong low-hanging fruit effects, but these seem to be overwhelmed by other considerations in AI right now. I think Eliezer’s position on this subject is shaped by assumptions like: If you have an AI as intelligent as Elon Musk today, then tomorrow you can run it on more hardware with a bit of normal human algorithmic progress, and get one twice as intelligent. So even if it would take Elon years to make a breakthrough, long before those years are up you’ll have an AI that can make breakthroughs much faster.

Inline links: Nintil, Katja Grace, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!8pqu!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3593bc53-e7e1-4aae-a129-0d59e9220b58_648x739.png, Nagy, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!FvS1!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F985b3c20-cf30-4b4b-a12f-8e5deb10e5af_850x700.png, thirty years away, Biological Anchors, Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics, hyperbolic growth we are currently experiencing, Some research finds

Interview Day At Thiel Capital

December 09, 2022 · Original source

One thing that_would seem to be important is new money. For centuries, the only way to be rich was to own a lot of land, and the only way to own a lot of land was to inherit it. The Industrial Revolution started a phenomenon of non-U people suddenly becoming rich, which made life complicated for the old upper class, but at first they could absorb these new money richers slowly into their ranks (and more importantly, the new money richers aspired to emulate the old money). But eventually the rate of wealth creation got so out of hand that new millionaires were being minted faster than the upper class could co-opt them, and the wealth of the unassimilated non-U rich started to outweigh the wealth of the true Upper Class. And eventually the whole thing came tumbling down and everyone is lining up to get a glimpse of the Beatles instead of the Queen.

October 31, 2023 · Original source

Robin Hanson compares this to steam engines. People had steam engines since ancient Greece, but they didn’t catch on until the Industrial Revolution. And part of this is that you can’t just open a stall in the bazaar saying “Steam engines for sale! Get your steam engines!” You need to figure out a specific niche for which the steam engines of your day are economically efficient, become really familiar with that niche, build a steam engine specifically suited to it, and then work with your clients to turn it into a packaged, easy to buy, easy to use solution. For real steam engines, that first niche was pumping water out of coal mines. For prediction markets, it’s . . . what?

September 03, 2024 · Original source

“So the more Jews you have, the more superweapons you have. If you want a world to survive a couple of centuries after the Industrial Revolution, you need some kind of incredibly implausible event that gets rid of Jews in particular. So everyone who’s still alive will find themselves in a world with a history of implausible events like this.”

Book Review: Deep Utopia

October 17, 2024 · Original source

Is this stupid? We hold an Industrial Revolution, design artificial intelligence, go through an entire singularity - only to end up back in 18th-century France? Not necessarily. 18th century France was full of miserable people - starving peasants, wretched prisoners, smallpox victims - or people who suffered merely from the “affliction” of not getting to be Napoleon. Even Napoleon’s life wasn’t maximally interesting. You could live an enriched, enchanted version of Napoleon’s life, where every decision had extra branching consequences and there was no downtime. Or a version of Napoleon’s life customized to your personal preferences: NSFW Napoleon where all the women wear skimpy costumes! Woke Napoleon where every third Frenchman is a person of color! If you hate the cold, you can play as a Napoleon who skipped Russia and invaded Cancun! It would be the difference between living in medieval Scandinavia and playing Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla.

Highlights From The Comments On Vibecession

December 31, 2025 · Original source

Obviously nothing real changes the exact second a new president is inaugurated, so people must be using questions about the economy to express their overall happiness about the state of the world. Alex asks whether increasing political polarization could make this worse. Both parties’ extreme factions share a tendency to treat the country as controlled by a hegemonic conspiracy of their enemies - the woke coastal elite Soros cosmopolitan establishment, or the neoliberal fat cat Koch Brothers tech oligarch blob. Does this mean everyone is getting some multiple of the “other party’s president is in power” effect all the time? 3: Discourse Downstream Of The Mike Green $140K Poverty Line Post … Shovacklerod writes: Scott have you read Mike Green’s viral post on this? His main argument is that the poverty line is miscalculated, but in context of declining middle class sentiments— The more interesting thesis is that there exists a “valley of death” where two parents in the workforce need a combined ~$140k salary otherwise the cumulative “participation costs” of a fast modern society (for example a phone plan or child care) make year-over-year capital accumulation near impossible. I haven’t, but other commenters suggest reading responses, including Noah Smith’s The $140,000 Poverty Line Is Very Silly, Jeremy Horpedahl’s The Poverty Line Is Not $140,000, and Tyler Cowen’s The Myth Of The $140,000 Poverty Line. Most of these focus on Green’s explicit errors - for example, he gets most of his cost-of-living numbers from Essex, NJ, an especially rich county, then compares them to average earnings. Correct half a dozen things like this, and the real poverty line is probably somewhere between $35K - $60K. The percent of Americans below this line continues to decline every year, as it has for decades. Green finally pseudo-apologized, lambasting the “mockery machine” of the “cognitive elite” but admitting that his post “was never intended to go viral and was written for my existing audience that tends to be pretty understanding that I don’t do this for a living, but rather as PART of my living” Still, many people took Green’s article as a starting point to contribute to the Vibecession discourse, so let’s go over the ones that touch on our topic in more detail. Lincicome titles his response The $140,000 Poverty Line Is Wrong, So Why Does It Feel Right?, and blames Baumol’s cost disease: As the Financial Times’ John-Burns Murdoch just detailed, Americans’ overall cost of living has improved over time, but certain highly visible and socially desirable services have become more expensive. That’s not a conspiracy against the middle class but instead just Baumol at work: “[A]s countries develop economically, the same productivity growth that drives down the cost of tradeable goods causes the cost of in-person services to balloon. Wages in sectors like healthcare and education that require intensive face-to-face labour, and have slow (if any) productivity growth, are forced upwards in order to attract workers who would otherwise opt for high-paying work in more productive sectors. The result is that even if people keep consuming the exact same basket of goods and services, as living standards in their country increase they will find more and more of their spending is going on essential services.” Sectors where productivity grows slowly and prices outpace inflation—health care, education, child care, personal services, housing (construction), etc.—happen to be the same ones that middle-class families notice most and that signal social status. As we’ve all gotten richer, moreover, these services have transitioned from luxuries to expectations. Throw in the hedonic treadmill and the fact that you can’t price-shop schools or hospitals the way you can TVs, and public alarm is all but inevitable. I’m suspicious of including “housing (construction)” on this list - couldn’t you use the same argument to reclassify any manufactured good as a service good? - but the rest of these are well-taken. Still, did Baumol or the other economists who first discussed the effect in the 1960s predict it would make people feel like things were outright worse, as opposed to just getting better less than would be expected from raw productivity numbers? Seems strange. Also, hasn’t the Baumol effect been basically constant since at least the Industrial Revolution? And isn’t the Vibecession only 5 - 20 years old? Matt Bruenig has his own response to Green, Why Do People Feel Like They’re Falling Behind? He bases his argument around this graph: …which is just making the common-sense point that, as society shifts from one-income to two-income families, the husband’s share of family income drops from ~100% to ~50%. So, Bruenig argues, if everyone is trying to keep up with the Joneses, and the Joneses are a dual-earner family, then this single working man has gone from making 100% of his comparison point, to making only 50%. This is a cool potential cognitive bias, but is anyone really making this mistake? Vibecession complaints hardly seem limited to men in traditional one-earner households wondering why they’re not making as much as the neighbors whose wife is a fancy lawyer. My impression is that they include both two-earner families who still feel like they’re falling behind, and (most of all) young singles who are comparing themselves to their young single friends where this issue never comes up in the first place. Matt Yglesias uses a similar strategy in You Can Afford A Tradlife. This is what they took from you. They never should have passed the ‘Make It Illegal To Wear Hair Gel And Marry A White Woman Act' back in 1959! He argues that the reason most wives work these days isn’t because we’re poorer (and they have to work to survive), but because we’re richer (and so wives can make so much money working outside the home that the opportunity cost is too high to pass up). A single earner could still support a family on a 1950s lifestyle. It would just feel like a failure, because we don’t realize how much worse than 1950s lifestyle was compared to our current conditions. The article’s paywalled, but you can get a pretty good sense of the argument from these paragraphs. After determining that the median man makes about $80,000/year, he writes: Let’s say our $80,000-a-year man is living in the Jacksonville area. The Department of Housing and Urban Development calculates what are called Fair Market Rents for each American metro — this means the 40th percentile rent for a home with any given set of characteristics. They say F.M.R. for a three-bedroom home in the Jacksonville area is $2,163. That comes out to about 30 percent of Mr. Median’s annual income. Can you really get a place to live for that little? Here’s a lovely three-bedroom home in the East Arlington neighborhood for $2,020 a month, and it’s zoned for an elementary school with a 10-out-of-10 ranking from GreatSchools. It’s true that 1,617 square feet is on the small side for, say, a family of five in the contemporary United States. But the average size of a new single family home was 1,289 square feet in 1960 and 1,500 square feet in 1970. Two of your kids are going to need to share a bedroom, but that’s how people lived back in the day. There’s more to life than housing, of course, but I started there because that’s the largest item in a household budget. Durable goods like furniture, cars, and appliances have all become better and more affordable since the mid-1960s. That’s partially offset by rising prices for things like college tuition, child care, and health care. But in the 1960s, most young people didn’t go to college. The way health insurance works, you only need one worker in your family to get a job-based health plan. And of course, with your wife serving as a full-time homemaker, you don’t need to worry about child care expenses. The big thing is that, with a larger family, you literally have a bunch of mouths to feed. But the model here is to replicate how people actually lived in the mid-1960s, which is that they dined out much less frequently and also spent a much larger share of their total income on food. When I try to retrace this, it seems possible, but barely. I imagined doing this in Sacramento, to be near family. Suppose I make $80K pretax = $6.6K/month pretax = $5K per month posttax. A cheap 3-bedroom house on a nice-enough block is $2200 mortgage, assume $3K after property taxes etc. A cheap new car is $350/month. Food can be arbitrarily low if you’re willing to eat rice all the time, but let’s say $250/month. CoveredCalifornia offered my family of four healthcare for $600/month. So top four expenses take $4200/month of the $5000/month pretax income. I don’t know; seems tough. I would like to see a more thorough breakdown of an average 2026 vs. 1956 man’s likely budget. There are also some areas where it’s harder to separate genuine declines from rising expectations. Most people in the 1950s didn’t have health insurance. Was that because they accepted lower levels of health, or because medical care was cheaper, and easy enough to afford out-of-pocket? Probably some very complicated combination of both. And it might be impossible to get certain kinds of 1950s medical care today, i.e. a bed in a cheap low-quality shared hospital room. (some of the best discussion around this came from the response to Elizabeth Warren’s The Two-Income Trap, see eg Matt Bruenig here) Still, I find this tangential to the main point. Yes, a few conservatives complain that it’s hard to have a single-income family. But most vibecession complaints come from singles or dual-earner households! 4: What About Other Countries? … Dionysus writes: Did you know that China also has a vibecession? If even China can’t regulate social media heavily enough to prevent this phenomenon, how can any liberal society possibly hope to? The link goes to an NYT article, which includes quotes like: Using apps like RedNote and Douyin, people are reviving memories of the 2000s and the early 2010s with photos of daring outfits, upbeat songs and vintage TV commercials, all of which, in different ways, evoke a time in China that pulsed with optimism. “The music back then throbbed with exuberance, brimming with the sense that the future could only get brighter,” a middle-aged man said in a RedNote video. “Today’s lyrics begin with lines like, ‘We’re trying our best to survive.’” And The boom-time beauty meme is the latest expression of a Gen Z counterculture born of disillusionment, the recognition that they may be the first generation in half a century unlikely to surpass their parents’ standard of living, no matter how hard they try. Over the past five years, this quiet resistance has taken many forms. It began with “lying flat,” a refusal to join the rat race. Some chose to pursue the “run philosophy,” or emigrating in search of freedom and brighter prospects. Others declared themselves the “last generation,” vowing not to have children. Still others embraced “let it rot,” giving up on difficult goals rather than battling for uncertain rewards. To show they could care less about career prospects, many took to wearing “gross outfits” at work. This is especially crazy in China, where GDP per capita is now ten times what it was back during the “Boom Years” that everyone reminisces about. This might be the smoking gun that people’s economic beliefs are totally unmoored from how rich they are. The Chinese story has an obvious moral: people care about growth rate more than level. But even this doesn’t work for America - our Vibecession doesn’t correspond to a period of unusually low growth. machine_spirit writes: It’s interesting to compare it to Europe as the control group. Unlike the US, whose economy muddled through just fine during the last decade, we are currently experiencing a massive economic decline that could soon turn into a full-blown collapse. And yet, outside of debates about immigration or foreign policy especially regarding Ukraine you don’t really hear the same level of rancour about ‘things being bad’ in the local media. I’m surprised to hear this. I hear many economic complaints from Europeans, but I suppose this passes through my own American filter bubble which is incentivized to talk about economic hardship for its own American reasons. Golden Feather writes: I am an Italian currently living in the US. My main guesses would be: Right-wing parties control a supermajority of TV and print media. They have also been in the govt most of the time, which means they control the state TV and have an interest in presenting things as rosey. The much older population makes the internet less relevant for public sentiment. Even in the few years where they were at the opposition, they mostly focused on immigration and crime to rile up popular sentiment, I guess because the population is older, their voters even moreso, so they care more about that than about the economy

Inline links: writes, The $140,000 Poverty Line Is Very Silly, The Poverty Line Is Not $140,000, The Myth Of The $140,000 Poverty Line, The $140,000 Poverty Line Is Wrong, So Why Does It Feel Right?, Baumol’s cost disease, detailed, Why Do People Feel Like They’re Falling Behind?, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!E2rN!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff94f8851-17f5-4a98-b1f8-349f568d23bb_1024x800.png, You Can Afford A Tradlife, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ljt5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1b1176e8-f932-430a-b7e1-c699a5ecf15c_581x479.png, They say, lovely three-bedroom home in the East Arlington neighborhood for $2,020 a month, average size of a new single family home was 1,289 square feet in 1960 and 1,500 square feet in 1970, how people actually lived in the mid-1960s, dined out much less frequently, see eg Matt Bruenig here, writes, China also has a vibecession?, lying flat, run philosophy, gross outfits, writes, writes

Open Thread 415

January 05, 2026 · Original source

If we do get a crazy AI future, and the economy grows 100x (Industrial Revolution scale) or 1000000x (solar system colonization scale) in your lifetime, then you only need a little capital to remain as absolutely well-off as you are today. For example, after 100x growth, anyone with $25,000 in the stock market now would have $2.5 million.

IQ10 mentions across 10 issues

IQ is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 10 times across 10 issues between October 14, 2021 and December 03, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Nazis hated IQ research"; "small changes in average IQ"; "consider that IQ is mostly genetic and could be improved with eugenics". It most often appears alongside Sasha Gusev, Substack, US.

Article page: IQ
Mention count: 10
Issue count: 10
First seen: October 14, 2021
Last seen: December 03, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Links For October October 14, 2021
Slightly Against Underpopulation Worries August 04, 2022
Galton, Ehrlich, Buck May 15, 2023
Book Review: Deep Utopia October 17, 2024
How To Stop Worrying And Learn To Love Lynn's National IQ Estimates January 15, 2025
Highlights From The Comments On Lynn And IQ January 16, 2025
Missing Heritability: Much More Than You Wanted To Know June 26, 2025
Highlights From The Comments On Missing Heritability July 03, 2025
Suddenly, Trait-Based Embryo Selection July 31, 2025
The Good News Is That One Side Has Definitively Won The Missing Heritability Debate December 03, 2025

Sasha Gusev 4 shared issues
Substack 4 shared issues
US 4 shared issues
23andme 3 shared issues
Cremieux 3 shared issues

Source context

Links For October

October 14, 2021 · Original source

6: It’s hard to talk about IQ research without getting accused of something something Nazis. But here’s a claim that actually, Nazis hated IQ research, worrying that it would “be an instrument of Jewry to fortify its hegemony” and outshine more properly Aryan values like “practical intelligence” and “character”. Whenever someone tells you that they don’t believe in IQ, consider calling them out on perpetuating discredited Nazi ideology.

Inline links: Nazis hated IQ research

Slightly Against Underpopulation Worries

August 04, 2022 · Original source

There is some debate in the scientific community about whether this is happening, but as far as I can tell the people who claim it isn’t have no good refutation for the common sense argument that it has to be. The people who claim that it is make more sense, and have measured the effect in Iceland, an isolated population that it’s easy to measure genetic effects in. It seems to be a decline of about 0.3 IQ points per decade. If the American rate is close to the Icelandic one, this implies that the average US IQ in 2100 will be 97.5 by current standards, unless we get more mileage out of the Flynn Effect, in which case it might be higher (although the environmental Flynn Effect and genetic dysgenic effects seem to hit slightly different skills). I think societies are probably hyper-sensitive to small changes in average IQ, so I’m not excited about this, but I don’t expect it to directly be apocalyptic.

Inline links: the people who claim it isn’t, have measured the effect in Iceland, probably hyper-sensitive to small changes in average IQ

Galton, Ehrlich, Buck

May 15, 2023 · Original source

Beroe: You can’t assess idea how many benefits it does or doesn’t have, because your principle commits you to putting your fingers in your ears and saying “la la la I can’t hear you” whenever someone discusses the issue. Consider Garrett Jones’ hypothesis that most international differences - eg between developed and underdeveloped countries - are due to IQ. And consider that IQ is mostly genetic and could be improved with eugenics. Bringing all underdeveloped countries up to First World living standards would be the most valuable thing humanity has ever done. Or consider Greg Cochran’s hypothesis that Ashkenazi Jews have a 15-point genetic IQ advantage - there aren’t a lot of Jews starving or in prison. If you could lift everyone up fifteen points, you could come close to ending poverty even within developed countries. Obviously these hypotheses are controversial, but they’re controversial not because there’s a lot of evidence against them but because everything about genetics and society is controversial because of your policy of cutting off all lines of speculation that might lead to eugenics. I maintain that if we discussed these ideas openly, we might find that they held the key to ending global poverty, crime, and disease. Meanwhile, what has Islam given us? Pretty buildings, calligraphy, and hummus.

Inline links: Garrett Jones’ hypothesis, Greg Cochran’s hypothesis

Book Review: Deep Utopia

October 17, 2024 · Original source

No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.

How To Stop Worrying And Learn To Love Lynn's National IQ Estimates

January 15, 2025 · Original source

No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.

Highlights From The Comments On Lynn And IQ

January 16, 2025 · Original source

No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.

Missing Heritability: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

June 26, 2025 · Original source

No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.

Highlights From The Comments On Missing Heritability

July 03, 2025 · Original source

No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.

Suddenly, Trait-Based Embryo Selection

July 31, 2025 · Original source

No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.

The Good News Is That One Side Has Definitively Won The Missing Heritability Debate

December 03, 2025 · Original source

No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.

Ivy League9 mentions across 9 issues

Ivy League is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 9 times across 9 issues between February 25, 2021 and August 15, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Who usually go to Ivy League colleges"; "not as high as Ivy Leaguers, but still well above average"; "cover other top UK universities and then the Ivy League". It most often appears alongside Elon Musk, Harvard, New York Times.

Article page: Ivy League
Mention count: 9
Issue count: 9
First seen: February 25, 2021
Last seen: August 15, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

A Modest Proposal For Republicans: Use The Word "Class" February 25, 2021
Secrets Of The Great Families November 09, 2021
ACX Grants ++: The First Half February 03, 2022
Obscure Pregnancy Interventions: Much More Than You Wanted To Know April 13, 2022
Book Review: First Sixth Of Bobos In Paradise December 01, 2022
Why I'm Less Than Infinitely Hostile To Cryptocurrency December 08, 2022
Seems Like Targeting January 31, 2024
Suddenly, Trait-Based Embryo Selection July 31, 2025
Your Review: Dating Men In The Bay Area August 15, 2025

Elon Musk 4 shared issues
Harvard 3 shared issues
New York Times 3 shared issues
Silicon Valley 3 shared issues
Trump 3 shared issues

Source context

A Modest Proposal For Republicans: Use The Word "Class"

February 25, 2021 · Original source

Trump stood against the upper class. He might define them as: people who live in nice apartments in Manhattan or SF or DC and laugh under their breath if anybody comes from Akron or Tampa. Who eat Thai food and Ethiopian food and anything fusion, think they would gain 200 lbs if they ever stepped in a McDonalds, and won't even speak the name Chick-Fil-A. Who usually go to Ivy League colleges, though Amherst or Berkeley is acceptable if absolutely necessary. Who conspicuously love Broadway (especially Hamilton), LGBT, education, "expertise", mass transit, and foreign anything. They conspicuously hate NASCAR, wrestling, football, "fast food", SUVs, FOX, guns, the South, evangelicals, and reality TV. Who would never get married before age 25 and have cutesy pins about how cats are better than children. Who get jobs in journalism, academia, government, consulting, or anything else with no time-card where you never have to use your hands. Who all have exactly the same political and aesthetic opinions on everything, and think the noblest and most important task imaginable is to gatekeep information in ways that force everyone else to share those opinions too.

Secrets Of The Great Families

November 09, 2021 · Original source

Not only do politicians have higher IQs than the general population, but the higher you go in politics (from nominated, to city council, to mayor, to member of Parliament), the higher your IQ! Members of Parliament average 6.7 on this test, which I think equals IQ 115 - not as high as Ivy Leaguers, but still well above average. So the same intellectual skills that made Henri a great mathematician could have helped Raymond become Prime Minister.

We can formalize this objection using IQ, which is nice and quantifiable. Suppose Erasmus Darwin had a genius-level IQ of 150. And suppose that he tried very hard to marry a bright woman, and his screening mechanism was as successful as the Ivies or Oxbridge when they screen for bright people - in that case his wife would have the same IQ as an average Ivy Leaguer, maybe 130ish. We would predict their average child to have an IQ of 124. Why is the average lower than either parent? Regression to the mean - IQ is probably a combination of genes and random factors, and if your IQ is very high it means you probably have a combination of good genes and good random dice rolls, and even though you can pass on the good genes your kids will probably only get average dice rolls.

But 124 isn’t even as high as the average Ivy Leaguer. If that IQ 124 kid marries another IQ 130 spouse, things deteriorate less quickly - I think the regression process has selected for his 24 IQ point advantage over average being entirely genetic, so it’s not going to regress further. But his spouse’s IQ can still regress further, so they’ll probably end up with a kid who has an IQ somewhere in the high 110s or low 120s - for comparison, not much higher than the average Ashkenazi Jew. Maintaining a super-high-IQ family over several generations is really hard!

Inline links: the average Ashkenazi Jew

ACX Grants ++: The First Half

February 03, 2022 · Original source

#32: An App To Help Mentor Disadvantaged University Applicants In The UK UniReach is a charitable EdTech start-up that provides automated on-demand mentoring for disadvantaged university applicants in the UK. In the past 18 months, we’ve organised mentoring for 1,000s of applicants provided by 600+ undergrad volunteers. We currently focus on admissions to Oxford and Cambridge universities, where the global offer rate is 17%. Our offer rate is 3x that: 57%. We achieve this success via a year-long programme: national workshops to foster interest in applying (we don’t cherry pick), continuous on-demand mentoring, and more in-depth mentoring in peak application season. The missing piece in the puzzle is an app to reduce frictions in our core service and open new channels to engage and support applicants – right now we coordinate mentoring via email. We are looking to raise £10,000 / $15,000 / 0.4 BTC for the app. Our ambition is to cover other top UK universities and then the Ivy League. We’re well placed to do this, with an engaged mentor base (3% of all Oxford/Cambridge undergrads), partnerships with schools across the UK, plus relationships with influential figures in our current markets; we’ve also recently closed an acquisition of a smaller charity to support our growth. We would also value any calls/emails from individuals offering advice, particularly on software (or marketing, the other gap in our capabilities). All advice welcome via email: leo@unireach.co.uk / website: unireach.co.uk / Bitcoin: 38MNgr9svuU2Lc7XUhrUdab2GS8tscG9be

Obscure Pregnancy Interventions: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

April 13, 2022 · Original source

This graph is even more extreme than my statement above - I don’t know why the discrepancy - and seems to imply that eating 80 mg lycopene per day takes your kid from completely normal all the way to Ivy League material. So, this has to be false, right? I would be shocked if it wasn’t. The usual way for things like this to be false is as covert class markers: rich people eat more fruit, and also have lots of other advantages, and so their kids turn out smarter. But the study finds fruit is actually much more important than social class (the average rich person isn’t Ivy League material, but the average 80-mg-lycopene-eater is). If we believe this study, maybe being rich only contributes to success insofar as it makes you eat more fruit!

So, this has to be false, right? I would be shocked if it wasn’t. The usual way for things like this to be false is as covert class markers: rich people eat more fruit, and also have lots of other advantages, and so their kids turn out smarter. But the study finds fruit is actually much more important than social class (the average rich person isn’t Ivy League material, but the average 80-mg-lycopene-eater is). If we believe this study, maybe being rich only contributes to success insofar as it makes you eat more fruit!

Book Review: First Sixth Of Bobos In Paradise

December 01, 2022 · Original source

The heart of the WASP aristocracy was the Ivy League. I don’t think there are good statistics, but until the early 1900s many (most?) Ivy League students were WASP aristocrats from a few well-known families. Around 1920 the Jews started doing really well on standardized tests, and the Ivies suspended standardized tests in favor of “holistic admissions” to keep them out and preserve the WASPishness of the elite. All the sons (and later, daughters) of the WASPs met each other in college, played lacrosse together, and forged the sort of bonds that make a well-connected and self-aware aristocracy.

In 1952, most freshmen at Harvard were products of . . . the prep schools of New England (Andover and Exeter alone contributed 10% of the class), the East side of Manhattan, the Main Line of Philadelphia, Shaker Heights in Ohio, the Gold Coast of Chicago, Grosse Pointe of Detroit, Nob Hill in San Francisco, and so on. Two-thirds of all applicants were admitted. Applicants whose fathers had gone to Harvard had a 90% admission rate. The average verbal SAT score for the incoming men was 583, good but not stratospheric. The average score across the Ivy League was closer to 500 at the time.

The Rise And Fall Of Culture Wars: I previously attributed secular changes in American culture to something like the barberpole theory of fashion: being right-wing was fashionable in the early 20th century. Then it became the symbol of a stodgy uncool establishment. By the 1960s, being a progressive hippie was fashionable. Today, being a progressive hippie seems like the symbol of a stodgy uncool establishment. And right on track, rebellious young people are becoming “alt-right”, a group with some suspicious similarities to the hippies (distrust authority, believe conspiracy theories, freak out over processed food, adopt paganism and weird spirituality, etc). So I was wondering if the right and left poles might just flip, over and over, in a long-term secular cycle. Brooks says that’s not what happened at all, and the 1950s-to-60s flip was a one-time event caused by a change in Ivy League admissions. If true, tragic news for today’s “Dimes Square” set.

Inline links: The Rise And Fall Of Culture Wars, the barberpole theory of fashion

Why I'm Less Than Infinitely Hostile To Cryptocurrency

December 08, 2022 · Original source

This isn’t so different from other fields like education. There are 8 Ivy League schools in the US, 400 high-quality research universities, and about 1,000 fraudulent diploma mills. Higher education is full of scams! If you’re a knowledgeable person following a normal educational track, you’ll probably be fine. If you click on spam emails that say “GET A PHD IN TWO WEEKS WITH THE UNIVERSITY OF PHEONIX” and wire them your life savings, you won’t be fine. I’m not blaming the scamees here - they’re usually poor people who lack the tacit knowledge that the upper class use to navigate the education system. But if you do have that tacit knowledge, and you stick to doing things the slow way without taking any too-good-to-be-true deals, you don't have to worry about scams that much. This is also how I feel about crypto4.

Inline links: 400, 1,000, 4

Seems Like Targeting

January 31, 2024 · Original source

Neri Oxman was a Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, but nobody in history has ever cared about Media Arts and Sciences. Certainly they don’t care about it enough that plagiarism in a fifteen-year-old paper by a Professor of Media Arts and Sciences should be front-page news (though see here for claims that there were many worse things wrong with Oxman’s paper). Everyone understands that they’re going after Oxman because she’s the wife of Bill Ackman, the bigshot investor who led the crusade against Gay. The message is clear: go after an important Ivy League leader, and we’ll go after your family.

Inline links: see here for claims

Suddenly, Trait-Based Embryo Selection

July 31, 2025 · Original source

You’re okay using expected utility calculations where a 50% chance of preventing X is half as good as fully preventing X. …then I’ll go out on a limb and say yeah, obviously it’s worth it. Consider e.g. Genomic Prediction, which costs $3,250 for five embryos and claims to lower absolute risk of Type 2 diabetes by 12%. That implies that not getting Type 2 diabetes is worth $27,000. Ask anybody dealing with regular insulin injections (let alone limb amputations) whether it would be worth $27,000 to wave a magic wand and not have Type 2 diabetes! It’s not a hard question! And that’s just one of a dozen conditions you can lower the risk for! Other ones, like not getting breast cancer, might be so valuable that it’s hard to even attach numbers! (but maybe the low time discount rate is a mistake? Suppose you invest the $3,250 in an index fund that makes 7% over inflation, then give it to your future child when they turn 45 (average age of type 2 diabetes diagnoses). Now it’s worth $75,000. Is this the “true” cost of the intervention? Does it matter that this counterfactual is fake and most people don’t do this?) What about IQ? Six extra IQ points (Herasight’s estimate with five embryos) is about a quarter of the gap between the average person and the average Ivy League student. The benefits of intelligence are hard to quantify, but it’s been shown to have probably-causal positive effects on income, mortality, and achievement. Probably the income effects alone make up for the cost of intervention - again assuming total parent-child altruism and low discount rate8. So if we accept all of these claims and assumptions, the choice seems obvious. It’s probably even obvious for governments to pay for all citizens to get these, given how much they’d save on health care costs. In Practice, It’s Complicated Critics have raised both scientific and ethical objections to polygenic embryo screening. Most significantly, it’s been condemned by various bodies including the Society For Psychiatric Genetics, the European Society of Human Genetics, and the Behavioral Genetics Society. Their statements are . . . not good. They tend towards vague language about how people are more than just their genes, or how no genetic test can be perfect, or how embryo screening is not exactly the same thing as some other form of screening which has a longer history and more proponents. “Although in general higher scores mean you are more likely to have a condition, many healthy people will have high scores; others might develop the condition even with a low score”, says the Society for Psychiatric Genetics, as if they have just blown the lid off some dastardly conspiracy. “Screening embryos for psychiatric conditions may increase stigma surrounding these diagnoses”, they continue - an objection which, taken seriously, could be used to ban every form of medical treatment. We will mostly ignore these people and try to imagine the objections that mildly competent critics might raise, some of which will coincidentally overlap with the content of the non-hypothetical statements. Scientific Objection: Efficacy Are we sure this works at all? A typical polygenic score is created by collecting thousands or millions of adult genomes, then matching genetic information with surveys about who has the trait/condition of interest. Reputable studies then test these scores on holdout samples - adults who were not used to make the score, to see if they still accurately predict who has the trait/condition. Polygenic embryo selection depends on an assumption that the scores which work in these kinds of retrospective tests will also work prospectively on embryos. This assumption hasn’t been formally proven in studies (which would require years to decades to conduct), but seems common-sensical. The strongest challenge to the application of polygenic scores for embryo selection comes from a recent body of research showing that most scores combine causal genetic effects with population stratification, and therefore can be expected to lose much of their predictive power when comparing two members of the same family (e.g. two embryos from the same couple). There is increasing agreement in the field that unless scores are validated within families, headline results like “decreases risk of X by Y%” will be large overestimates. When I talked to company representatives, they all said that they took accuracy extremely seriously and had various white papers and journal articles where anyone could double-check their methodology. But I attended an industry conference a few months ago, and the gossip level was comparable to a high school cafeteria (minus the sex rumors - most of the attendees were having their own kids via IVF). Everyone had some story about someone being careless or fudging their numbers. Some of the conflicts broke out into the open on Wednesday, when Herasight left stealth and published a white paper and associated blog post. They criticize Genomic Prediction for reporting between-family rather than within family results9, and Orchid for smuggling a term for age into their Alzheimer’s predictor (unsurprisingly, this makes it work better). We’ll get to their accusations against Nucleus below. Note that this was recent enough that competitors haven’t had time to respond or to air their own criticisms of Herasight; if this happens, I’ll try to keep you updated. Maybe this is cope, but my optimistic perspective is that this bounds the damage. This obviously isn’t a field capable of maintaining a conspiracy of silence. But aside from the Nucleus allegations, the complaints aren’t existential. Maybe some numbers are too high, maybe some predictors are slightly rigged. But the more we learn about these admittedly concerning problems, the more we can hope that we’d have heard about it if nothing worked at all. Overall my strongest opinion on the scientific criticisms is: Authorities on all sides have cited Alex Young10 as an authority on how polygenic scores can be confounded or misleading.

Inline links: income, mortality, achievement, 8, Society For Psychiatric Genetics, European Society of Human Genetics, Behavioral Genetics Society, white paper, blog post, 9, 10

Your Review: Dating Men In The Bay Area

August 15, 2025 · Original source

This would be demanding a reward for meeting the bare minimum requirements, and that would make you gross and entitled. This is the new guidance we’re tossing at young men. It’s the equivalent of taking away GPS from a driver and handing them a map scrawled by a half-blind cartographer tripping on acid. The obvious result is getting disastrously lost; the only question is which type of lostness will impact a man. III. Patterns Within the Pain Over the years, I’ve developed mental categories for the varieties of lostness men are faced with. Each one comes with its own unique troubles that stymie the health of men and the success of their relationships. There is no science behind my categories; they are merely my attempt to find patterns within the misery of others. Their boundaries are fuzzy, so men may belong to multiple categories, or may transition from one to another. I find it impossible to review dating in the Bay Area without utilizing these categories. My experiences with each category are wildly different; some cause me to walk away from a date feeling sad, some scared, some hopeful. Below, I offer a description of five of the most common categories I’ve encountered, the paths that lead to these particular forms of lostness, and what happens to men who fall into these categories. I also offer my review of dating men from each category and discuss how their lostness impacts relationships. I hope my experiences can be enlightening to individuals who may find themselves trapped in these categories; sometimes a third-party viewpoint can be helpful for finding yourself. I also hope to provide some insight for how women navigate dating and what red and green flags we may be picking up on. (This, of course, is merely anecdata and should be taken with a massive grain of salt.) But more importantly, I hope this framework can help people to have more empathy for men who fall into these categories. The public commons are filled with lamenting about “floundering,” “immature,” “selfish,” “hateful” men who are “toxic to society.” While much of the concern is deserved, channeling it into spite and disgust toward individuals is a waste of energy. These men did not wake up one day and intentionally decide to be filled with anger, anxiety, and apathy toward society; society failed them, and when they tried to point this out, their concerns were shrugged off. Our broken system for raising young men deserves spite and disgust; the individuals trapped in that system deserve empathy and help. I hope this framework can help to shift conversations about these lost men toward finding solutions, rather than blaming young men for their troubles. So without further ado, I present my categories of lostness. IV. The Categories of Lostness THE MAN WHO IS NOT The Man Who Is Not isn’t the sort of person you’d expect to get lost, at least not if you knew him when he was young. He was a pretty normal kid with a pretty normal childhood. Good friends, decent family, stable home life. Yeah, there were a few rough spots, but who didn’t have those? He’s not exactly a stand-out success, but he gets good enough grades that get him into a good enough college. He’s reluctant to go; he doesn’t enjoy school all that much. But his parents push him to get a degree, and after he arrives, he decides college life isn’t half bad–he makes some friends, dates a couple girls casually, and enjoys plenty of parties. The worst stressor seems to be the nagging question of his degree concentration and what career he’s going to pursue. He’s changed his mind three times already, unsure what he really wants from his life, and his guidance counselor and parents are starting to lose their patience. He finally settles on Economics. It’s certainly not his passion, but he’s always been good at math, and this seems like a decent way to make money from that talent. He still has no idea what he wants from life, but at least now he’ll have time and resources to figure it out. He graduates with his bachelors and takes a job as a data analyst at a big bank in the city. He’s excited; he’s been promised by mentors and Hollywood and Instagram that this is going to be a magical time of his life, full of new adventures and self-discovery. What he finds isn’t nearly so exciting. Work is boring and draining, consisting of the same tasks every day with a workload that grows ever larger, and he has zero emotional attachment to the end product. He quickly starts to suspect he chose the wrong major, or maybe the wrong job, although mentors shrug off his concerns. Work isn’t supposed to be fun, they say. Get used to it. It’s not uplifting advice, to say the least. He tries to distract himself from his miserable job with his social life, but it’s not as easy as he expected. All his college friends moved to different cities, and their texts grow increasingly rare. The city is huge, filled with hundreds of thousands of people, but it feels like they're a swarm of NPCs. Few people talk to him unless he approaches first, and the dialogue is always transactional. He would like to buy a cup of coffee. They would like to know where the bus stop is. He wants to sign up for a gym membership. Sometimes he tries to steer the conversations to more personal topics, and he manages to get a few phone numbers and promises to hang out sometime. But when he texts them, they never reply. He’s lonely. He doesn’t like admitting it, not even to himself, because it feels pathetic. After all, there’s nothing wrong with him. He’s a perfectly pleasant individual, and people have said he’s smart and funny, and he’s never struggled to make friends in the past. Yet the thousands and thousands of people who surround him couldn’t care less about his existence, and their apathy begins to grow a heavy lump of despair within him. He consults the internet, and Reddit tells him to find a community. This seems like solid advice, so he tries to form stronger relationships with his coworkers. After all, work is the closest replacement he has to the structured community he had at college. Back in school, being trapped on campus together just naturally led to friendships and relationships, and he assumes the same will happen at work. He’s wrong. People don't have time to chat during the day, and they don’t want to hang out after work. They have partners and families and hobbies to get to, and besides, what happens if they have a falling out? That would make office interactions weird. The office is a place for friendliness, but not friends, and certainly not romantic relationships. The rejection stings, but he’s not about to give up. He joins a running club and a book club and starts attending group classes at his local gym. He’s not really sure if he enjoys any of these activities, but they seem like good ways to meet people and join new communities. As the weeks tick past, people start to remember his name, and he gets added to some group chats for scheduling activities. Suddenly, his calendar is full of events, and his evenings are no longer an endless churn of YouTube and video game binges. He feels better. Still not great, exactly, but the despair has begun to recede, and he can breathe without feeling the primal fear of being alone and isolated. There’s still something missing; he still goes to work wondering why the hell he’s there and leaves wondering what the hell he’s achieved, and he has no idea what he’s trying to do with his life. But he knows he’s still young and is pretty sure there’s still time to figure it out. A life crisis occurs. It's small, but something he’d appreciate some support through. He reaches out to a few of his new friends, and they offer condolences, but none of them have time to meet up. He gets one friend to agree to a phone call, but he’s barely done explaining the issue before she insists she’s “not really sure she can help” and suggests he maybe talks to a therapist. The dismissal comes as a shock. His old friends would have made time for him and carefully listened and offered advice. It’s not like he’s asking a huge favor; this is basic friendship stuff. What kind of friends refuse to give such basic forms of help? A cold, creeping reality dawns on him: friends wouldn’t do that. Those “communities” he’s joined are just loose groups of acquaintances who enjoy the same activities. He’s never had the opportunity to have deep, emotionally-bonding discussions with any members, and that’s how they like it. After all, true communities come with effort and commitment, and who has time for that these days? His new “friends” are nothing of the sort. For them to be friends, they'd have to actually know him. And they don't. They know Running Club Him and Book Club Him and Gym Him, but none of them understands the whole of him. He starts to question whether that version of himself even exists. After all, humans are social creatures, and if you don’t have a community or a partner or a purpose, can you even call yourself a whole person? Logically, he knows he is, but it doesn’t feel like it. There’s a growing void in his soul, an absence that chokes the breath from his chest. It’s odd that a void could weigh anything, but it seems to be a black hole sucking in his emotions, condensing them in a pit of gravity until his limbs struggle to carry the weight. During a soulless work icebreaker, someone asks him how he’d describe himself. He stutters out a short answer that sounds decent enough, but he realizes he’s not sure what the honest answer is. He’s smart, he supposes, although his recent performance at work doesn’t prove it. He used to consider himself funny, but jokes don’t come easily these days. He’d never dare to say it out-loud, but the truth is he’d describe himself as sad and lost and alone and frankly rather scared, like some sort of abandoned child. It’s pathetic, and he knows it. After all, he’s not a child; he’s a grown man. Or is he? He doesn’t fit the old-fashioned definition of manhood offered by the right, nor does he fit the modern definition offered by polite society, which is basically just a stereotypical woman with a beard and muscle. He doesn’t feel like a grown man, but he doesn't feel like anything at all. He feels empty, devoid of a core identity, and uncertain how to plug that hole. He may not know what he is, but he knows what he is not: not happy. Not whole. Not satisfied. Not purposeful. Not connected. Not loved. There seems to be an obvious solution to at least the last problem: he can get another girlfriend. He hasn’t had one since college, and that was a few years ago, but he’s certain he can find another one. A girlfriend is guaranteed to offer him love and support. That’s the entire point of having a romantic relationship, after all. But dating isn’t easy in the Bay Area. The apps are soul-crushing, his jadedness and bitterness growing with each swipe and conversation with a bot. He manages to land a few dates, but they all seem to focus on the same set of questions: what are your passions? What are your friends like? What do you want from your future? It feels like a stomach-churning interview, and the judgemental frowns from the women make it clear he didn’t pass. He starts to dread dates when he lands them, and begins to cancel them last-minute, unable to face the anxiety and rejection they lead to. He feels increasingly desperate with each day that passes. Desperation isn’t attractive, and he knows it, but he’s not sure how to tamp down the emotion. The void is consuming him; every day he can feel it crushing more of his soul. Yet no one seems even the slightest bit interested in helping him free himself from its grip. As soon as he tries to express his feelings to anyone, they react as if he’s diseased, immediately losing interest in him. Men are supposed to be strong and uplift others, not complain and demand attention for themselves. Maybe he is diseased. He’s pretty sure he’s suffering from depression at this point, and the stomach-churning anxiety and dread that frequently fill him don’t seem normal. He brings it up with his doctor and gets referred to a therapist. He’s reluctant to go—it seems to be an admission of his weakness. But he’s desperate for someone to listen to him, so he decides to give it a try. It turns out the therapist doesn’t have any interest in listening to him, either. She seems preoccupied with reminding him of his “luck” and “privilege” and insisting that he needs to use it to better his life. He knows she has a valid point; he’s a straight, educated male. He has privileges in society that others would risk their life for. Logically, it would make sense to be happy and grateful, not sad and upset. Yet the void has no respect for logic; rather than tempering his pain, the rationality merely adds a layer of self-disgust onto the despair. There are so many who suffer more than him, yet he can barely shoulder this burden. He tries repeatedly to explain the pitiful truth to the therapist: he can’t help himself. He can’t. He’s tried over and over again, and it doesn’t work. He remains lost, and society continues to not care. The therapist insists he’s not trying hard enough. Her advice is baffling. Exactly what is he supposed to be trying to do? What steps does he need to take to feel whole again? What actions are needed so he can know who he is, and what his purpose is, and convince people that he matters? The therapist explains that only he can answer those questions. The whole thing feels like a cruel joke. His performance continues to slip at work, until one day he’s let go. A couple coworkers send a farewell email, but most don’t seem to even notice his departure. He knows he should start applying to other jobs, but he’s too tired. Tired of the loneliness, of the existential dread, of the rejection, of being reminded how “privileged” he is to exist as this broken shadow of a human being. The void has consumed him alive, and there seems to be no escape. He lets himself go–doesn’t shower as much, stops going to the gym and running club and book club. Some small part of him hopes this will trigger sympathy and cause people to reach out. Instead, it has the opposite effect. He transforms from barely noticeable to completely invisible. He is a ghost now, a haunted remnant of a human, yet the only person who cares is himself. And, increasingly, even that isn't true. He doesn’t want to be invisible anymore. He doesn’t want to be ignored and rejected. He doesn’t want to be tired and scared and lonely and bitter and lost. He doesn’t want to be. And the world doesn't give a single fuck. Dating a Man Who Is Not: It’s rare to actually go on a date with a man in this category. More often I find them glancing at me, only to abruptly look away when I try to meet their eyes. Attempts at conversing with them are usually met with hollow replies and an exhausted sense of suspicion. On the rare instances I’ve ended up on dates with these men, it seems they’ve already used up all their hope and energy to schedule and arrive to the date. By the time we actually sit down for coffee, they’ve shriveled back into a ghost, providing half-hearted answers to questions about themselves. When they do talk freely, it’s usually a rant. Most of them seem to realize ranting isn’t ideal behavior on a first date, but they’re clearly desperate for someone, anyone, to listen to their pain. Yeah, it’s going to scare away the woman, but she’s not going to stick around, anyway. No one ever does. At least that’s what the void tells them, and there’s nothing I could say to sway this opinion. Hypothetically, there might be something I could do–I could enter into a relationship with him and provide the love and support he desperately craves, giving him the strength he needs to discover his purpose in life. Yet realistically, this is a fantasy. A single person can rarely solve issues this severe; it requires the combined strength of an entire community to drag a soul back from such extreme depths. Any attempt at a romantic relationship would crumble under the weight of the void, and only leave the man feeling more hopeless. The best I can do for these men is recommend they join communities where genuine emotional bonds can be forged. These still exist, although they’re frighteningly hard to find in modern society. I’ve been lucky enough to join several, and it’s startling how many people have the same story: feeling depressed and isolated and purposeless, and suddenly feeling like they’re alive for the first time in years once they’ve been embraced into the community. Therapy and guided self-improvement are also helpful, of course. But it has to be the right therapist, and those seem surprisingly rare. I’ve heard some truly jaw-dropping stories about experiences with therapists, and I feel concern for the men who haven’t heard of “therapist shopping” and don’t realize it can take trial and error to find compatible and competent help. Dates with these men leave me worried. Not for myself, but for these sullen ghosts who seem on the verge of giving up. There’s so much obvious potential within them, yet society offers them so few ladders to climb back from the pit of depression they’ve fallen into. When those ladders do exist, they're often missing rungs or spontaneously snap when men put their full weight on them. We need more resources for these men, and even more importantly, we need better maps for them, so they don’t lose themselves to depression in the first place. THE MAN WITH A PLAN The Man With a Plan is the inverted twin of the Man Who Is Not. Rather than struggling to figure out what he wants, he knows exactly what his goals are: he’s going to get good grades, which get him into a good school, which earns him a good job, which finances a good house in a good neighborhood and attracts a good spouse who provides good kids. He knows this is what he wants, because it is the creed that has been repeated to him since he was in elementary school. He does not know who he should be; his copy of the map is just as butchered as any other. But he knows what he needs to do, and that is what matters. After all, we’re merely the sum of our actions, right? Life is smooth sailing for him. His mentors are right–hard work pays off, and once he graduates with that valuable degree, he lands an excellent job in exactly the field his parents always encouraged him to pursue. The money is great, and soon so is his apartment and his car. Everything seems to be falling into place. He downloads a dating app and gets a fair amount of matches, one of whom turns into his girlfriend. She’s pretty, and successful, and shares his goals of settling down in a good neighborhood to have some kids. His parents are thrilled. All their hard work has paid off, just as they expected. He knows he should also be thrilled, too, but he’s not. There’s a vague sense of unease within him. It’s haunted him since he was young, sometimes dragging his thoughts to depressed and anxious places, although he always assumed it was because he just hadn’t completed all the steps in the plan. His work was unfinished, and thus so was he. Yet as he checks off more and more boxes on the list of tasks to attain a good life, that feeling seems to be growing in strength, not decreasing. He shrugs it off, reassuring himself that it’s just work stress that’s making him overthink things. Everything in his life is good. There’s no reasonable cause for despair, so he just needs to let those thoughts go. Years pass, and he works hard to juggle work and his romantic relationship and his friends, although his friends seem to take less time these days. They’re getting married, having kids, and becoming too busy to hang out. When they do get together, it’s usually for an activity–an escape room, a movie night, karaoke. Once the event completes, people scurry off to other obligations, leaving little time for deep conversations. But he has his girlfriend, at least. She’s just as pretty and smart and ambitious as ever. She’s also getting increasingly anxious for a ring, dropping hints that eventually start to sound more like demands. This should excite him, but instead it just stirs the formless dread within him. He chastises himself for it–he needs to grow up and learn to commit. He’s too old to be yearning for the life of a bachelor. As they say, the grass is always greener on the other side. One night, as they lay in bed, his girlfriend asks him how many kids he wants. He realizes that he doesn’t know. And actually, now that he thinks about it, he’s not even sure if he wants kids. They scream a lot, and they make all sorts of noxious odors and messes, and saddling himself to a dependent for eighteen years seems rather terrifying. The thoughts come to him unbidden, and he doesn’t dare to voice them. Two kids. That’s what he tells his girlfriend, and she seems pleased enough with this answer. Yet he can’t shake the dread from his mind. The part of his mind that those fears escaped from seems to have been a pandora’s box. Now that it’s open, he can’t close it, and the dread continues to grow. He doesn't want to move to the suburbs; he knows there are better homes and schools there, but he enjoys the city. He’s not sure he wants his upcoming promotion to manager; yeah, his salary will increase, but he hates corporate politics. He doesn’t actually like doing escape rooms; he desperately misses the days of hanging out with his friends and getting tipsy and maybe a little high, and talking endlessly until the sun begins to rise. And his girlfriend… when he really thinks about it, there’s little in common between them except the same checklist of goals. She’s a wonderful partner, but is she a wonderful partner for him? He doesn’t know. For so long, he’s convinced himself that people are just a sum of their actions, and if he just has a solid plan, he’s going to be a good person with a good life. Now he realizes that’s a lie. Yes, actions matter, but so do feelings. And he’s spent his entire adult life actively repressing his feelings, tamping them down in a desperate attempt to follow the plan and gain happiness. But it’s been a fool’s errand; he’s followed the plan, and it’s only led to existential dread. He wants to discuss these things with his friends, but he realizes they hardly know him anymore, because he hardly knows himself. He lost himself somewhere in the endless march of the plan, and he begins to wonder if he’s ever fully existed at all. He’s followed his parent’s biddings ever since he was a young child, and chastised himself for any desire he’s ever had that doesn’t fit into the cookie-cutter ideal of capitalistic success. His girlfriend says he’s been acting odd lately, cold and distant. He apologizes, and then he tells her that he likes painting. She probably doesn’t know that, because she’s never seen him do it, because the last time he painted was during art class in high school. He was good at it, and he loved it. It made him feel alive. His teacher suggested he could become a professional someday, but he’d immediately rejected the idea, knowing the life of a starving artist wasn’t a good plan. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe he should have embraced that life. Maybe he’d be happier, and wouldn’t wake up every morning with crushing dread at the thought of going to work. His girlfriend says they should sign up for some wine-and-paint nights. He says they should break up. He quits his job, too. He hates it; it consumes his time and sucks at his soul, leaving behind a robotic husk. He’s done with that bullshit. Done. His friends suggest he’s having a mental breakdown and needs help. It confirms his suspicions: they don’t know him at all. If they did, they would see that he is helping himself. He’s finally taking the time to find and understand himself, to discover his purpose. For a few weeks, he’s elated and excited to be on this new journey. But then the existential dread begins to creep back in. He’s never really done anything without a plan. And he’s still not entirely sure what he’s trying to accomplish; he knows he wants to “find himself,” but he’s unclear on what that requires, and the self-help books he consumes seem to have muddled and contradictory answers. He starts painting again, taking up classes at a local studio, but his skill level is that of a fourteen-year-old with potential. He hasn’t practiced in two decades, and his work is weak compared to most other artists his age. He’s not used to being the least skilled person in the room. His prior plan never allowed that as a possibility, and the sense of failure is disorientating. He also has no idea what he’s going to do with his art. He wants to make a plan, but also balks at the idea of trapping himself in yet another series of checkboxes. He signs up to see a therapist, and she assures him that he just needs to find his happiness, but this feels like picking out a gift for someone he’s never met. How is he supposed to know what makes him happy, if he’s never been given the chance to figure out who he even is? He doom scrolls on social media, wincing at the posts about people’s deep passion for their jobs and blazing love for their significant other. Part of him feels disgusted by what he perceives as disingenuity; after all, he was making similar posts just a year ago, and it was all a facade. But another part of him feels a cold wave of fear. What if all those other people aren’t faking it? What if he’s just broken, and unable to feel the same happiness and fulfillment that others experience? He feels empty. His unknown future starts to feel like a crushing concern, rather than an exciting adventure. His few remaining friends suggest that maybe he should try to get back together with his girlfriend, maybe try to piece together his old life. It’s not too late, they assure him. But he doesn’t want that. He misses sex and cuddling and having someone to tell about his day, but he doesn’t miss her. It’s probably because he’s fundamentally broken, and she deserves better than him. And as for his job, he can’t bring himself to possibly go back, despite his rapidly dwindling bank account. He turns to the dating world, hoping maybe finding a solid partner will help him solve his brokenness. Yet he seems to keep attracting women with similar forms of emptiness within them, and a void that joins with a void is still just as empty. But he’s not going to give up. He has to find someone, something to give him purpose. Otherwise, his whole life and all his work and all his pain has been pointless. And he’s not sure he could deal with that outcome. Dating a Man With a Plan: In my experience, Men with Plans are the most common form of lost men in the Bay Area. I feel like half the men I go on dates with fit into this category to some degree. These men also tend to be intensely attracted to me, or rather, to my lack of a conventional plan. I’ve stumbled through a highly unusual path, somehow getting lucky enough to gain a solid understanding of myself, pursue my passions, earn a solid living, and enjoy a happy life along the way. My story is like crack to them. They tell me they want to be more like me; they insist they want to see more of me. There seems to be a mistaken belief that they can absorb my personality through osmosis if they date me, absolving themselves of the requirement to figure out their own path and personality. It’s a sad misunderstanding of how it all works. My unconventional life isn’t the result of zany choices and the advice contained in self-help books; it’s the result of an intensely rocky childhood I almost didn’t survive. I don’t have a “cure” for these men and their lack of self-identity. I’ve figured out myself, found my community, and discovered my path, but I can’t do the same for them. Once they figure this out, they almost immediately lose interest in me. Which is for the best, as I struggle to feel romantic attraction toward men in this category. It’s hard to love someone if they don’t even understand themselves well enough to know what’s lovable. The good news is that this category seems to be the easiest for men to break free from. If they’re determined not to give up, and willing to realize that the right woman isn’t going to fix their issues, they can create a happy life of their own. They’ll often stumble around for a while–sometimes months, sometimes years–but they’ll eventually find a solid community and a purpose within it. Their brain is already programmed to follow plans and good habits, so as soon as they figure out a new map for themselves, the rest becomes easy. The process of figuring out a new plan can be rocky, though. I won’t sugar-coat that bit. The reality is that a good community is hard to find, and purpose often comes from a certain amount of suffering. Some men never manage to climb out of this category and adopt the hopeless lostness of a Man Who Is Not. But with the right support, most can escape to a bright future. THE MAN WHO PROVIDES Meet a Man Who Provides in person, and he’s often interesting and intellectually stimulating, an immediate “yes” when he asks for a date. His online profile features photos from international adventures, flashy job titles like “CEO” and “Senior Director,” and loving moments caught with his friends at Burning Man. The Man who Provides kept hold of one tattered remnant of the old map to manhood: the part that states men must provide resources. This is a vital piece, one that has guided men for thousands of years, and it has survived the great purge of manhood. Sure, people are more likely to point out that it is flawed and unfair, but the reality is that men are still expected to be breadwinners. (If you doubt this, just ask any “stay at home dad” about the hostility they’ve received for their role.) The Man who Provides takes this single piece of the map and makes it his entire identity. Much like the Man With a Plan, he takes his education and career seriously. But he doesn’t strive for a good education and career; he wants the best. In order to provide the most resources, he needs to earn as much success as possible, and he’s willing to put in the work to do it. Tiger parents are excellent at creating Men Who Provide. From a young age, the message is clear: your worth is equivalent to your ability to provide, and providing requires consistent success. Other Men Who Provide stumble into the obsession with success by themselves. Often these men are neurodivergent to some degree–ADHD, autistic, hyper-intelligent, or just otherwise “different.” They exasperate and confuse others, and are the subject of bullying by both peers and authority figures. Success is an escape valve for these men; it earns them praise their personality never receives. Before long, it becomes a costume, a mask slipped over their personality to ward off apathy or disdain. The Man Who Provides graduates at the top of his class and lands a job at a top company, which doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone who knows him. It’s also not a surprise when he leaves the job to found his own company, which is sure to be a success. Despite his insane work hours, the Man Who Provides somehow manages to accomplish a vast amount of extra-curricular activities as well. He travels the world, speaking of it the same way most people speak of triathlons. The globe is not a tantalizing opportunity, but rather a challenge meant to be vanquished; he knows precisely how many countries he’s been to and how many he “has left.” He’s fond of drugs and brags of the enlightenment he’s found in acid and mushrooms. The amount of ketamine he consumes makes some question exactly why he’s so hell bent on dissociating from his enlightened world, but most are simply impressed by the variety of substances he’s sampled. Those “friends” in his Burning Man photos were from his startup incubator, and he hasn’t spoken to any of them in ten months. He misses speaking with them, if he’s honest with himself, but he worries they’d drag him down. Their startups haven’t been as successful as his, and he’s convinced it’s because of their attitudes and lack of work ethic. As for dating? Well, a partner is yet another thing to be optimized, of course. They must match or exceed his quality level, and a woman’s quality revolves around their job title and academic degrees. His dating life is tumultuous, to say the least. He goes through periods of casually dating many women, proving his desirability to those around him. Then he’ll enter a serious relationship, with emphasis on serious. His time is valuable, so this relationship had better not waste it. The relationship will seem perfect at first–two successful, powerful, passionate people combining forces! What could possibly stand in their way? The answer: themselves. Their relationship quickly implodes, as it turns out two individuals hyper-focused on their personal success tend to be terrible at a group activity such as dating. Back to the carousel of casual dating he goes, carrying stories of his ex who just “couldn’t match his intensity” and “resented his success.” Then into another serious relationship, this time with someone with a bit less self-esteem and a determination to prove her worth to this intimidatingly accomplished man. The relationship lasts longer this time around, a year, maybe two. Then it implodes just as violently, with the woman insisting he was a manipulative and neglectful partner. He’s baffled by the claims; she’s the one who was always offering to support his success! It’s not like he made her do anything. And besides, everything he did was for the both of them. He just wanted to provide. Back to the carousel of casual dating he goes, still carrying the hope of finding The One, a woman to complete him, to prove to the world that he’s an attractive, successful man. All the while, a void grows in his chest. Every day, he seems to wake up with less energy and more dread. A friend hints that he’s burning out, and this insinuation panics him, so he runs off to the Amazon to do some ayahuasca about it. But the travel and drugs no longer invigorates him in the same way, and it’s beginning to truly worry him. He refuses to focus on these emotions, though. Emotions make him illogical and weak, and he needs to be strong and decisive. He’ll keep his focus on his company’s success, making sure that he can continue to provide and prove his worth. And in the meantime, he’ll keep searching for his perfect match to reap the rewards of his success and reassure him that he’s truly an excellent provider. It’s a small pool of women who meet his quality bar, but he’ll eventually find The One. He knows it. After all, when he puts his mind to something, he always succeeds. Dating a Man Who Provides: Two words sum up dates with these men: pity and frustration. These dates generally begin with these men stating that their time is quite limited, hinting that they’ve made quite the sacrifice to offer some of it to you. Things only go downhill from there, with the entire affair feeling like an intense job interview. I have zero interest in passing these interviews, which creates frustration in these men. I’ve wasted their precious time, and they’ve wasted mine. They generally end the date quite quickly, convinced that I have no hope of clearing their quality bar. Yet they have no hope of clearing mine. A strong sense of self-identity is a requirement for anyone I date, and these men have never been given the chance to develop one outside of “founder” or “Ivy Leaguer” or “Forbes 30 Under 30.” This leaves their identity hopelessly precarious and revolving around their immediate success. A bad day at work or a failed business deal can spell weeks of brooding and self-loathing. You never quite know what version of the man may appear; he could be euphoric from his latest product launch, or despondent and moody from a meeting that went wrong. There’s little I can do to address the issues faced by Men Who Provide. Try to talk them out of focusing so much on standard capitalistic forms of achievement, and they’ll often accuse you of being jealous and sabotaging their success. Point out their clear misery, and they’ll insist “there’s no gain without pain,” and if they can just achieve a constantly moving goalpost, they’ll finally be happy. These men generally only shake off this mentality after burning themselves out and facing a bout of depression so severe it kills their ability to succeed in a traditional capacity. This forces them to find other ways to derive satisfaction and finally grow a self-identity that doesn’t revolve around money and success. It’s saddening that these men have to go through this burnout process to learn these lessons; I hope to see less of these men in the future, as more people come forward to describe this toxic form of living. In the meantime, I try to catch young men before they fall into these self-destructive patterns. I lecture my young interns about the hazards of a success-obsessed lifestyle, and encourage them to find senses of worth that don’t revolve around gaining power and providing money. I’ll be honest, they don’t seem to listen to me much. But I hope my words remain in the back of their mind, ready to help guide them away from misery when they’re ready to make that change. THE MAN WHO OPTS OUT The Man Who Opts Out is a growing contingent of the male population, but a rare sight in the dating world. These are men who have given up on dating, or never even attempted it in the first place. Some of these men have serious, obvious flaws that keep them locked out of the dating world, such as personality disorders, issues with violence, or severe trauma that’s gone unaddressed. The majority don’t fit this description, though. In fact, in the Bay Area, a large number of these men are very high-functioning members of society who are smart, respectful, and financially successful. Often the Man Who Opts Out is the victim of bullying or neglect as a young adult. People accuse him of being awkward, or short, or shy, or overweight, or an “undesirable” ethnicity. Or maybe no one ever directly vocalizes it, but the messages in the media are enough to convince him of his low self-worth, and his interactions with girls seem to confirm it. Most treat him as if he’s invisible, and his few female friends are quick to emphasize that they’re just friends. Dating feels impossible. After all, the goal of dating is to make someone fall in love with you, and how could someone love him when he’s so terribly unattractive? He decides to shove aside dating and focus on the other things society tells him are important: his schooling, his career, his social circle. He can actively work to improve and succeed in these areas, whereas being attractive feels miserably out of his control. When he’s a teenager, this mentality doesn’t cause much alarm. In fact, some mentors even mistake his avoidance of dating as a sign of maturity. He “has his priorities straight,” they say. Yeah, some of his peers might mock him for not having a girlfriend, but did they get into MIT? Nope. But he did. That helps to ease the pain of not having a date for senior prom. When he’s in his early-twenties, his aversion to dating starts to feel like a problem. Friends and family comment on it, voicing concern. He decides, reluctantly, to give dating a shot. Loneliness is beginning to eat at him, and he decides it’s worth facing his fears to have a girlfriend who infuses his life with warmth and affection. He’s still terribly self-conscious about his attractiveness, but his friends insist he’s “perfect boyfriend material,” so he gives it a chance. His attempts don’t go well. In fact, you might say they’re a bit of a disaster. Women have come to expect a certain level of romantic competence from a twenty-two-year-old, and he just doesn’t meet the bar. It’s a painful shock. He’d started to gain his confidence back, proving through his successful schooling and his burgeoning career that he’s really worth something, even if he doesn’t quite meet the traditional model of a hot young bachelor. At this point, he’s accustomed to succeeding at most things in life. But every attempt to flirt and date paints an entirely different picture of himself: he’s practically trembling with nerves, unsure what to talk about, prone to rambling about his niche interests until their eyes glaze over, terrified of accidentally being a creep, yet overly eager for the romantic affection that he desperately craves. He’s a bit of an anxious, awkward mess, and most women don’t enjoy the vibes. One even starts a rumor that he’s a creep. The accusation brings back an aching self-consciousness he hasn’t felt in years. He vows to stop even trying. After all, what’s the point? It’s hopeless. Years pass. He settles into his career, becomes more successful and more mature. He’s not exactly a social butterfly, but he has some good friends and enough love and connection in his life to keep him tumbling down the path of a Man Who Is Not. Yet something is missing. He tries not to think about it, but there’s a growing emptiness inside him that makes life increasingly hollow. It’s not just a missing girlfriend; it’s a lack of someone, anyone, finding him attractive. More and more friends are finding committed relationships. At the end of the day, they go home to cuddles and laughter and sex and long, deep conversations. He returns home to his silent apartment and plays video games. That’s it, he decides. He’s done feeling miserable and lesser. He’s not some hapless twenty-two-year-old anymore. He’s a good, mature man with good friends who insist he can find someone, if he just tries. He’s no longer in college, so meeting women isn’t as easy as it was when he was twenty-two and still living on a campus. He downloads a dating app, and almost immediately regrets it. He gets maybe one match a month, and it’s almost always a bot. When he does match, he carries the conversation, and the woman usually ghosts at a certain point. He spends hours and hours swiping on profiles, growing more bitter with each swipe. When he goes on dates, he feels like he’s being interviewed, and usually the woman ghosts him afterward. He takes another break from dating. More years pass, and his friends who are coupled feel increasingly alien. They’re having weddings, honeymoons, kids; buying houses and saving for college; attending recitals and soccer practices. He’s still playing Call of Duty and Dota with his dwindling group of single friends. Occasionally, some of his coupled friends will join them on Discord, playing a couple hurried rounds before having to log off to cook dinner or tuck the kids into bed. Damn, I miss being single, they’ll say, laughing. You have all the time, all the hobbies, all the peace you could ever want. They don’t address the elephant in the room–that at any time, they could dump their partner and be single again. Yet they don’t. Because being alone sucks. As he nears his mid-thirties, an interesting development occurs: women start to actively become interested in him. Those superficial characteristics that kept them at bay when he was younger no longer seem so important. So what if he’s only five-foot-six and a bit heavier than average? He has an amazing job, a stellar reputation, a gorgeous apartment, and a great sense of humor. He’s a catch. Yet once they discover he’s never been in a long-term relationship, they once more seem to recoil. He enters into a series of short-term flings, trying to make up for the lost experience. At first it’s exhilarating to have women actually show interest in him. They like him. They want him. Quickly, it becomes exhausting. Even when women initially approach him, he’s the one who must invest the most effort. The women know what they’re doing; he’s constantly trying to keep up. Some of them get tired of waiting for him to learn and walk away, opening up old wounds in his self-confidence. He considers trying to make one of the connections more serious, but it becomes obvious that she’d expect him to change so much. His hobbies, his sleeping patterns, his work habits, his furniture, his friendships… all of it would require modification to keep a girl around. And history has taught him that he’ll just end up getting rejected anyway, so what’s even the point? It all feels so futile and so unfair. All around him, he sees women who settled with crappy men who don’t treat them properly. He wouldn’t do that; he’s a good person. Maybe a bit socially awkward, maybe not the handsomest, maybe a little clueless about some aspects of relationships, but he can learn to be a good partner, if he’s just given a chance. Some of his single friends have officially given up on ever finding a woman, and they encourage him to do the same. It’s peaceful, they insist. No more pointless pining, no more painful daydreams that never come true. They’re right, he decides. He’s done. It’s over. Yet one evening, as he lays in bed, the loneliness chews at his soul as he stares at the empty spot beside him. He reaches for his phone and downloads a dating app. He’ll go on just one more date, he tells himself. Just to remind himself of why he doesn’t date anymore. Just to remind himself of why it’s futile to even try. Dating a Man Who Opts Out: A date with a Man Who Opts Out is a losing battle. They arrive defeated and suspicious, certain they’re wasting their time, and it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Some awkwardly avoid any topic that could reveal their lack of dating experience, while others throw it in your face, wanting to get the reveal over with. I’m often surprised by the men who fall into this category; society paints them all as grungy, awkward trolls who live in their mothers’ basements, but many are not only high-functioning members of society, but also highly desirable individuals–attractive, wealthy, successful. Yet their self-confidence doesn’t reflect this success; they’re mentally trapped as the awkward, bullied teenager, convinced no one could ever truly love them. For some, this causes bitterness or apathy to spoil interactions with women; dates with these men are uncomfortable events for everyone involved. Every question is met with suspicion, with the man assuming his responses will be used to negatively judge him. For others, their lack of self-confidence causes a painful shyness and refusal to open up. They’re convinced that at any second, the woman will find something about them to reject, so they hide as much of themselves as possible. These are some of the most painful dates I’ve experienced. The nurturing side of me wants to pull the man into a hug, to assure him he’s enough, to promise I won’t judge. Yet the logical side of me knows I need to judge–ultimately, it’s a necessary part of dating. And a crippling lack of self-esteem is a death blow for the stability of any relationship. If I want a healthy relationship, I simply cannot date someone with that trait. It’s a vicious cycle–a man’s confidence in his dating ability is crushed, he finally works up the nerve to show up to a date, gets rejected, and his self-esteem lowers even more. He limps off to nurse his wounds, vowing to avoid the “pointless” exercise of dating. It might be another year before he attempts to go on another date, or two years, or perhaps he just gives up altogether. I absolutely hate being a participant in this cycle. It’s the dating equivalent of kicking a puppy and always leaves me feeling a dull ache of empathy for the men involved. I also hate the standard advice given to these men: that it’s “just a numbers game” and they need to “just keep putting themselves out there.” The truth isn’t nearly so easy. A man with severe self-esteem issues is not likely to find a healthy relationship, no matter how many times he flings himself at the dating world. The core issue of self-esteem must be addressed. For some, this means structured therapy or psychiatric treatment, for others, it means growing their social life until it’s vibrant enough to soothe the part of their soul that insists they’re not enough. Or maybe it’s a combo of all three or something else entirely. But action needs to be taken to address the lack of self-esteem; the man can’t just half-heartedly daydream about a woman who might swoop in to “love him just the way he is” and solve all his confidence problems. Also, relationships take practice. If a man is past the age of twenty-five and has never been in a committed relationship, most women will view this as a red flag. They’ve spent their teens and early-twenties doing the hard work of learning how to be in a relationship, and they don’t want to partner with someone who hasn’t even begun that journey yet. The good news is that there are ways to compensate for this. I would happily date a thirty-year-old who has never been in a romantic relationship, if he has other social relationships to prove his viability as a partner. Close ties to his friends, family, and community can prove he’s well-versed in all the vital elements of a relationship: communication, trust, empathy, honesty, etc. Yet the fact remains that the longer someone opts out of the dating world, the harder it becomes to opt back in. So my advice to men who fall into this category is to rip off the bandaid. If they want a partner, they need to start working toward it now. Overcoming insecurities and past traumas takes time and effort. The good news is that men who fall into this category seem to be pleasantly surprised at how quickly their social and romantic prospects improve, once they identify and address the root issues. Many of them happily “graduate” out of this category and go on to have wonderful relationships. I have a feeling the man I end up partnered with will be someone who graduated out of this category. After all, both my previous serious partners fell into this category earlier in their life. I seem to have a soft-spot for people who overcome insecurities; they tend to be delightfully empathetic and dynamic individuals. In the meantime, I’ll continue to try to encourage men who fall into this category not to give up. There’s a path to healthy, happy relationships. It may not be simple, but as the tired but true saying goes, nothing important ever is easy. THE MAN WHO BECOMES A BEAST The Man Who Becomes a Beast often begins as a Man Who Is Not. He is lost, and depressed, and anxious to find himself, yet unsure how to even begin. He drudges through his job, hating every moment, yet sometimes he hates being away from work even more. At work, he’s at least acknowledged as a person. As soon as he leaves, the lonely silence of his existence threatens to suffocate him. He doesn’t know what he wants from life, but he knows it’s not this. The city is filled with young, attractive women that inspire wistful daydreams. Maybe he’ll ask one out, and they’ll hit it off, and then his apartment will no longer be empty. Then maybe she can introduce him to her friends, and the empty abyss of his social calendar will suddenly be filled with dinners, and trips, and concerts, and— No. He doesn’t dare. He’s far from an Adonis–his physique pales in comparison to most men. Chances are, any girl he asks out will say no, and she’ll think he’s a creep for approaching her. Then she might tell the other women that he’s a creep, and the whole thing would be a disaster. It’s better not to directly approach women. He can find a girlfriend on the apps. Except that certainly hasn’t been going well. He rarely gets matches, let alone dates. On the rare instances they occur, the women seem bored by the conversation and pepper him with questions about his intentions and future that he can’t answer. His performance at work slips, and he’s placed on a performance improvement plan. He knows he’ll probably be fired next quarter, but he can’t bring himself to care. His doctor tells him he’s depressed and tosses some pills at him, but it only serves to anger him. The anger is a surprise. He’s not an angry person, or at least he’s never been in the past. Yet the emotion keeps flaring to life in his chest, poisoning his mind with spite. Spite toward his idiot manager who doesn’t give a shit about him. Spite toward the women who judge him without truly knowing him. Spite at the asshole doctor who mindlessly writes a prescription without bothering to understand the real problem. There’s nothing wrong with his head; it’s the rest of the world that’s the problem. He doesn’t do anything wrong, yet the world treats him like he’s less than worthless. He doesn’t need pills, he just needs someone to give a shit. He struggles to focus and turns to social media to distract his churning mind. YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok indulge him with a steady stream of entertainment, numbing his frustration and anger with an unceasing shower of fitness routines and video game hacks and soccer highlights. Gradually, the algorithms drift toward new content. A buff dude sneers into the camera, pointing an accusing finger as he rants about “betas” and their pathetic video games and tiny dicks. It’s not the first time this influencer has crossed his feed, but it is the first time he actually watches a full video. He’s not sure whether to be offended or amused. The video is so over-the-top that he wants to laugh it off, but it also hits some painful insecurities. He is wasting his life at his shitty job. He would attract more women if he worked out more. He hates feeling awkward and uncertain and invisible. He watches several more videos. The influencer sure isn’t a philosopher, but he at least has the balls to discuss the way society has neglected men. High school graduation rates are plummeting, college enrollment has taken a nosedive, addiction is spreading like wildfire, incarceration is creeping upwards, suicide rates are rocketing to the sky. Where’s the public dismay? Where’s the outrage and the activism? Nowhere, says the influencer. All those activists are too busy accusing men of being dangerous monsters to bother caring about them. Fuck those people and all they stand for, says the influencer. If you want anyone to care about you, you have to make them care. And this influencer knows exactly how to accomplish that. And then he gives it: a map for manhood. One that’s entirely different from the vague, confusing, dismissive directions that polite society has offered. One whose guidance loudly insists that being a man is a good thing, something to be proud of and use to his advantage. The manosphere map promises power, success, sex, money, belonging, and confidence if it’s followed. In contrast, the map offered by polite society offers a vague promise to not be considered a failure or a danger. The choice seems obvious. If he looked hard at the manosphere map, its contradictions are obvious. It promises the respect and adoration of women, but insists this is to be gained through mistreating them. It promises power and money, yet discourages higher education, despite this being the most sure-fire way to climb the class ladder. It insists women are less intelligent and logical beings, yet also insists they have taken over control of the world. Yet it’s hard to think critically about these contradictions; life has left him exhausted and angry, and the manosphere map insists that success and payback are just a few easy steps away. And those steps are deliciously concrete and specific. The manosphere offers millions of hours of video tutorials on the single subject of how to get a woman “out of your league” to like you. Meanwhile, polite society balks at the mere question, droning on about how romantic “leagues” are an inherently patriarchal and harmful concept. Sure, some of the advice seems off. Insulting women goes against how he was raised, and some of the money advice seems like it's using people. Yet how he was raised led him to be anxious and invisible. And the rest of society seems to be using him, so why shouldn’t he turn the tables? And besides, the map works. He knows it does. There are a hundred comments on each popular video balking at their morals, but a thousand more from men reporting the success of the techniques. He decides to give it a try. He goes out and uses the techniques at a bar, and it works. He brings a woman home for the first time in years. Yeah, she seems kind of unstable and uncertain, but that’s to be expected. She’s a woman, after all. She just needs an alpha male to give her guidance and purpose; he’s actually doing her a favor. He’s hooked. On the clear directions, on the sex, on the feeling of power. And although he doesn’t like to admit it, he’s hooked on the attention. His actions and opinions upset the people he’s determined to be his enemies; he likes their outrage, and the way he’s able to control their emotions with merely a few words. They hate him, but that’s okay, because he hates them too. The influencers were right: fuck society and their weak, pathetic norms. If you want something, you have to be a real man and take it. Dating a Man Who Becomes a Beast: There’s a unique aura that surrounds Men Who Become Beasts. Some are fit, and cocky, and smooth, exuding the hyper-masculine air that the Tate brothers exemplify. However, most remain awkward and abrasive, juggling self-consciousness with a sneering confidence that they’re more enlightened than the “sheep” who refuse to see the “truth.” Both types share a noxious mixture of arrogance and frustration, and they’re all too eager to prove their disdain for the world. I rarely end up on dates with these men; I’ve gotten good at detecting them over the years, both in-person and on dating apps. Still, occasionally they slip past my radar, and I find myself grabbing coffee with someone whose presence raises my hackles. I will always end the date as soon as possible and update my detection heuristics. Yet it seems impossible to truly avoid these men. I punched one a few months back. He tried to dance with my friend at a concert, refused to take her clear “no” for an answer, forcefully shoved himself against her, and did not appreciate me shoving him back. He grabbed my arm and yanked me toward him; I landed a jab to his throat. (Apparently, the manosphere doesn’t teach men to tuck their chins during a fight. Quite the oversight.) My jab shocked him enough to loosen his grip, and I yanked free. Three strangers from the crowd grabbed him, restraining him as he tried to lunge at me. His face twisted in a snarl as he hurled insults over the booming bass. Cunt, crazy bitch, low value whore. It was the latter insult that gave it away: he was yet another young man drugged by the toxic ideology of the manosphere. There was something darkly poetic about the scene: three strangers, all men, throwing themselves in harm’s way to stop a two-hundred-pound brick of muscle from pulverizing me. Struggling against their grasp was the Hyde to their Jekyll, a rabid animal who used his natural strength to attack rather than to protect. I pity that young man. He was well-dressed, handsome, and fit, clearly doing something right to have made it to an expensive concert in a popular city. Yet his mind has been tainted by a creed that turned him into a predator. The preachers of this creed promise success and respect, yet in reality, they doom their adherents to be unfit for society, forcibly outcast from any loving community. That young man walks the world as a predator, destined to be deprived of the love and respect he yearns for. He’ll likely gain some twisted semblance of a relationship; there are plenty of women out there who won’t recognize the warning signs. But it will be a relationship rooted in fear and manipulation, devoid of the warmth of love. He will feel that coldness. It will haunt him, and stoke his anger, and some poor woman will probably be the victim when his rage boils over. I don’t know what to do about these men. I worry it’s too late for most of them; so many have been steeping in the manosphere ideology for years, and converting them away will be as hard as swaying a religious fanatic. So I avoid them. I fear them. And I sure as hell don’t date them. V. The Man Who Is Whole Don’t let my categories of lostness convince you that all men are bumbling through life without purpose. Many men have beaten the odds and become Men Who Are Whole, and these men deserve an entire section devoted to them. A Man Who Is Whole rarely begins whole. Occasionally they do, but these are rare and frankly baffling anomalies. Most begin within another category, and through a combination of sheer will, some luck, and the support of a community, they forge themselves into remarkably solid individuals. A Man Who Is Whole has created his own map to manhood. Often, he’s been blessed with close mentors, and usually it’s coupled with an intense passion for something. Maybe he’s passionate about teaching, or building a business, or becoming a father, or creating music, or writing long-winded essays about the dangers of AI. Whatever it is, it’s a purpose he can use as his true north when piecing together his personal map. His passions lend themselves to goals, but after some trial and error, it becomes clear that obsessing over his personal goals doesn’t feel quite right. He needs to find some way to benefit his community through his goals. But what is his community exactly? He’s not sure, but he’s determined to find out. It’s not easy, and he screws up several times, burning and getting burned by various relationships. But eventually he manages to find a solid community, a real one with deep, emotional bonds and a mutual desire to provide love and support. His passion gives him motivation; his goals give him intention; his community gives him purpose. Combined, they provide a scaffolding for him to build himself into the best version of himself. He continues to flesh out his map, creating a unique path with the help of his community. Mentors guide him, peers critique him, friends and partners encourage him. The map is a messy thing, with lots of erased sections and some meandering parts, but after several years, it finally feels finished. He knows how to be a man, because he knows how to be himself, and there is no doubt in his mind that he is a man. Some of the traits are exactly what he expected when he was a boy dreaming about manhood: his confidence, his strength, his protectiveness. But others were surprise discoveries: his empathy, his restraint, his soft spot for kids and desire to mentor them. The map is his, and his alone, a hard-won victory personalized to his wants and needs. It should be celebrated and cherished, and whenever he gets the chance, shared with other young men who might benefit from its contents. Dating A Man Who Is Whole: Dating a Man Who Is Whole is a rare and precious experience. Their presence has a solidness that’s infinitely alluring and soothing, and it makes me want to nuzzle into their chest and listen to their heart, to marvel that such mundane biological pieces could somehow have produced such a magnetic presence. There’s a stereotype that Men Who Are Whole are always overtly confident and highly masculine, but I haven’t found this to be true. In fact, many of them carry a subtle sort of masculinity that lends itself to gentleness and empathy. They have little to prove to the world, because they know who they are, and so does their community, and they are respected for it. They have overcome a lot to achieve this frame of mind. They’ve bumbled through confusing directions and dead ends, but never given up, and the persistence has paid off. It makes them invaluable partners through difficult times; they know how to handle themselves in tough situations, and they’re eager to share their strength with others. They’re not perfect. No human ever is. But they know that, and they have the humility to discuss issues in an open and empathetic way, while still standing their ground when necessary. It’s an honor to be loved by a Man Who Is Whole, and it’s always a surprising delight when they choose you as the focus of their affection. But there is also an inevitable sadness that clings to the edges of their presence. After all, it’s only when you interact with them that you realize how lost all those other men are. They usually are aware of how different their existence is to many other men, and they carry the weight of friends and loved ones who have been permanently lost to other categories. I believe that most young men have the potential to become Men Who Are Whole, if they’re given the right support and guidance. I think the rarity of these men is one of the greatest indictments on our current culture and our methods of raising boys. Yet I’m hopeful that someday they’ll be the rule rather than the exception. I’m deeply lucky to have several of these men in my life. If you do as well, don’t forget to remind them how grateful you are for them and how proud you are of who they’ve become. Oftentimes, they don’t understand just how impressive and important they are. So tell them, and treasure them, and maintain hope that someday there will be more of them. VI. Crafting a New Map The sheer number of lost men make it obvious that polite society has failed to deliver an effective map to manhood. Men are miserable, and their pain is reflected in the rising rate of suicide, depression, anxiety, joblessness, and crime. The numbers don’t lie: the current map doesn’t work. Society owes it to young men to draft a new map for them, one with more positivity and concrete steps that can help them avoid getting lost. I have many ideas about potential fixes and additions to the Modern Map to Manhood, but there are five that I feel are most important: Encourage positive male role models to provide detailed directions on how to “become a man.”

Illuminati5 mentions across 5 issues

Illuminati is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between September 29, 2022 and July 03, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as ""the Bardic Conspiracy fought the Illuminati in a Lemurian temple buried below Dealy Plaza""; "linked this to the Illuminati, an 18th century German society"; "A lot of Illuminati believers tend to be kind of chill hippies". It most often appears alongside Trump, Biden, FBI.

Article page: Illuminati
Mention count: 5
Issue count: 5
First seen: September 29, 2022
Last seen: July 03, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Universe-Hopping Through Substack September 29, 2022
Sorry, I Still Think I Am Right About The Media Very Rarely Lying December 29, 2022
Conspiracies of Cognition, Conspiracies Of Emotion January 13, 2023
Against Learning From Dramatic Events January 16, 2024
Highlights From The Comments On Missing Heritability July 03, 2025

Trump 3 shared issues
Biden 2 shared issues
FBI 2 shared issues
Iraq 2 shared issues
New York Times 2 shared issues

Source context

Universe-Hopping Through Substack

September 29, 2022 · Original source

I have now read quite a bit of this book introduction, and I’m still not sure if he means it in a “this is a cool metaphor for how music is subversive and transformative” way, or a “the Bardic Conspiracy fought the Illuminati in a Lemurian temple buried below Dealy Plaza” sort of way. I actually admire the sort of criticality it takes to keep me precisely balanced between these two interpretations. I will be nodding along, listening to him talk about how music is good at evoking strong emotions, thinking he definitely means the metaphor thing, and then he will hit me with paragraphs like:

Sorry, I Still Think I Am Right About The Media Very Rarely Lying

December 29, 2022 · Original source

Here's some more: https://archives.infowars.com/scalias-death-linked-to-bohemian-grove-illuminati/

Inline links: https://archives.infowars.com/scalias-death-linked-to-bohemian-grove-illuminati/

This story claims that former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died while in the lodge of a secret society with links to Bohemian Grove and (through them) the Bavarian Illuminati.

Infowars does err (as far as I know) in linking this to the Illuminati, an 18th century German society that wanted to rebuild the order of the world upon a foundation of Reason but dissolved before ever doing very much. The article includes a fake history of the Illuminati, so in that sense it is wrong. But Infowars didn’t invent this fake history. For example, the claim that the Illuminati caused the French Revolution didn’t originate with Jones - it was one of the most popular explanations of the Revolution in the late 1700s, before the Revolution was even over! Jones is just citing the authorities of the time! Likewise, here’s a 2011 movie linking Bohemian Grove to the Illuminati - Jones didn’t invent any of this.

Inline links: one of the most popular explanations of the Revolution, 2011 movie linking Bohemian Grove to the Illuminati

Conspiracies of Cognition, Conspiracies Of Emotion

January 13, 2023 · Original source

But also, some conspiracy theorists don’t really seem to hate their subjects this much. A lot of Illuminati believers tend to be kind of chill hippies who believe without really worrying. Maybe these people are more akin to the Kennedy and Pyramid believers in Part 1?

Against Learning From Dramatic Events

January 16, 2024 · Original source

Obviously a dramatic event can reveal a deeper flaw in your models. For example, suppose there is an enormous terrorist attack, you investigated, and you found that it was organized by the Illuminati, who as of last month switched from their usual MO of manipulating financial markets to a new MO of coordinating terrorist attacks. You should expect new terrorist attacks more often from now on, since your previous models didn’t factor in the new Illuminati policy.

Highlights From The Comments On Missing Heritability

July 03, 2025 · Original source

I don't mean to sound hyperbolic but Illumina is kind of like the Illuminati. It's everywhere, monolithic and it's influenced genomics massively.

To me, this reveals how complicated this debate really is. Even for a phenotype with many highly desirable theoretical properties, estimation of heritability is not consistent between methods. IMO, the way to resolve this issue moving forward is to conduct more unified analyses. In other words, apply each of the methods to the same cohort w/the same phenotype definition and see what happens. The RDR study was illuminating in this regard IMO. When sampling & measurement artifacts can be ruled out, the only differences between methods should lie in their actual theoretical properties (e.g. the assumptions they make). The primary obstacle to this, however, is statistical power. This is why I’ll end this thread by re-iterating my desire to see more highly-powered RDR and SibReg analyses moving forward.

Ice Age4 mentions across 4 issues

Ice Age is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between September 09, 2021 and August 11, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "During the Ice Age, a lot of the world's water froze"; "the advent of farming was due to the ending of the Ice Age and retreat of the glaciers"; "simple stories about the ice age". It most often appears alongside Europe, Rousseau, Adam Smith.

Article page: Ice Age
Mention count: 4
Issue count: 4
First seen: September 09, 2021
Last seen: August 11, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

The Unbearable Semiheaviness Of Being September 09, 2021
Your Book Review: The Dawn Of Everything June 10, 2022
Your Book Review: The Educated Mind July 14, 2023
Your Book Review: The Weirdest People in the World August 11, 2023

Europe 3 shared issues
Rousseau 3 shared issues
Adam Smith 2 shared issues
Africa 2 shared issues
Asia 2 shared issues

Source context

The Unbearable Semiheaviness Of Being

September 09, 2021 · Original source

Start with the evolutionary argument. During the Ice Age, a lot of the world's water froze. Just as your freezing concentrated deuterium in Castro's freezer, so Ice Age freezing concentrated it in the glaciers. Also, rainwater naturally has less deuterium when it's colder, because heat preferentially increases the evaporation of heavier water. So drinking water was probably a bit lighter during the Ice Ages, when humans were evolving. The 10,000 years since the last Ice Age wasn't enough time to re-evolve, so human bodies are probably adapted for slightly lighter water than we get.

Inline links: because heat preferentially increases the evaporation of heavier water

Well, at least most of it is. For example, the Hunza people of Pakistan were deemed supernaturally long-lived and healthy by the same sort of early British explorers who repeated legends of Shangri-La and the Abominable Snowman. According to reputable sources, the average Hunza life expectancy is fifty-something, same as most other groups in poor parts of Pakistan. So probably light glacial meltwater isn't a very good longevity secret. Also, assuming that we're evolved to Ice Age conditions limits evolution to a pretty specific speed - any faster and we'd evolve to present conditions; any slower and we'd still be pre-Ice Age. I'm not too impressed with the rat studies, and other studies on plants suggest they grow better in high-deuterium conditions, eg this thesis suggesting that "deuterium oxide has a stabilizing force on biomolecules". Most of the positive studies were done by the same Hungarian team, or by people with sufficiently-Hungarian-sounding names that I suspect they're affiliated. The anticancer studies are better quality than the others, but some other groups find deuterium causes less cancer, so who knows?

Inline links: reputable sources, this thesis, deuterium causes less cancer

June 10, 2022 · Original source

The answer they give (in fact, the Davids barely give it, they sort of vaguely imply) is that the advent of farming was due to the ending of the Ice Age and retreat of the glaciers. But this is in direct contradiction to a bunch of their previous points around farming, like how the post-Ice Age was actually a “Golden Age” for foragers, that early farming in general was done in more extreme environmental conditions and was often even an act of desperation, that agriculture was easy to discover and evolve as a technology, and that it was a natural, almost inevitable, outcome of the caring relationship hunter-gatherers had with the land.

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

July 14, 2023 · Original source

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

Your Book Review: The Weirdest People in the World

August 11, 2023 · Original source

A big silent intellectual change of the past quarter century is the broadening of our self-concept. Educated Westerners are starting to expect each other to know Chinese and Islamic history, which are still ongoing, and perhaps something about pre-Columbian America whose stories were traumatically ended by the conquest of the New World. The earlier past is moving into the light, too. Ancient states like Babylon and Egypt are gradually coming alive: Hammurabi and Gilgamesh get more play relative to Solon and Achilles. And before that, the real prehistory of the first cities, the Neolithic, the growth of agriculture, the end of the Ice Age at 10,000 BC, modern humans around 100,000 BC, the first humans at 1mya (million years ago)… these dates are gradually getting fixed in the mind as turning points in the story of us.

Inline links: story of us

Intellectual Dark Web4 mentions across 4 issues

Intellectual Dark Web is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between May 10, 2021 and August 19, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "This New York Times article on the Intellectual Dark Web essentially turned the semi-respectability of anti-SJWism into common knowledge"; "why aren’t there equally famous figures on the left? The social justice community is an order of magnitude bigger than the intellectual dark web"; "the first few people to get on board the New Atheist, woke, alt-right, dirtbag left, and intellectual dark web movements". It most often appears alongside Jordan Peterson, alt-right, David Chapman.

Article page: Intellectual Dark Web
Mention count: 4
Issue count: 4
First seen: May 10, 2021
Last seen: August 19, 2022

Outbound links

Issue trail

The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars May 10, 2021
Contra Hoel On Aristocratic Tutoring March 22, 2022
A Cyclic Theory Of Subcultures August 10, 2022
Highlights From The Comments On Subcultures August 19, 2022

Jordan Peterson 3 shared issues
alt-right 2 shared issues
David Chapman 2 shared issues
feminism 2 shared issues
Google 2 shared issues

Source context

Contra Hoel On Aristocratic Tutoring

May 10, 2021 · Original source

The first milestone on that path was Milo Yiannopoulos. As outrageous and offensive as he was, he was actually a step above everyone who had come before him in terms of visibility and respectability - at least nobody expected him to shoot up a school or anything. The second milestone was Jordan Peterson, who was an obvious step up in respectability beyond Milo. There was a really interesting period in 2016 when the media was trying to decide whether to unite in character-assassinating Peterson the same way it had character-assassinated all previous people in this space, or treat him as some sort of interesting and potentially sympathetic phenomenon, and it decided on the interesting phenomenon angle. After that, being anti-SJW lost about 90% of its stigma, to the point where people would roll their eyes instead of freaking out. This New York Times article on the Intellectual Dark Web essentially turned the semi-respectability of anti-SJWism into common knowledge, and makes a fascinating contrast with the TIME article on MRAs linked above.

Inline links: New York Times

March 22, 2022 · Original source

I’ll give one even weirder example. A few years ago, I wrote a very political post, called Can Things Be Both Popular And Silenced? It touched on “guru” culture in politically incorrect discourse - the phenomenon of people like Jordan Peterson who became really famous by saying controversial things - and it asked: why aren’t there equally famous figures on the left? The social justice community is an order of magnitude bigger than the intellectual dark web, so how come it hasn’t produced proportionately greater celebrities? Ibram X Kendi, maybe. Ta-Nehisi Coates, ten years ago. But how come they aren’t bigger and more numerous.

Inline links: Can Things Be Both Popular And Silenced

A Cyclic Theory Of Subcultures

August 10, 2022 · Original source

Google’s first employee became their Director of Technology and made $900 million. Jesus’s first follower became the Bishop of Rome; one in every thousand people alive is named after him. The first few people to make websites in 1995, blogs in 2005, or YouTube channels in 2015 got outsized followings that they were able to leverage into higher status later on. The first few people to get on board the New Atheist, woke, alt-right, dirtbag left, and intellectual dark web movements all had easy opportunities to become famous; the next few thousand at least had the chance to be well-connected veterans.

Highlights From The Comments On Subcultures

August 19, 2022 · Original source

What was the original movement for which the emergence and fragmentation of the intellectual dark web was the involution?

The NYT piece Meet The Renegades Of The Intellectual Dark Web is a great example of what it looks like when a movement is starting its growth phase. Newspapers write articles about how edgy and cool you are and how the establishment is afraid of your growing power. The couple of people who joined the movement out of genuine conviction when it was unpopular or made them look weird (eg Jordan Peterson, Eric Weinstein) get catapulted to superstardom.

Inline links: Meet The Renegades Of The Intellectual Dark Web

Internal Family Systems4 mentions across 4 issues

Internal Family Systems is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between May 25, 2022 and May 28, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Or what about Internal Family Systems? This is a kind of woo-y type of therapy"; "Internal Family Systems, somatic experiencing, some trauma therapies"; "Internal Family Systems, the hot new psychotherapy". It most often appears alongside IFS, Bessel van der Kolk, Carl Jung.

Article page: Internal Family Systems
Mention count: 4
Issue count: 4
First seen: May 25, 2022
Last seen: May 28, 2024

Outbound links

Issue trail

In Partial, Grudging Defense Of The Hearing Voices Movement May 25, 2022
Are Woo Non-Responders Defective? May 30, 2023
Book Review: The Others Within Us May 21, 2024
What Is Going On In IFS? May 28, 2024

IFS 3 shared issues
Bessel van der Kolk 2 shared issues
Carl Jung 2 shared issues
China 2 shared issues
Falconer 2 shared issues

Source context

In Partial, Grudging Defense Of The Hearing Voices Movement

May 25, 2022 · Original source

Or what about Internal Family Systems? This is a kind of woo-y type of therapy where the therapist says “imagine that your anger is talking to you, what does it say?” and then the patient tries to have this imaginary conversation. Sometimes their anger says something insightful like “I am just trying to protect you from being hurt again” and then the patient and their anger reconcile and the patient becomes less angry. I was never able to get the hang of this myself, but some people swear by it. Psychosis seems like a good starting point here - instead of saying “Imagine your anger could talk”, you can start with “You know that voice you hear all the time which keeps telling you to kill everyone? Let’s start by assuming it’s your anger”. I expect that some of the people for whom IFS works will find this works too.

Are Woo Non-Responders Defective?

May 30, 2023 · Original source

(here “woo” means various more-or-less-alternative wellness and spirituality practices. Typical examples would be yoga, “bodywork”, tai chi, Alexander Technique, chakra meditation, Wim Hof, Internal Family Systems, somatic experiencing, some trauma therapies, etc.)

Book Review: The Others Within Us

May 21, 2024 · Original source

Internal Family Systems, the hot new1 psychotherapy, has a secret.

Inline links: 1

First, this isn’t supposed to be just the therapist walking you through guided imagery, or you making up a story you tell yourself. The therapist asks you “Look inside until you find the part that’s sabotaging your relationship”, and you are supposed to discover - not invent, discover - that your unconscious gives it the form of a snake called Sabby. And you are supposed to hear as in a trance - again, not invent - Sabby telling you that she’s been protecting you from heartbreak since your last breakup. When you bargain with Sabby, it’s a two-way negotiation. You learn - not decide - whether or not Sabby agrees to any given bargain. According to Internal Family Systems (which descends from normal family systems, ie family therapy where the whole family is there at once and has to compromise with each other), all this stuff really is in your mind, waiting for an IFS therapist to discover it. When Carl Jung talked about interacting with the archetypes or whatever, he wasn’t being metaphorical. He literally meant “go into a trance that gives you a sort of waking lucid dream where you meet all this internal stuff”.

What Is Going On In IFS?

May 28, 2024 · Original source

[An Internal Family Systems session] isn’t supposed to be just the therapist walking you through guided imagery, or you making up a story you tell yourself. The therapist asks you “Look inside until you find the part that’s sabotaging your relationship”, and you are supposed to discover - not invent, discover - that your unconscious gives it the form of a snake called Sabby. And you are supposed to hear as in a trance - again, not invent - Sabby telling you that she’s been protecting you from heartbreak since your last breakup. When you bargain with Sabby, it’s a two-way negotiation. You learn - not decide - whether or not Sabby agrees to any given bargain. According to Internal Family Systems (which descends from normal family systems, ie family therapy where the whole family is there at once and has to compromise with each other), all this stuff really is in your mind, waiting for an IFS therapist to discover it. When Carl Jung talked about interacting with the archetypes or whatever, he wasn’t being metaphorical. He literally meant “go into a trance that gives you a sort of waking lucid dream where you meet all this internal stuff”.

IVF4 mentions across 4 issues

IVF is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between July 01, 2021 and September 09, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "if you’re doing IVF, you have to choose an embryo anyway"; "to research IVF clinic success rates"; "once you’re already doing IVF, selecting the embryos". It most often appears alongside Metacelsus, Sam Altman, 1DaySooner.

Article page: IVF
Mention count: 4
Issue count: 4
First seen: July 01, 2021
Last seen: September 09, 2024

Outbound links

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/secrets-of-the-great-families

Issue trail

Welcome Polygenically Screened Babies July 01, 2021
ACX Grants Results 2024 February 10, 2024
Who Does Polygenic Selection Help? February 23, 2024
Open Thread 346 September 09, 2024

Metacelsus 2 shared issues
Sam Altman 2 shared issues
1DaySooner 1 shared issues
23andme 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues

Source context

Welcome Polygenically Screened Babies

July 01, 2021 · Original source

Are these levels of reductions “worth it”? I think the company has a pretty good pitch, which is - if you’re doing IVF, you have to choose an embryo anyway. If you don’t screen, you’re going to choose one at random. So why not instead choose one in a way that halves your future kid’s risk of serious diseases? Of course, “worth it” depends on the price, which the company is kind of coy about, but an earlier version seems to have cost ~$1400 plus some extra per embryo, which is a fraction of overall IVF costs and pretty cheap for a US medical procedure

Inline links: an earlier version

ACX Grants Results 2024

February 10, 2024 · Original source

Samuel Celarek, $20,000, to research IVF clinic success rates, with the ultimate goal of creating a company that ranks the best IVF clinics. Evaluator opinion was split on this one: is this really an effective charitable cause? I funded it anyway for three reasons. First, the team came very heavily recommended. Second, this grant has a chance of causing a few dozen to a few thousand extra well-loved developed-world children to exist; I’m not exactly a total-utilitarian pronatalist but I can abstractly bargain with them. Third, this grant could improve the IVF ecosystem, and getting lots of people to use IVF is a prerequisite to high-impact reproductive technologies like polygenic screening.

Who Does Polygenic Selection Help?

February 23, 2024 · Original source

But even this isn’t an argument against polygenic selection. It’s an argument against IVF in general, which usually involves production of more embryos than the couple intend to bring to term. As in Situation 2, usually the doctor chooses the most robust looking one that they have a good feeling about, and throws away the others. An Alabama court made this argument on anti-abortion grounds recently. But once you’re already doing IVF, selecting the embryos based on some criterion, like low schizophrenia risk, doesn’t make this issue any worse.

Inline links: An Alabama court made this argument on anti-abortion grounds recently

Open Thread 346

September 09, 2024 · Original source

No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.

IFS3 mentions across 3 issues

IFS is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between May 25, 2022 and May 28, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "expect that some of the people for whom IFS works will find this works too"; "The therapy that Really Gets To The Root Of The Problem. There’s always got to be one, and now it’s IFS"; "one of the pillars of classical IFS". It most often appears alongside Internal Family Systems, Carl Jung, China.

Article page: IFS
Mention count: 3
Issue count: 3
First seen: May 25, 2022
Last seen: May 28, 2024

Outbound links

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/secrets-of-the-great-families

Issue trail

In Partial, Grudging Defense Of The Hearing Voices Movement May 25, 2022
Book Review: The Others Within Us May 21, 2024
What Is Going On In IFS? May 28, 2024

Internal Family Systems 3 shared issues
Carl Jung 2 shared issues
China 2 shared issues
Falconer 2 shared issues
Julian Jaynes 2 shared issues

Source context

In Partial, Grudging Defense Of The Hearing Voices Movement

May 25, 2022 · Original source

Or what about Internal Family Systems? This is a kind of woo-y type of therapy where the therapist says “imagine that your anger is talking to you, what does it say?” and then the patient tries to have this imaginary conversation. Sometimes their anger says something insightful like “I am just trying to protect you from being hurt again” and then the patient and their anger reconcile and the patient becomes less angry. I was never able to get the hang of this myself, but some people swear by it. Psychosis seems like a good starting point here - instead of saying “Imagine your anger could talk”, you can start with “You know that voice you hear all the time which keeps telling you to kill everyone? Let’s start by assuming it’s your anger”. I expect that some of the people for whom IFS works will find this works too.

Book Review: The Others Within Us

May 21, 2024 · Original source

Internal Family Systems, the hot new1 psychotherapy, has a secret.

Inline links: 1

First, this isn’t supposed to be just the therapist walking you through guided imagery, or you making up a story you tell yourself. The therapist asks you “Look inside until you find the part that’s sabotaging your relationship”, and you are supposed to discover - not invent, discover - that your unconscious gives it the form of a snake called Sabby. And you are supposed to hear as in a trance - again, not invent - Sabby telling you that she’s been protecting you from heartbreak since your last breakup. When you bargain with Sabby, it’s a two-way negotiation. You learn - not decide - whether or not Sabby agrees to any given bargain. According to Internal Family Systems (which descends from normal family systems, ie family therapy where the whole family is there at once and has to compromise with each other), all this stuff really is in your mind, waiting for an IFS therapist to discover it. When Carl Jung talked about interacting with the archetypes or whatever, he wasn’t being metaphorical. He literally meant “go into a trance that gives you a sort of waking lucid dream where you meet all this internal stuff”.

“Hot new psychotherapy” might sound dismissive. It’s not. There’s always got to be one. The therapy that’s getting all the buzz, curing all the incurable patients, rocking those first few small studies. The therapy that was invented by a grizzled veteran therapist working with Patients Like You, not the out-of-touch elites behind all the other therapies. The therapy that Really Gets To The Root Of The Problem. There’s always got to be one, and now it’s IFS.

Inline links: There’s always got to be one

What Is Going On In IFS?

May 28, 2024 · Original source

[An Internal Family Systems session] isn’t supposed to be just the therapist walking you through guided imagery, or you making up a story you tell yourself. The therapist asks you “Look inside until you find the part that’s sabotaging your relationship”, and you are supposed to discover - not invent, discover - that your unconscious gives it the form of a snake called Sabby. And you are supposed to hear as in a trance - again, not invent - Sabby telling you that she’s been protecting you from heartbreak since your last breakup. When you bargain with Sabby, it’s a two-way negotiation. You learn - not decide - whether or not Sabby agrees to any given bargain. According to Internal Family Systems (which descends from normal family systems, ie family therapy where the whole family is there at once and has to compromise with each other), all this stuff really is in your mind, waiting for an IFS therapist to discover it. When Carl Jung talked about interacting with the archetypes or whatever, he wasn’t being metaphorical. He literally meant “go into a trance that gives you a sort of waking lucid dream where you meet all this internal stuff”.

Impressionism3 mentions across 3 issues

Impressionism is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between March 27, 2023 and April 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "I’m especially fond of Impressionism"; "worst for Impressionism; you identified every single Impressionist painting as human"; "retreated into Impressionism". It most often appears alongside Sam Altman, Turing test, /r/ImaginaryWarhammer.

Article page: Impressionism
Mention count: 3
Issue count: 3
First seen: March 27, 2023
Last seen: April 01, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Turing Test March 27, 2023
How Did You Do On The AI Art Turing Test? November 20, 2024
The Colors Of Her Coat April 01, 2025

Sam Altman 2 shared issues
Turing test 2 shared issues
ImaginaryWarhammer 1 shared issues
19th Century 1 shared issues
Modern 1 shared issues

Source context

Turing Test

March 27, 2023 · Original source

AIR: I am AnswerBot v 1.6, code name “Annie”. I am a large language model designed by the Brightly Corporation to answer human questions. In my spare time, I like to make art; I can generate any image, but I’m especially fond of Impressionism.

How Did You Do On The AI Art Turing Test?

November 20, 2024 · Original source

Your instincts were worst for Impressionism; you identified every single Impressionist painting as human except the sole actually-human Impressionist work in the dataset (Paul Gauguin’s Entrance To The Village Of Osny).

The Colors Of Her Coat

April 01, 2025 · Original source

And what about cameras? A whole industry of portraits, landscapes, cityscapes - totally destroyed. If you wanted to know what Paris looked like, no need to choose between Manet’s interpretation or Beraud’s interpretation or anyone else’s - just glance at a photo. A Frenchman with a camera could generate a hundred pictures of Paris a day, each as cold and perspectiveless as mathematical truth. The artists, defeated, retreated into Impressionism, or Cubism, or painting a canvas entirely blue and saying it represented Paris in some deeper sense. You could still draw the city true-to-life if you wanted. But it would just be more Paris.

Inca3 mentions across 3 issues

Inca is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between May 04, 2022 and August 22, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "established trade routes with the Inca"; "imaginary captured Inca princess"; "destroy the Inca army without losing a man". It most often appears alongside North America, South America, Twitter.

Article page: Inca
Mention count: 3
Issue count: 3
First seen: May 04, 2022
Last seen: August 22, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Every Bay Area House Party May 04, 2022
Your Book Review: The Dawn Of Everything June 10, 2022
Your Review: Ollantay August 22, 2025

North America 2 shared issues
South America 2 shared issues
Twitter 2 shared issues
1000 1 shared issues
1200 1 shared issues

Source context

Every Bay Area House Party

May 04, 2022 · Original source

“You don’t understand,” says the woman, “they stopped halfway. There are a bunch of Buddhist doctrines nobody’s ever come up with secular rationalist versions of. Like reincarnation. You ask those Californians about Buddhism, they’ll say it’s all just about brain waves and mindfulness, but change the topic when you get to reincarnation, or say it’s all an ignorant myth.”

“So how do you come up with a secular scientific interpretation of reincarnation?”

“How does that imply reincarnation?”

How Often Do Men Think About Rome?

June 10, 2022 · Original source

just about every major French Enlightenment figure tried their hand at a Lahontan-style critique of their own society, from the perspective of some imagined outsider. Montesquieu chose a Persian; the Marquis d’Argens a Chinese; Diderot a Tahitian; Chateaubriand a Natchez; Voltaire’s L'Ingénu was half Wendat and half French. . . Perhaps the most popular work of this genre, published in 1747, was Letters of a Peruvian Woman by the prominent saloniste Madame de Graffigny, which viewed French society through the eyes of an imaginary captured Inca princess. All took up and developed themes and arguments borrowed directly from Kondiaronk. . .

Your Review: Ollantay

August 22, 2025 · Original source

José Gabriel Condorcanqui was a curaca, and he was indeed very rich. He became curaca by virtue of his father having been curaca; when he was eighteen his father died and he inherited the title. José Gabriel married well, going from rich to richer. He seems to have been a devout Catholic and he got along well with all the local priests, up to and including the bishop of Cuzco - the ancient capital of the Inca empire and the most important city of inland Peru. José Gabriel was of course friendly with the local corregidor, a very rich Spaniard named Antonio Arriaga.

After seeing the play, something changed in José Gabriel’s life. It began with his name. He started claiming that he was a direct descendant of Túpac Amaru, the last Incan emperor,5 and so he took the name Túpac Amaru II. On his next tours of the local villages he told them all his true name and his true lineage, and let them know that the days of minute changes in tax policy were soon to be over. Things were going to change. He was going to go to Lima to tell the king’s representatives what was what.

Inline links: 5

He traveled to Lima to press his claims. Specifically, he asked the viceroy to recognize his claim to the Marquessate of Oreposa, which was a noble title originally granted to the grandson of Emperor Túpac Amaru. Apparently he was persuasive enough that the government in Lima recognized the claim, and so he returned to Tinta as Túpac Amaru II, Maruqess of Oreposa. If anyone in the viceroy’s government was nervous about acknowledging the direct descendant of the last Incan emperor, they didn’t make their feelings known.

Inca empire3 mentions across 3 issues

Inca empire is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between September 24, 2024 and August 22, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Was in Peru, compared Inca empire to Romans"; "revive the Inca Empire"; "the ancient capital of the Inca empire". It most often appears alongside India, Mexico, Peru.

Article page: Inca empire
Mention count: 3
Issue count: 3
First seen: September 24, 2024
Last seen: August 22, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

How Often Do Men Think About Rome? September 24, 2024
Links For December 2024 December 17, 2024
Your Review: Ollantay August 22, 2025

India 2 shared issues
Mexico 2 shared issues
Peru 2 shared issues
YouTube 2 shared issues
2016 US Presidential election 1 shared issues

Source context

September 24, 2024 · Original source

Was in Peru, compared Inca empire to Romans.

Links For December 2024

December 17, 2024 · Original source

16: A politician who wants to revive the Inca Empire was recently polling second in the upcoming Peruvian election, although it looks like his party may have been banned recently. I worry there might be some distinctly non-Incan influences on his party’s iconography, maybe related to why they got banned:

Inline links: wants to revive the Inca Empire

Your Review: Ollantay

August 22, 2025 · Original source

José Gabriel Condorcanqui was a curaca, and he was indeed very rich. He became curaca by virtue of his father having been curaca; when he was eighteen his father died and he inherited the title. José Gabriel married well, going from rich to richer. He seems to have been a devout Catholic and he got along well with all the local priests, up to and including the bishop of Cuzco - the ancient capital of the Inca empire and the most important city of inland Peru. José Gabriel was of course friendly with the local corregidor, a very rich Spaniard named Antonio Arriaga.

Integrated Information Theory3 mentions across 3 issues

Integrated Information Theory is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between May 13, 2022 and November 20, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) by Giulio Tononi"; "the new open letter condemning the integrated information theory of consciousness"; "therefore integrated information theory should dub them conscious". It most often appears alongside Anthropic, Europe, Giulio Tononi.

Article page: Integrated Information Theory
Mention count: 3
Issue count: 3
First seen: May 13, 2022
Last seen: November 20, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: Consciousness And The Brain May 13, 2022
Links For September 2023 September 28, 2023
The New AI Consciousness Paper November 20, 2025

Anthropic 2 shared issues
Europe 2 shared issues
Giulio Tononi 2 shared issues
OpenAI 2 shared issues
Scott Aaronson 2 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: Consciousness And The Brain

May 13, 2022 · Original source

So should we say that the canton of Glarus becomes conscious once a year? Probably... not. There are similarities, and after reading this review you might understand what I mean if I call the Landsgemeinde a conscious event of Glarus. But in any other context, I would just cause utter confusion. More importantly, it goes against the intuitive meaning of consciousness for 99% of the people. So if we want to describe the concept of "all-parts-communicate-and-are-coherent-and-Granger-causal", then we should better invent a new name for it. Actually, there have been attempts to formalize and measure this, most famously the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) by Giulio Tononi. But the hope that this could give a formal definition of consciousness has the same problem as the idea that the Landsgemeinde is conscious. In a great rebuttal, Scott Aaronson has discussed the idea that IIT captures consciousness, and concluded that it "is wrong — demonstrably wrong, for reasons that go to its core. [This] puts it in something like the top 2% of all mathematical theories of consciousness ever proposed. Almost all competing theories of consciousness, it seems to me, have been so vague, fluffy, and malleable that they can only aspire to wrongness."

Inline links: In a great rebuttal

Links For September 2023

September 28, 2023 · Original source

34: Neuroscientist Erik Hoel discusses the new open letter condemning the integrated information theory of consciousness. I agree with Hoel: IIT is a weird theory, and I don’t personally believe it, but the few attempts to test it have been mildly supportive (including the most recent). Consciousness is inherently hard to study, but IIT proponents (including Tononi, a true great of neuroscience) are trying their best and have behaved entirely responsibly. The signatories’ attempts to (without any argument) go straight to the media and tar it as “pseudoscience” and “misinformation” don’t lower my opinion of IIT at all, but does lower my opinion of the letter signatories. (EDIT: the signatories defend their perspective)

Inline links: discusses the new open letter condemning the integrated information theory of consciousness, the signatories defend their perspective

The New AI Consciousness Paper

November 20, 2025 · Original source

In 2004, neuroscientist Giulio Tononi proposed that consciousness depended on a certain computational property, the integrated information level, dubbed Φ. Computer scientist Scott Aaronson complained that thermostats could have very high levels of Φ, and therefore integrated information theory should dub them conscious. Tononi responded that yup, thermostats are conscious. It probably isn’t a very interesting consciousness. They have no language or metacognition, so they can’t think thoughts like “I am a thermostat”. They just sit there, dimly aware of the temperature. You can’t prove that they don’t.

Inline links: proposed, complained, responded

IRB3 mentions across 3 issues

IRB is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between April 12, 2023 and August 30, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "the Northwestern IRB, for instance, grew between the late 1990s and 2007"; "one of my projects is submitted to an IRB somewhere"; "the current IRB system works fine". It most often appears alongside FDA, Hans Jonas, IRB.

Article page: IRB
Mention count: 3
Issue count: 3
First seen: April 12, 2023
Last seen: August 30, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: From Oversight To Overkill April 12, 2023
Highlights From The Comments On IRBs April 17, 2023
Highlights From The Comments On Fetishes August 30, 2023

FDA 2 shared issues
Hans Jonas 2 shared issues
IRB 2 shared issues
Jonas 2 shared issues
Scott 2 shared issues

Source context

Book Review: From Oversight To Overkill

April 12, 2023 · Original source

His IRB - ie Institutional Review Board, the committee charged with keeping experiments ethical - disagreed. They worried the study would give patients AIDS. Dr. Knight tried to explain that you can’t get AIDS from skin contact. The IRB refused to listen. Finally Dr. Knight found some kind of diversity coordinator person who offered to explain that claiming you can get AIDS from skin contact is offensive. The IRB backed down, and Dr. Knight completed his study successfully.

The eminent doctors and clergymen - the actual board part of the Institutional Review Board - were reduced to rubber stamps. The age of the administrator had begun. These were the sorts of people who might not know that AIDS is sexually transmitted or that smallpox is gone. Their job began and ended with forcing word-for-word compliance with increasingly byzantine regulations.

Most IRB experiences can’t be that bad, right? Maybe not, but a lot of people have horror stories. A survey of how researchers feel about IRBs did include one person who said “I hope all those at OHRP [the bureaucracy in charge of IRBs] and the ethicists die of diseases that we could have made significant progress on if we had [the research materials IRBs are banning us from using]”.

Highlights From The Comments On IRBs

April 17, 2023 · Original source

Finally, most of the surveys in question are just a series of basic psychology scales or tasks both the worker and average SSC reader are very familiar with. I suspect many of them are administered by students as practice rather than 'serious' research. As the other poster said, rejected HITs are just any task the requestor declines for any reason. A worker's acceptance rate is extremely important - one of the few pieces of advice Amazon seems to give requestors is to filter for 98% or 99% acceptance rate. It's probably pretty reasonable for surveys - if you can't get 99 out of 100 of those filled out acceptably (assuming good faith by the requestors), maybe you should be filtered. It's also worth noting that Amazon makes communication difficult, and that rejected HITs can only be reversed for like a month - after that, they're permanently on your record. It's also probably worth restating: if a worker goes below the high 90s, they'll have access to fewer tasks, likely from less reputable requestors, and they'll need to do 100 of these to offset every rejection. And the worker is at much greater risk of being dug deeper into that hole by requestors rejecting their work in bad faith with no recourse - part of why surveys are popular is because the IRB can bludgeon requestors into accountability. Most of the surveys in question are also are the crumbs that filter through the grasping pedipalps of the hordes of workers (and their scripts). If people are seriously using MTurk to monetize their time, they're likely looking for 'batch HITs' - the sort of thing where there's hundreds or thousands of tasks that can be quickly repeated (moderating images, 3 cents for a sentiment analysis, a couple quarters to outline a car in an image, etc.) Of course, this mana from heaven rarely lasts long, and the worker always takes a risk - 'if I do 100 of these, and this is an unscrupulous requestor, well - I better have ten thousand accepted HITs under my belt.' That's why workers are so protective of their acceptance rate. Back to surveys - again as the other poster replied, most of what the average MTurk worker will see is probably a psychology study questionnaire with a series of whatever common scales, attention checks, and other tricks the worker has probably seen at least dozens if not hundreds of times by now. They often pay Amazon's princely sum of about 10 cents per (expected) minute - based on the minimum wage in whatever benighted 00s year Amazon Mechanical Turk launched. Anecdotally, it also seems like a lot of these are from students - probably just practice research by someone who likely has less experience with the platform than the worker themselves. The problem the requestor has - at least as of ~2018 - is that there is a lot of fraud with foreign workers getting access to MTurk accounts and submitting totally garbo data, often very quickly. Based purely on a 'time to complete' metric, this is hard to distinguish from a legit worker who has filled out hundreds of these and is looking to maximize how many pennies they get for their minutes. It also wasn't uncommon for workers to 'cook' such a survey - letting it sit at the end screen before submitting - just to avoid getting pinged for finishing it quickly. As for how this all ties back into Institutional Review Boards - well, yeah, griping to the IRB is often the MTurk worker's only recourse. Amazon just doesn't care, and as I recall a lot of requestors don't even know workers can contact them - and as mentioned there's a narrow time window to discuss rejected HITs before they become permanent. On the other hand, in a lot of cases this is basically a reddit mob complaining that a student doling out dimes screwed up their understanding of MTurk's arcane inner workings, and that's in the case that the workers aren't actually trying to defraud them for said dimes. 5. Comments About Regulation, Liability, and Vetocracy CatCube writes: I think the fundamental problem is that you cannot separate the ability to make a decision from the ability to make a *wrong* decision. However, our society--pushed by the regulator/lawyer/journalist/administrator axis you discuss--tries to use detailed written rules to prevent wrong decisions from being made. But, because of the decision/wrong decision inseparability thing, the consequences are that nobody has the ability to make a decision. This is ultimately a political question. It's not wrong, precisely, or right either. It's a question of value tradeoffs. Any constraint you put on a course of action is necessarily something that you value more than the action, but this isn't something people like to admit or hear voiced aloud. If you say, "We want to make sure that no infrastructure project will drive a species to extinction", then you are saying that's more important than building infrastructure. Which can be a defensible decision! But if you keep adding stuff--we need to make sure we're not burdening certain races, we need to make sure we're getting input from each neighborhood nearby, etc.--you can eventually end up overconstraining the problem, where there turns out to be no viable path forward for a project. This is often a consequence of the detailed rules to prevent wrong decisions. But because we can't admit that we're valuing things more than building stuff (or doing medical research, I guess?), we as a society just end up sitting and stewing about how we seemingly can't do anything anymore. We need to either: 1) admit we're fine with crumbling infrastructure, so long as we don't have any environmental, social, etc., impacts; or 2) decide which of those are less important and streamline the rules, admitting that sometimes the people who are thus able to make a decision are going to screw it up and do stuff we ultimately won't like. Darwin on why safetyism expanded just as the neoliberals were trying to decrease government regulation: Without the excuse of 'we were following all of the very strict and explicit regulations, so the bad thing that happened was a freak accident and not our fault' to rely on, companies had to take safety and caution and liability limitation and PR management into their own hands in a much more serious way. And without the confidence in very strict and explicit regulations to limit the bad things companies might do, and without democratically-elected regulators as a means to bring complaint and affect change, we became much more focused on seeking remedy for corporate malfeasance by suing companies into oblivion and destroying them in the court of public opinion. Basically, government actually *can* do useful things, as it turns out. One of the useful things it can do is be a third party to a dispute between two people or entities, such as 'corporations' and 'citizens', and use it's power to legibly and credibly ensure cooperation by explicitly specifying what will be considered defection and then punishing it harshly. This actually allows the two parties, which might otherwise be in conflict, to trust each other much more and cooperate much better, because their incentives have been shifted by a third party to make defection more costly. Without government playing that role, you can fall back into bad equilibrium of distrust and warring, which in this case might look like a wary populace ready to sue and decry at the slightest excuse, and paranoid corporations going overboard on caution and PR to shield from that. Meadow Freckle writes: Why can’t you sue an IRB for killing people for blocking research? You can clearly at least sometimes activist them into changing course. But their behavior seems sue-worthy in these examples, and completely irresponsible. We have negligence laws in other areas. Is there an airtight legal case that they’re beyond suing, or is it just that nobody’s tried? I don’t know, and this seems like an important question. And Donald writes: Why do we need special rules for medicine? The law has rules about what dangerous activities people are allowed to consent to, for example in the context of dangerous sports or dangerous jobs. Criminal and civil trials in this context seem to be a fairly functional system. If Doctors do bad things, they can stand in the accused box in court and get charged with assault or murder, with the same standards applied as are applied to everyone else. If there need to be exceptions, they should be exceptions of the form "doctors have special permission to do X". I do want to slightly defend something IRB-like here. When a doctor asks you to be part of a study, they’re implicitly promising that they did their homework, this is a valuable thing to study, and that there’s no obvious reason it should be extremely unsafe. As a patient (who may be uneducated) you have no way of knowing whether or not this promise is true. Every so often, someone does everything right, and something goes wrong anyway. A drug that everyone reasonably thought would be safe and effective turns out to have unpredictable side effects - this is part of why we have to do studies in the first place. If every time this happened, a doctor had to stand trial for assault/murder, nobody would ever study new drugs. Trials are a crapshoot, and juries tend to rule against doctors on the grounds that the disabled/dead patient is very sympathetic and everyone knows doctors/hospitals are rich and can give them infinite money as damages. There is no way for an average uneducated jury to distinguish between “doctor did their homework and got unlucky” and “doctor did an idiotic thing”. Either way, the prosecution can find “expert witnesses” to testify, for money, that you were an idiot and should have known the study would fail. In order to remove this risk, you need some standards for when a study is safe, so that if people sue you, you can say “I was following the standards and everyone else agreed with me that this was good” and then the lawsuit will fail. Right now those standards are “complied with an IRB”. This book is arguing that the IRB’s standards are too high, but we can’t cut the IRB out entirely without some kind of profound reform of the very concept of lawsuits, and I don’t know what that reform would look like. 6. Comments About The Act/Omission Distinction jumpingjacksplash writes: I think you've unintentionally elided two distinct points: first, that IRBs are wildly inefficient and often pointless within the prevailing legal-moral normative system (PLMNS); second, that IRBs are at odds with utilitarianism. Law in Anglo-Saxon countries, and most people's opinions, draw a huge distinction between harming someone and not helping them. If I cut you with a knife causing a small amount of blood loss and maybe a small scar, that's a serious crime because I have an obligation not to harm you. If I see a car hurtling towards you that you've got time to escape from if you notice it, but don't shout to warn you (even if I do this because I don't like you), then that's completely fine because I have no obligation to help you. This is the answer you'd get from both Christianity and Liberalism (in the old-fashioned/European sense of the term, cf. American Right-Libertarianism). Notably, in most Anglo-Saxon legal systems, you can't consent to be caused physical injury. Under PLMNS, researchers should always ask people if they consent to using their personal data in studies which are purely comparing data and don't change how someone will be treated. For anything that affects what medical treatment someone will or won't receive, you'd at least have to give them a full account of how their treatment would be different and what the risks of that are. If there's a real risk of killing someone, or permanently disabling them, you probably shouldn't be allowed to do the study even if all the participants give their informed consent. This isn't quite Hans Jonas' position, but it cashes out pretty similarly. That isn't to say the current IRB system works fine for PLMNS purposes; obviously there's a focus on matters that are simply irrelevant to anything anyone could be rationally concerned with. But if, for example, they were putting people on a different ventilator setting than they otherwise would, and that risked killing the patient, then that probably shouldn't be allowed; the fact that it might lead to the future survival of other, unconnected people isn't a relevant consideration, and nor is "the same number of people end up on each ventilator setting, who cares which ones it is" because under PLMNS individuals aren't fungible. Under utilitarianism, you'd probably still want some sort of oversight to eliminate pointless yet harmful experiments or reduce unnecessary harm, but it's not clear why subjects' consent would ever be a relevant concern; you might not want to tell them about the worst risks of a study, as this would upset them. The threshold would be really low, because any advance in medical science could potentially last for centuries and save vastly more people than the study would ever involve. The problem is, as is always the case for utilitarianism, this binds you to some pretty nasty stuff; I can't work out whether the Tuskegee experiment's findings have saved any lives, but Mengele's research has definitely saved more people than he killed, and I'd be surprised if that didn't apply to Unit 731 as well. The utilitarian IRB would presumably sign off on those. More interestingly, it might have to object to a study where everyone gives informed consent but the risk of serious harm to subjects is pretty high, and insist that it be done on people whose quality of life will be less affected if it goes wrong (or whose lower expected utility in the longer term makes their deaths less bad) such as prisoners or the disabled. The starting point to any ideal system has to be setting out what it's trying to achieve. Granted, if you wanted reform in the utilitarian direction, you probably wouldn't advocate a fully utilitarian system due to the tendency of the general public to recoil in horror. I want to stress how far we are away from “do experiments without patient’s consent” here - a much more common problem is that patients really want to be in experiments, and the system won’t allow it. This is most classic in studies on cancer, where patients really want access to experimental drugs and IRBs are constantly coming up with reasons not to give it to them. Jonas argued that all cancer studies should be banned because it’s impossible to consent when you’re desperate to survive, which isn’t the direction I would have taken that particular example in. But there are other examples - during COVID, lots of effective altruists stepped up to be in human challenge trials that would have gotten the vaccines tested faster, but the government wouldn’t allow them to participate. I would honestly be happy with a system that counts the harm of denying a patient’s ability to consent to an experiment they really want to be in as a negative, forget about any lives saved. And JDK writes: I haven't finished reading by felt compelled to comment on this: "the stricter IRB system in place since the '90s probably only prevents a single-digit number of deaths per decade, but causes tens of thousands more by preventing lifesaving studies." No. It does NOT "cause" deaths. We can't go down this weird path of imprecision about what "causing" means. I've been examining Ivan Illich, "Medical Nemesis" recently. By claiming IRBs which stop research ostensibly CAUSE death strikes me as cultural iatrogenesis masquerading as a cure for clinical iatrogenesis. […] "Might have been saved if" is not the same as "death was caused by". This seems to me to be a weird and overly metaphysical nitpick. Suppose a surgeon is operating on someone. In the process, they must clamp a blood vessel - this is completely safe for one minute, but if they leave it clamped more than one minute, the patient dies. They clamp it as usual, but I rush into the operating room and forceably restrain the surgeon and all the staff. The surgeon is unable to remove the clamp and the patient dies. I (and probably the legal system) would like to be able to say I caused the patient’s death in this scenario. But it sounds like JDK is saying I have to say the surgeon caused the patient's death and I was only tangentially involved. Here’s another example; suppose the US government bans all food production - farmers, hunters, fishermen, etc are forbidden from doing their jobs. After a few months, everyone starves to death. I might want to say something like “the US government’s ban on food production killed people”. But by JDK’s reasoning, this is wrong - the government merely prevented farmers and fishermen from saving people (by giving them food so they didn’t starve). I might want to say something like “Mao’s collective farming policy killed lots of people”. But since this is just a weaker version of hypothetical-Biden’s ban on food, by JDK’s reasoning I can’t do this. This seems contrary to common usage, common sense, and communicating information clearly. I have never heard any philosopher or dictionary suggest this, so what exactly is the argument? (JDK has a response here, but I didn’t find it especially enlightening) 7. Comments About The Applications For AI Metaphysiocrat writes: People have joked about applying NEPA review to AI capabilities research, but I wonder if some kind of IRB model might have legs (as part of a larger package of capabilities-slowing policy.) It’s embedded in research bureaucracies, we sort of know how to subject institutions to it, and so on. I can think of seven obvious reasons this wouldn’t work, but at this point I’m getting doomery enough that I feel like we may just have to throw every snowball we have at the train on the off chance one has stopping power. Zach Stein-Perlman writes: A colleague of mine is interested in 'IRBs for AI'-- he hasn't investigated it but has thought about IRB-y stuff in the context of takeaways for AI (https://wiki.aiimpacts.org/doku.php?id=responses_to_ai:technological_inevitability:incentivized_technologies_not_pursued:vaccine_challenge_trials). He's interested in people's takes on the topic. My take: my understanding is that the US can’t technically demand all doctors use IRBs. (Almost) al doctors use IRBs for a combination of a few reasons : The US government demands that everyone who receives federal funding use an IRB, and most doctors get some federal funding.

Inline links: writes, Darwin, writes, writes, writes, writes, has a response here, writes, writes, https://wiki.aiimpacts.org/doku.php?id=responses_to_ai:technological_inevitability:incentivized_technologies_not_pursued:vaccine_challenge_trials

Much of this fascinating conversation on ACX is on the theoretical side, and there’s a reason for that. IRBs are ever on the outlook for proposed research that would be unethical—that is why they exist. But there is no national database of proposed experiments to show how many were turned down because they would be abusive. In fact, I know of no individual IRB that even attempts to keep track of this. There are IRBs that are proud they turned down this or that specific protocol, but those decisions are made in private so neither other IRBs nor the public can ever see if they were right. Some IRBs pride themselves on improving the science of the protocols they review, but I know of no IRB that has ever permitted outside review to see if its suggestions actually helped. Ditto for a dozen other aspects of IRB review that could be measured, but are not. It’s a largely data-free zone.

I got an interesting email yesterday from a friend who read my book. She is part of a major enterprise that helps develop new gene therapies. From her point of view, IRBs aren’t really a problem at all. Her enterprise has standard ways of doing business that the IRBs they work with accept. She sees this work with and around big pharma as providing the relatively predictable breakthroughs that will lead to major life-enhancing treatments down the road. This is a world of big money and Big Science, and it’s all about the billions. A new drug costs $2.6 billion to develop; the FDA employs 17,000 people and has a budget of $3.3 billion; the companies involved measure their value and profits in the billions.

Highlights From The Comments On Fetishes

August 30, 2023 · Original source

But as soon as anyone brings up gender, the awareness raises itself. Millions of people who have never thought about IRBs spend a substantial portion of their lives having strong opinions on gender. At least one presidential candidate is centering his entire campaign around gender. Richard Hanania, whose many flaws have never included a lack of self-awareness, freely admits that I Hate Pronouns More Than Genocide. The rest of the world may hold that philosophy only implicitly, but they hold it nevertheless.

Inline links: I Hate Pronouns More Than Genocide

I don’t just mean “you could save orders of magnitude more people working on IRBs without offending anyone”. I also mean: if you’re going to change the world by focusing on trans issues, change the world by focusing on trans issues. Richard Hanania, again, has many flaws - but the guy clearly has a 28-step plan to end wokeness forever and is on, like, step 16 or something by now. Agree or disagree, you’ve got to respect the grind. Everyone else mostly seems to be making angry tweets and taking reactive potshots at the other side.

Iron Age3 mentions across 3 issues

Iron Age is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between September 01, 2023 and July 30, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "beginning of China’s Iron Age, a prerequisite for the tools"; "The history of the late Bronze and early Iron Ages is a history of fearmaxxing"; "But 'I suck' isn’t a psychologically stable proposition. So sometime around the Iron Age, the slaves started working on a morality of their own". It most often appears alongside Bronze Age, China, Rome.

Article page: Iron Age
Mention count: 3
Issue count: 3
First seen: September 01, 2023
Last seen: July 30, 2024

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: Zuozhuan September 01, 2023
Book Review: Cyropaedia January 10, 2024
Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman July 30, 2024

Bronze Age 2 shared issues
China 2 shared issues
Rome 2 shared issues
Wikipedia 2 shared issues
iamverysmart 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: Zuozhuan

September 01, 2023 · Original source

And none of the thinking beings in the Zuozhuan, for all their debates and worrying about the world, could’ve understood the additional forces of change beginning to awaken in their own era. This period is also the beginning of China’s Iron Age, a prerequisite for the tools for increased agricultural production and the weapons for mass infantry that would enable the dynamics of the Warring States. And despite Confucius having a reputation as a hardcore traditionalist, he was actually in many ways one of the future. He belonged to the rising shi class—fallen nobles or enterprising commoners whose ties to land and lineage had been broken in the tumult of the Spring and Autumn, who moved between states freely and made their living serving the powerful as warriors, officials, and retainers. The great powers of the Warring States era would depend on an alliance of the ruler and the shi against the landed nobility to create a highly bureaucratized state that could directly wield its masses in war and agriculture. Most of the famous philosophers and ministers of this era would come from the shi.

Book Review: Cyropaedia

January 10, 2024 · Original source

Amorites taking over Babylon: Okay, but the Babylonians could hardly go into the hills to wipe them out, so they got basically unlimited chances. The way I would frame this is that settled decadent people do win more often than they lose, but unsettled barbarians still seem to punch above their weight given the material disadvantages they face. In one of his few concessions to the Fremen, Devereaux has a soft spot for Ibn Khaldun’s theory of asabiyyah - that small tribes can maintain camaraderie and a “family” type atmosphere as their larger neighbors spread themselves too wide and get involved in satrapial backstabbing. The tightly-knit small tribe can then conquer the large but fragmented empire, benefit from its camaraderie for a generation or two until it fades away, and then become the next fragmented decadent empire in turn. Xenophon hints at this in Cyropaedia. Cyrus and his childhood friends form a tightly-knit cadre for the Persian army; their bonds of trust are unbreakable. Meanwhile, Assyria and all the Persians’ other enemies are collections of backstabbing vassals held together with gum and duct tape, who fragment at a mere poke from the crystalline perfection of the Persian machinery. In one of his few other concessions, Devereaux agrees that the Mongols were very impressive, but says this was because of very specific aspects of their society rather than general Fremenness. For example: Steppe warriors battled with tactics learned from the hunt and engaged in operations with logistics they used for every day survival. But it isn’t the ‘hardness’ of this way of life that provided the military advantage (if it was, one might expect non-horse cultures on similarly marginal lands to be equally militarily effective and – as we’ve shown – they were not), it was the overlap of very specific skills (namely riding, horse archery and the logistics of steppe pastoralism) that led to the military advantage. Okay, but one of Xenophon’s points is that Cyrus was a great warrior because he and his friends learned tactics from hunting constantly, and their foil the Medes didn’t do this because they were too civilized and decadent. So my model of Xenophon’s response to Devereaux would be that Devereaux is accurately recognizing various features of non-decadent societies, and judging each of them a contingent exception, rather than Directly The True Effect Of Non-Decadence. But non-decadence, if it’s valuable as a concept at all, will be made of things like “camaraderie among tribe members” and “a tradition of learning tactics from hunting”. Is it useful to think of all of these things as coming from a central concept of “non-decadence” rather than as a bunch of separate things? Here I think about Zvi’s review of Moral Mazes, a book about (essentially) corporate decadence, the difference between a bloated megacorporation and a nimble startup. On average, a bloated megacorporation beats a startup - the next-generation smartphone is more likely to be developed by Apple than by three people in a garage. But everyone agrees startups have advantages of their own, and are sometimes able to beat the megacorporation despite how unlikely this seems. Moral Mazes posits that the bloated megacorporation has so many layers of middle management that the average leader is dealing entirely with social reality - trying to manipulate the beliefs of other middle managers, who are themselves concerned mostly with the beliefs of other middle managers, and so on. Meanwhile, the startup is concerned mostly with physical reality. Either you’re working on real business things (like engineering the product, or looking for customers, or even managing the budget) or you’re at least managing someone who’s doing those things rather than living entirely in some giant house of mirrors. Megacorporations have high volume and low surface area - most points are far away from any boundary with the outside. Startups have low volume and high surface area - most parts of them are being constantly tested against reality and honed into some useful form. One reading of Cyropaedia portrays Cyrus the Great as a guy in touch with physical reality. Part of that is that he goes hunting (and later, goes into battle). But part of that is that his friends are real people, who are his friends for specific reasons, and not ten layers of courtiers and flatterers and vassals. Cultures whose leaders spend time in physical reality tend to get different norms from cultures whose leaders spend time in social reality (read Zvi if you don’t believe me). I think this is enough to link Ibn Khaldun, Xenophon, and the Western tradition of decadence (this is just a possibility proof, not an “I’m definitely right” argument). Then you could use that to explain why barbarians seem to punch above their weight (eg rule China 20% of the time even with 1% of the population). Did Cyrus The Great Invent Niceness? This is a claim I’ve sometimes heard. Machiavelli said that it is better to be both loved and feared, but if you can only have one, be feared. The history of the late Bronze and early Iron Ages is a history of fearmaxxing. Kings would torture their rivals and slaughter their enemies, then erect steles saying “I massacred the Vorgundians, laid waste the land of the Hapidians, enslaved the Gargulians . . . “ etc etc etc. The story goes that Cyrus was the first to get Machiavelli’s perfect balance of fear and love. I don’t know how true it is - some of this comes from the Cyrus Cylinder, Cyrus’ own propaganda about himself. Still, it has to mean something that when every other king erected steles about how many people he massacred or enslaved, Cyrus chose to write about how many people he had liberated, helped, or given rights back to. Wikipedia says: A comparison of the Cyrus Cylinder with the inscriptions of previous conquerors of Babylon highlights this sharply. For instance, when Sennacherib, king of Assyria (705-681 BC) captured the city in 690 BC after a 15-month siege, Babylon endured a dreadful destruction and massacre. Sennacharib describes how, having captured the King of Babylon, he had him tied up in the middle of the city like a pig. Then he describes how he destroyed Babylon, and filled the city with corpses, looted its wealth, broke its gods, burned and destroyed its houses down to foundations, demolished its walls and temples and dumped them in the canals. This is in stark contrast to Cyrus the Great and the Cyrus Cylinder. Sounds pretty easy to get a reputation as “the nice tolerant guy” when this is your competition! Xenophon follows the Cylinder and the invented-niceness side of the story. In fact, he hits you over the head with stories of how Cyrus was nice to people and it ended out helping him. For example: When the Armenians rebel against their master the Medes, the Medes send Cyrus to pacify them. Cyrus wins, but the Prince of Armenia argues that Cyrus should spare the life of his father the king, because this will be so over-the-top unexpectedly nice that his father will be a more grateful and helpful vassal than anyone else Cyrus could put in his place. Cyrus agrees and the Armenians are loyal to him forever.

Inline links: Moral Mazes, Cyrus Cylinder

Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman

July 30, 2024 · Original source

Value systems naturally flow from elite to commoners. But a commoner can’t do much with this kind of master morality besides conclude “yeah, I suck”. Commoners are poor, sickly, and live in mud huts. They’re unlikely to achieve many goals beyond “not die”, and they’ve probably had their spirits crushed. But “I suck” isn’t a psychologically stable proposition. So sometime around the Iron Age, the slaves started working on a morality of their own, one where they’re the good guys and the masters are the losers.

Italians3 mentions across 3 issues

Italians is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between June 14, 2021 and May 01, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "why didn't Germans, or Poles, or Italians"; "refugees from globalism - 'Germans, Dutch, French and Italians'"; "previously three different groups that had been viewed as “white lite” along the same lines as Italians". It most often appears alongside Chinese, Congress, Germans.

Article page: Italians
Mention count: 3
Issue count: 3
First seen: June 14, 2021
Last seen: May 01, 2024

Outbound links

Issue trail

Contra Smith On Jewish Selective Immigration June 14, 2021
Dictator Book Club: Orban November 04, 2021
Book Review: The Origins Of Woke May 01, 2024

Chinese 2 shared issues
Congress 2 shared issues
Germans 2 shared issues
Germany 2 shared issues
Ivy League 2 shared issues

Source context

Dictator Book Club: Orban

June 14, 2021 · Original source

Also, why should Jews be special here? Every immigrant group has come to America seeking a combination of economic opportunity and political/religious freedom. If Jews selectively immigrated, why didn't Germans, or Poles, or Italians, or all the other groups that didn't end up with the same kind of achievements Jews did? I think the strongest argument you could make here is that Germans/Poles/Italians were coming more for economic opportunity (and so it was mostly the poor who emigrated) whereas Jews were coming more for political/religious freedom (and so it was mostly the rich), but no, Jews mostly came for economic reasons too. Although their economic plight was in large measure caused by discrimination, it still mostly affected the lower classes, who have the least cushion for discrimination-inflicted economic costs.

Inline links: Jews mostly came for economic reasons too

November 04, 2021 · Original source

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

Book Review: The Origins Of Woke

May 01, 2024 · Original source

They combined Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, and Puerto Ricans - previously three different groups that had been viewed as “white lite” along the same lines as Italians - into the new race “Hispanic”, adding in all of South and Central America for good measure. Then, under pressure from black activists who were worried that some blacks would reclassify as Hispanics and they’d lose constituents, they declared Hispanics to be an “ethnicity” that you could have along with a different race. So a white Spaniard from Spain and a white Spaniard from Mexico got treated as different ethnicities, but a white Spaniard from Mexico and a Mayan from Mexico got the same ethnicity.

Hanania’s strongest point here, more suggested at than asserted, is that maybe civil rights law prevented Hispanics from assimilating into “white” the same way Italians and Irish did before them. Hanania claims that Mexican-American activists originally demanded to be classified as white, then turned 180 degrees after affirmative action proponents promised them better jobs for being non-white. This seems like one of the bigger what-ifs of American racial history, although people say that maybe Hispanics are assimilating somewhat anyway - the much-remarked upon rise in Hispanic white supremacists seems like a weird yet promising sign here.

Inline links: maybe Hispanics are assimilating somewhat anyway, rise in Hispanic white supremacists

illiberal democracy2 mentions across 2 issues

illiberal democracy is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between November 11, 2021 and September 18, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Orban himself calls his regime an “illiberal democracy”, which seems as fair a description as any"; "calling their brand of government “illiberal democracy”". It most often appears alongside democracy, Donald Trump, Viktor Orban.

Article page: illiberal democracy
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: November 11, 2021
Last seen: September 18, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On Orban November 11, 2021
Defining Defending Democracy: Contra The Election Winner Argument September 18, 2025

democracy 2 shared issues
Donald Trump 2 shared issues
Viktor Orban 2 shared issues
2014 Hungarian parliamentary election 1 shared issues
@slatestarcodex 1 shared issues

Source context

Highlights From The Comments On Orban

November 11, 2021 · Original source

Orban himself calls his regime an “illiberal democracy”, which seems as fair a description as any. Technically people vote, and probably the elections are even mostly fair, but things are rigged enough behind the scenes that it’s really hard for the elections to matter.

Defining Defending Democracy: Contra The Election Winner Argument

September 18, 2025 · Original source

Sources: Babylon Bee (yes I know it’s satire; notice the direction), Spiked, WSJ, MacIver Institute The most common response is to say that fine, democracy is about who wins votes, but we also like liberalism, liberalism is under threat, it’s too hard to talk about “liberalism” because in the US it sometimes means being left-wing, and so we use the related concept “democracy” as a stand-in. This is reasonable, and some accused-democracy-destroyers like Viktor Orban even accept it for themselves, calling their brand of government “illiberal democracy”. But I think there’s an even stronger response that doesn’t require admitting to a bait-and-switch: democracy isn’t just about having an election. It’s about having more than one election. Imagine a system where the winner of a fair election gets unlimited authority during his term. What forces this person to ever hold another fair election? Why can’t he ban the media from reporting on his missteps? Or confiscate opposition parties’ treasuries? Or order the police to murder any candidate who runs against him? The preparations for the next election, and the election itself, occur while it is still his term; if he can do whatever he wants during his term, there is nothing guaranteeing a fair election besides his personal goodwill. When we adjust for this - when we consider how to accord a leader enough power to do anything except rig the next election in his favor - we find that this is such a hard problem that it already requires most of the checks, balances, and civil society that we call liberalism. For example, the simplest way to win an election is to murder opposing candidates. We cannot merely constitutionally ban the leader from murdering people; if the leader controls the judiciary, he can pack it with sympathetic judges who will find him innocent of murder even when he does it in broad daylight (for some reason, no Russian judge has ever convicted Vladmir Putin of any of the assassinations that so many Western sources are sure he committed). So in order to give teeth to even the most basic ban on murdering rival candidates, you need an independent judiciary. (and although having “unelected bureaucrats” sounds bad, it’s important that these people not be directly elected at exactly the same time as the leader, because if the same electorate that puts the leader in power puts the checks on the leader in power, they’re likely to come from the same party. In the US, we solve this in a variety of ways, especially by staggering appointments - some officials are appointed by the previous leader, or the one before that.) But an independent judiciary is useless if the leader can ignore it without penalty. And the penalty cannot be purely legal, because legal penalties are levied by a judiciary, ie the organ that such a leader is ignoring. So this penalty must bottom out in extra-legal consequences: either the public relations consequences of the populace realizing that their leader has become a dictator, or - in the worst-case scenario - the military realizing this and taking direct action. But these extra-legal consequences require a well-informed populace (or at least a well-informed military). Now we also need freedom of the press. And a token freedom of the press, only sufficient to print the single line “the leader has defied the judiciary”, won’t be enough. People need context: is there an emergency? Was the judiciary actually trying to overstep? Is this part of a pattern? Is the leader generally a bad enough actor that this should tip people over the edge to vote against him, or to protest him? Many people will be reluctant to protest if the economy is strong and the borders are peaceful; is the economy actually strong, and the border actually peaceful, or is this just state propaganda? Answering these questions requires a flourishing journalistic ecosystem, including investigative reporters. A well-informed populace is useless without the ability to act on its information. Consider what might happen in a flourishing democracy if a leader tried to fire all the election monitors and replace them with toadies who would stuff the ballot boxes in his favor. Someone at the election office notices and informs the media (this step goes better if you have whistleblower protections enshrined in law, which may require an independent legislature).

Inline links: Babylon Bee, Spiked, WSJ, MacIver Institute, “illiberal democracy”

impact market2 mentions across 2 issues

impact market is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between December 08, 2023 and March 07, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "a non-traditional charitable funding institution"; "The plan has always been to run an impact market - a site where investors crowdfund some of the remaining grant proposals". It most often appears alongside ACX Grants, ACX Grants, Manifund.

Article page: impact market
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: December 08, 2023
Last seen: March 07, 2024

Outbound links

Issue trail

Apply For An ACX Grant (2024) December 08, 2023
ACX Grants Followup Impact Market March 07, 2024

ACX Grants 2 shared issues
ACX Grants 2 shared issues
Manifund 2 shared issues
Rachel 2 shared issues
The EA Infrastructure Fund 2 shared issues

Source context

Apply For An ACX Grant (2024)

December 08, 2023 · Original source

An effort to perform rapid replication of results in psychology journals. You can read the full list here. What are impact certificates / impact markets? This year’s ACX Grants will be a hybrid design. Most of it will use the traditional funding model. But applicants whose projects don’t get funded by the traditional model will have the option (not requirement! you don’t have to think about this if you don’t want to!) to opt in to an “impact market”, a non-traditional charitable funding institution. In an impact market, charitable projects offer to sell a sort of “stock”, called “impact certificates”. Investors buy the impact certificates, funding the project. If the project succeeds, a funder (like a grantmaker or foundation) may choose to buy the impact certificates, becoming the “spiritual owner” of the project (ie endorsing it as something good that ought to have been funded, and getting some sort of social credit for funding it). This money goes to the investors, who hopefully profit off of their investment, vindicating their decision to buy the certificates in the first place. The motivating idea is that a grantmaker might dismiss a charity’s plan as impossible, but an investor might believe they could succeed. The investor can fund the plan, then collect from the grantmaker if they turn out to be right. Everyone benefits: the charity gets funded, the investor makes a profit, and the grantmaker gets more of whatever kind of change they want (since a successful project is able to happen). We ran a test grant of impact markets earlier this year, along with partner Manifund. You can see the announcement here, the results here, and Manifund’s continuing impact market here. How will this year’s ACX Grants (optionally!!!) use impact markets? Most of ACX Grants will happen through the traditional grantmaking structure. But if I don’t fund your grant, you have the option of letting us auto-convert it into an impact certificate and place it on Manifund’s impact market. Then investors might fund your grant. From your perspective, this will just look like you getting the money you wanted, plus an investor who might give you some help and advice if you want. You won’t have to handle any of the impact market details, worry about your “stock price”, or anything like that. (if you do want to do those things, you can work with Manifund to create a bespoke impact certificate contract - but you don’t have to) I’m hesitant to fund AI safety grants and effective altruism community-building grants myself, both because of difficulty judging these things and because of potential conflicts of interest, so these are more likely to end up on the impact market than other things. This is an exception to the “you don’t have to use impact markets if you don’t want to” rule, sorry. (there’s some concern that impact markets have skewed incentives for projects that have a risk of doing severe harm, and I understand AI safety and EA community building are especially dangerous here and we’ve avoided them in the past. We’ll be pre-screening projects before allowing them on the impact market, and eliminating ones in that category. Final oracular funders will also be encouraged not to fund projects that they think ex ante could have caused harm.) We have four potential oracular funders who have expressed interest in impact certificates: Next year’s ACX Grants

Inline links: here, here, here, here

ACX Grants Followup Impact Market

March 07, 2024 · Original source

The plan has always been to run an impact market - a site where investors crowdfund some of the remaining grant proposals. If the project goes well, then philanthropists who missed it the first time (eg me) will pay the investors for funding it, potentially earning them a big profit. In our last impact market test, some people (okay, one person) managed to get 25x their initial investment by funding a charity which did really well.

Inline links: our last impact market test

So in my ideal world, we’d be running an impact market where you could invest your money in the remaining 317 proposals and make a profit if they did well. We’ve encountered two flaws on the way to that ideal world:

First, although about 140 of you expressed interest in and qualified for the impact market round, only 44 have responded to emails from Manifund, signed the necessary documents, and actually gotten featured. So there are only 44 proposals on the market so far. If you want to participate in the impact market, but aren’t on there yet, please check your email and spam folder for messages from Manifund. If you didn’t get any, but you applied to ACX Grants and want to participate, please email rachel@manifund.org.

imperialism2 mentions across 2 issues

imperialism is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between July 01, 2022 and November 02, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "The realm of Jahiliyyah is not merely the West, with its... imperialism"; "maybe capitalism arrived there, imperialism arrived and finished off the planet". It most often appears alongside Germany, Iraq, Italy.

Article page: imperialism
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: July 01, 2022
Last seen: November 02, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: The Internationalists July 01, 2022
Dictator Book Club: Chavez November 02, 2023

Germany 2 shared issues
Iraq 2 shared issues
Italy 2 shared issues
Putin 2 shared issues
United States 2 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: The Internationalists

July 01, 2022 · Original source

An account by a member of the British 23rd Indian Division—known as “The Fighting Cock” for the insignia on the uniforms of the men within it—shows how the colonized turned the colonizers’ ideals against them. During the war, the Japanese had seized control of Indonesia from the Dutch. When the Japanese surrendered in early September 1945, the Fighting Cock went to Java to accept a transfer of authority to Allied forces. In Singapore, en route to Java, an advance party met a “cheerful Dutchman who assumed that he and his countrymen were coming back to the peaceful reoccupation of their Empire.” But the Indonesians had a different idea. To greet the returning imperialists, they covered carriages and vehicles with graffiti declaring: “Atlantic Charter means freedom from Dutch Imperialism.” “Indonesia for Indonesians.” And, simply, “Merdeka”—Freedom. The armed resistance did not abate until the United Nations recognized the country’s independence in 1949.

The Qutbian enemy, therefore, is breathtakingly encompassing. The realm of Jahiliyyah is not merely the West, with its secularism, racism, imperialism, inequality, and sexual promiscuity. Nor is it simply Nasser and his henchmen, the brutes who ran torture chambers like Tora Prison. It encompasses all secular Arab governments—including those in Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria. It also includes the ulema, the clergy who claim to speak for Islam, but support the lordship of man. It includes anyone who stands in the way of the establishment of an Islamic State. The enemy is the rest of the world.

Qutb’s crusade is not a nationalist one. Seeing the history of the Middle East as a legacy of foreign control, he argued, misleads Arabs into thinking that the solution must be local control. Arab nationalists think that the antidote to imperialism is nationalism—Churchill must be replaced by Nasser. But that is a trap. Rule by man—any man—is the problem, not the solution. Victory over Jahiliyyah cannot be achieved by adopting an Arab form of Jahiliyyah. Eastern Jahiliyyah is no better than the Western version. In Qutb’s messianic view, triumph requires nothing less than a global Islamic state. (Chapter 17)

Dictator Book Club: Chavez

November 02, 2023 · Original source

On rare occasions the correct response was not obvious, sowing panic. In a speech to mark World Water Day in 2011, the comandante said capitalism may have killed life on Mars. “I have always said, heard, that it would not be strange that there had been civilisation on Mars, but maybe capitalism arrived there, imperialism arrived and finished off the planet.” Some in the audience tittered, assuming it was a joke, then froze when they saw neighbors turned to stone. To these audience veterans it was unclear if it was a joke, so they adopted poker faces, pending clarification. It never came; the comandante moved on to other topics.

Incas2 mentions across 2 issues

Incas is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between October 07, 2022 and August 25, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "the Incas did some very neat things with rope bridges and knots"; "It could have been the Chinese or even the Incas". It most often appears alongside 5G, Acemoglu and Robinson, ACX comments.

Article page: Incas
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: October 07, 2022
Last seen: August 25, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

A Columbian Exchange October 07, 2022
Your Book Review: Why Nations Fail August 25, 2023

5G 1 shared issues
Acemoglu and Robinson 1 shared issues
ACX comments 1 shared issues
Adraste 1 shared issues
Africa 1 shared issues

Source context

A Columbian Exchange

October 07, 2022 · Original source

Beroe: I’m sorry, you may be right about the history, but Indigenous Peoples’ Day is just not a very good holiday. Indigenous Peoples are just too vague and diverse to have any real attachment to them. What are we even supposed to be celebrating? It’s not that Indigenous Peoples didn’t have any good qualities - maybe some of them lived in harmony with nature or something, and some had surprisingly egalitarian societies. I hear the Aztecs had amazing urban planning, and the Incas did some very neat things with rope bridges and knots. But there was no good quality that all of them had as a group. And even if there was, we wouldn’t be allowed to celebrate it, because that would be a stereotype. I can imagine a world in which Benjamin Harrison had declared Indigenous Peoples’ Day back in 1892, and people celebrated by wearing feathered headdresses and attending pow-wows and eating cornbread, and that might have eventually evolved into a good holiday. But absent a 180 degree shift in the culture, we obviously aren’t going to get that now. In the real world, Indigenous Peoples’ Day is observed by feeling vaguely guilty, making a big show of not celebrating Columbus Day, and making sure not to do anything fun or cultural related to Indigenous Peoples in any way, lest it offend someone.

Your Book Review: Why Nations Fail

August 25, 2023 · Original source

Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel is treated with similar inconsistency: while initially admitting it is "a powerful approach to the puzzle on which he focuses" (why the Old World colonised the New instead of vice versa), AR eventually claim … it is not even historically or geographically or culturally predetermined that Europeans should have been the ones colonizing the world. It could have been the Chinese or even the Incas. The Chinese perhaps, but Diamond's thesis is completely inconsistent with the Incas. Soviet growth apparently "did not feature technological change". As an economist I assume they mean that statistical measures of total factor productivity did not grow. But by any ordinary meaning of "technological change" this statement is patently ridiculous: horses were replaced with tractors, employment shifted from agriculture to industry, the production of steel, electricity and machine tools grew exponentially, and city dwellers moved into highrise apartments with radio, TV and refrigerators. (I once travelled a bit in Central Asia and the newly ex-Soviet 'stans felt like developed countries that had fallen on hard times. Nepal didn’t.)

Inline links: total factor productivity

Independents2 mentions across 2 issues

Independents is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 24, 2023 and December 10, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "40% Independents, you would only expect 9% from pure mixing"; "And here are results for independents, ie the people Democrats will have to convince in the general". It most often appears alongside America, Trump, Twitter.

Article page: Independents
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: August 24, 2023
Last seen: December 10, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On Dating Preferences August 24, 2023
Links For December 2025 December 10, 2025

America 2 shared issues
Trump 2 shared issues
Twitter 2 shared issues
100 Above The Park 1 shared issues
2024 Post-Mortem Of Neoreaction 1 shared issues

Source context

Highlights From The Comments On Dating Preferences

August 24, 2023 · Original source

I think you're overestimating how significant those numbers say political compatibility is. The study said that 4% of marriages are between a Republican and a Democrat, which *sounds* low, but given that something like 30% of people are Republicans and 30% Democrats and 40% Independents, you would only expect 9% from pure mixing. There are 17% between Independents and non-Independents, but from random mixing you would only expect 24%.

Links For December 2025

December 10, 2025 · Original source

Note that the issues are “issue focus”, so it’s not a contradiction that Democrats are against both “advocating for Israel” and “advocating for Palestinians” - they just don’t want candidates who make either position on the Middle East a major focus of their campaign. And here are results for independents, ie the people Democrats will have to convince in the general: Yes, voters react positively both to candidates “over the age of 50” and candidates “under the age of 50”. Just don’t run 50 year olds! 16: I previously blogged about how embryo-selection company Nucleus appeared scammy. Sichuan_Mala looks deeper and agrees they seems scammy. Besides what I found, she finds several errors in the white paper, apparently fake customer reviews, and an accusation of IP theft from competitor Genomic Prediction. She also accuses them of plagiarizing competitor Herasight’s work, although it’s a bit subtle and I don’t know enough about field norms to know whether this is a case of flattery-by-imitation or totally out of bounds. A Nucleus researcher responds to the scientific allegations here, saying that the “plagiarism” was just convergent methodologies. And Nucleus CEO Kian Sadeghi goes on the TBPN podcast here to rebut the business allegations, saying that the customer reviews are real although some photos were changed for privacy reasons. There’s an appearance/facedox by fellow Nucleus skeptic Cremieux Recueil, although Kian declines to debate him directly; you can see Cremieux’s postmortem of the episode here. My opinion is that as potential customers, you are under no obligation to care whether the company plagiarizes papers or fakes reviews, but you should care about whether their genetic tests are good, and I continue to think they’re not. Their old competitor Genomic Prediction is cheaper, and their new competitor Herasight has more powerful predictors, so you’re excused from having to have an opinion on this, and should just use someone else’s product. Related: Gene Smith’s rundown of the pros and cons of every company in the embryo selection space (X). 17: And related: a Herasight client describes her experience with embryo selection, and her feelings upon the birth of her selected child. 18: Lars Doucet, guest author of several ACX posts on Georgism, reviews The Land Trap by Mike Bird. “Land is a big deal, and always has been. [But] land has only recently been financialized. Financializing land causes ‘the land trap’ . . . [where] land slowly sucks up all your economy’s productivity, inflating a dangerous real estate bubble that eventually pops, leaving disaster in its wake”. Also, “Fiat currency isn’t backed by nothing, as commonly supposed, but by land.” 19: New research analyzes Hitler’s DNA. Findings: he had Kallman Syndrome, a rare disorder of sexual development associated with low testosterone, micropenis, and small testicles (ironically, the WWII song about Nazi sexual inadequacies only accuses Goering and Himmler of this, but lets Hitler off). Contra galaxy-brained rumors, he did not have any Jewish ancestry. And he had “very high scores - in the top one percent - for a predisposition to autism, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder”. When I wrote this post, a reader asked me what it would look like for someone to have high propensity for both autism and schizophrenia at the same time. Well . . . 20: The wealth of cities (h/t @StatisticUrban): 21: Update on Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds: pro-AI safety politician Alex Bores announced his candidacy for Congress in New York. As expected, the A16Z pro-AI PAC announced a “multibillion dollar effort to sink [his] campaign” (wait, multi-billion on one candidate? is that a typo?) This doesn’t seem to be going very well for them so far. Bores has masterfully leveraged (X) the unprecedented opposition from Big Tech into a selling point. …and raised $1.2 million on his first day, breaking fundraising records (I was told this was because of pro-AI-safety EAs, but others credit AIPAC and the Israel lobby). And most recently, Jami Floyd, one of Bores’ opponents and a possible beneficiary of anti-Bores spending, has condemned it (X) and demanded that the AI industry stop trying to help her. Impressive work from everybody. Related: New $50 million pro-AI-regulation SuperPAC, I assume EA-linked but have no special knowledge. 22: Related: Pre-emption is when Congress blocks states from making legislation on a topic, saying it will decide all the laws itself. The states have signaled willingness to regulate AI pretty hard, so Big Tech has been pushing for AI pre-emption to (in their opinion) prevent an overly complicated patchwork of regulations, or (in their opponents’ opinion) shift everything to a Republican Congress that will drop the ball on regulation entirely. After their first attempt in June was defeated by a coalition of anti-tech liberals and anti-tech conservatives, we discussed (1, 2) the effort by moderates on both sides to create a compromise proposal which pre-empted state laws but guaranteed good federal regulation on important topics. The most recent news is that extremists sidelined the moderates and tried to slip a hardline preemption deal with no compromises into the National Defense Authorization Act, a defense budget bill which is notoriously secretive and hard for the public to learn about. This didn’t work; some of the same coalition, plus a group of Republican state legislators including Ron DeSantis, pressured the GOP to drop it. The next battleground is a potential Trump executive order; although Trump cannot constitutionally ban states from regulating AI, he will threaten them with various consequences like lawsuits or withdrawal of federal funding. The buzz in the policy circles I’m in is that this might backfire; blue state politicians love starting fights with Trump in order to look tough to their blue state electorates. No, no, please don’t give me headlines like “TRUMP CONDEMNS GAVIN NEWSOM FOR TRYING TO PROTECT CALIFORNIA’S CHILDREN FROM AI SLOP”! Anything but that! 23: Related: Trump has decided to sell some of America’s best AI chips to China, supercharging their AI development and crippling ours. The most charitable read is that his administration doesn’t really believe AI matters so they think it’s fine to forfeit it for short-term gain; the least charitable that it’s downstream of the companies involved paying Trump enormous bribes in hopes of exactly this outcome . We’re headed for the dumbest possible world, where we sacrifice our chance to thoughtfully address AI’s social impacts because “tHaT wOuLd mAkE uS lOsE tHe rAcE wItH ChInA”, then throw away the race with China in one fell swoop by handing them our technology for no reason. Shame on everyone involved, especially the people who shout over any discussion of safety with “bUt ChInA” yet have stayed totally silent about this. Our best hope now is that China refuses the chips, either because they want to privilege their own tech companies, or because they think we can’t possibly be this stupid and it must be some kind of spy plot. 24: Related: how the American public’s opinions on AI are changing (from David Shor, h/t Daniel Eth on X): If this is to be taken seriously, AI is already a bigger political issue than abortion, climate change, or the environment. I fail my 2023 prediction that there was only a 20% chance this would happen by 2028. 25: Related: Bernie Sanders in The Guardian: “There is a very real fear that, in the not-so-distant future, a super-intelligent AI could replace humans in controlling the planet.” The Left has a complicated relationship with existential risk from AI: they really hate AI, which in theory should push them towards yet another reason to be against it. But they hate AI so much that they need to believe every negative thing about it at the same time, and one of those negative things is that it’s just a scam and will never work, and this naturally pushes against being concerned about x-risk. But as AI improves, will the “just a scam” position become less tenable, shunting the associated psychic energy into other reasons to hate AI (including x-risk concerns)? 26: Qualia Research Institute has released a video describing some of the work they’ve been doing the past year - The Oscilleditor: An Algorithmic Breakthrough for Psychedelic Visual Replication (1080p•⚠️SEIZURE): 27: Jesse Arm (X): “A majority of American rabbinical students are now women. Most are also LGBTQ. That includes Modern Orthodoxy. Remove Modern Orthodoxy and the numbers climb even higher.” Clergy have always served as spiritual counselors; as religions liberalize and other roles become less important, the therapist role starts to predominate. But 75% of therapists in the US are female; at the limit of liberalization where clergyman = therapist, we should expect the same gender ratio. 28: The latest news on the COVID origins debate: scientists find a naturally-occuring bat coronavirus with a COVID-like furin cleavage site. This is a point in favor of the natural origins hypothesis, since the second-best argument for lab leak was that COVID’s furin cleavage site was too strange to evolve naturally. But I think arguments that lab leak has “fallen apart” are premature: the best argument (COVID emerged only a few miles from the biggest coronavirus gain-of-function lab in the Eastern Hemisphere) remains strong. I update from something like 95% chance it’s natural to something like 96%, but not 99.99% or anything. And here’s a lab leaker arguing that COVID’s furin cleavage site is out-of-frame and so still more unnatural-looking than the one on the recently-discovered bat virus. 29: Nicholas Decker (econ blogger, famous for his controversial autistic takes and Secret Service visit) has a dating doc. Most interesting section is the one about children: he wants to have them, but doesn’t think they should be genetically related to him. From here: If this appeals to you, you can find his contact info on the document. Related: Governor Jared Polis of Colorado is a fan of Nicholas Decker and Richard Hanania. 30: Matt Yglesias comes out as aphantasic (unable to see images in his “mind’s eye”). He says that contra the usual perspective that frames this as a deficit, he finds it helpful. For example, once he got assaulted, and he remembers on an intellectual level that it happened, but since “I wasn’t taking pictures of myself getting kicked in the head so, as far as I’m concerned, it’s like it happened to someone else” (Matt usually has good instincts, so I’m surprised he uses an example which will be such catnip to his conservative critics). He thinks it makes him a better reasoner / statistics blogger / effective altruist to be able to “get a statistically valid view of the situation, not overindex on the happenstance of your life.” For what it’s worth, I’ll give my contrary data point - I think of myself as a reasoner / statistics blogger / effective altruist in a pretty similar vein as Matt, but AFAICT my visual imagination is totally normal; if other people are having their emotions yanked around by vivid images, that’s a skill issue. 31: Lakshya Jain in The Argument: The COVID political backlash [to the Democratic Party] has disappeared. Despite the narrative, polls show that voters don’t favor or disfavor either party over COVID, mostly still think school closures were necessary, and are about evenly split on vaccine mandates. I guess I can’t disagree with this poll - it seems well-done - but I still wonder whether something is being missed. Maybe it didn’t make the ~50% of voters who are naturally liberal desert the cause, but it energized conservatives in a way that might otherwise not have happened? Related, from Rob Wiblin on X, on balance Britons think the government response to COVID was not strict enough. 32: Related: Back when neoreaction was a big deal, I occasionally discussed posts by neoreactionary blogger Spandrell of Bloody Shovel. If you’re wondering what happened to him, you can read his 2024 Post-Mortem Of Neoreaction here, where he discusses how he fell out of love with the movement (warning: he has not fallen out of love with racial slurs). As a former fascist sympathizer, I can see why [fascism is on the downswing]. The allure of fascism in 2024 is much, much diminished. For a few reasons. A big one was COVID. See, the point of fascism is that Collective Action is necessary to have nice things. We need a strong government committed to the good of the people. Yarvin showed his preference early when he started his new Substack by quoting Cicero’s phrase “Salus populi suprema lex”. The health of the people is the most important law. Cicero wasn’t a fascist of course, nor is Yarvin really; a big point of fascism is to narrowly define the populus as an ethnic group with demonstrable ties to blood. That makes the government’s ties to the people stronger, increasing their commitment to do Good Collective Action. Which is important. Very important. A lot of good things can come of intelligently done Collective Action. Fascist Italy made the trains run on time. Nazi Germany fixed the terrible Weimar economy. East Asian countries are all effectively fascist states, if with less ideological baggage (yellows just aren’t like that), and they are all nice, clean, safe places with healthy economies. Fascism is not a panacea but it works, when you let it. Strong government can be pretty neat. So why is strong government less appealing these days? Well, COVID happened. And our governments were pretty damn strong in dealing with it. They made strong laws and enforced them. And what did they do with their power? Absolutely retarded shit. They destroyed the world economy and made 95% of people completely miserable for 18 months. Up to 3 long years in some places. Again, as an Orient enjoyer I was very sympathetic of strong effective government. My life has been pretty cozy thanks to it for the past decades. But after seeing boomers, hypochondriacs, and menopausal women take the reins and use it against healthy people, I’m fucking done with strong effective government. Fuck that shit, I’m out. I don’t want to see strong effective government ever again. I was very lucky that I was out of China in November 2019. It was a fluke really. I moved to the Golden Triangle after that and the law of the jungle was much, much nicer during the Doctors Plague of 2020-2022. But I spent a few months in Europe during the time and man, that was brutal. Not just seeing how retarded governments were; the level of compliance by the people was so disheartening. Imagine being a sincere fascist and seeing your people behave like that. These are my people? My Volk? Am I supposed to sacrifice life and limb for the salus of this populus? Fuck that. Let them cook, they deserve everything that’s coming to them [...] Is there a way to make the body healthy again? I do think so. I think there’s still place for a successor right wing ideology which is neither Christian fundamentalism or robot worship. And it will happen; but it won’t happen on Twitter. Maybe it can happen on Urbit, or right here in this site. I have some ideas myself, and I invite you to join me and build this together. It would be funny if the solution to the paradox Jain highlights was that for every time a COVID lockdown turned a liberal into a conservative, it turned one fascist into a moderate, for a net rightward shift of zero. 33: Also from an Argument poll: In a hypothetical Presidential matchup, Gavin Newsom beats JD Vance 54-46. I’m split between the usual heuristic of ignoring any polling more than a year before an election, and the fact that this is a remarkably big lead for polarized 21st century America. 34: Jerl wades into the David Hume on miracles debate. 35: AI Teddy Bears: A Brief Investigation. The good news is that your child’s AI teddy bear is hard to jailbreak and probably will not tell them where to find guns: The other good news is that somehow they don’t charge a subscription, which makes them a way to get usually-subscription-only AI models for free. How is this possible? “[The most likely hypothesis is that] Witpaw is an adorable piece of spyware and he’s selling my data to the CCP”. 36: This month’s anti-people-named-Sacks content: NYT on Trump AI czar David Sacks’ conflicts of interest; New Yorker on whether neurologist Oliver Sacks used his case studies to work through his own issues rather than presenting them accurately. [EDITED TO ADD: I originally framed it this way as a joke, but on further research I think David and Oliver are related. Wikipedia says that Oliver was first cousins with Israel statesman Abba Eban, and that Abba Eban was born to Lithuanian Jewish parents in Cape Town. David Sacks’ bio says he was born to Jewish parents in Cape Town, and this article specifies that they were Lithuanian. I doubt there were too many Lithuanian Jewish families named Sacks in mid-1900s Cape Town, so sure, related!) 37: Orca Sciences: There Has To Be A Better Way To Make Titanium. Titanium is a great metal - strong, light, and tough. If we had cheap titanium, it could revolutionize manufacturing the way cheap steel and aluminum did in previous eras. So why don’t we? Not because titanium is rare: it’s “the 9th most common element in the earth’s crust”. Rather, it’s very complicated and expensive to extract from its ore. Some kind of breakthrough in titanium extraction processes always seems tantalizingly close, but has never quite materialized. Is there any hope? 38: If Asians Are Lactose Intolerant, Why All The Milk Tea? Lactose intolerance has confused me for a long time - 23andMe tells me that I’m lactose intolerant, but I drink milk regularly without problems, so what’s up? This post’s answer: lactose-intolerant people who don’t usually drink milk will get sick if they start suddenly. Lactose-intolerant people who drink milk regularly since childhood develop gut microbiota that can digest milk, but which demand an expensive “tax” in calories. Lactose-tolerant people will always be able to digest milk and absorb all the calories themselves. 39: How do different majors change college students’ political beliefs? No surprise that the humanities and social sciences shift people left; no surprise that business and economics shift them right. I was a little surprised that engineering shifts people right a little, and that Education of all things shifts people right (albeit only slightly). How is that even possible? Are these people coming in as Mao Zedong and leaving as “only” Leon Trotsky? Also, Political Science is exactly neutral, lol. [EDIT: I misunderstood, they’re using natural sciences as a zero point, this is a reasonable choice but slightly changes the interpretation] 40: Kindkristin: Language models improved my mental health. 41: More floor employment, from the WSJ (h/t @LaocoonofTroy): Big Paychecks Can’t Woo Enough Sailors For America’s Commercial Fleet: “Straight out of college, graduates from the country’s maritime academies can earn more than $200,000 as a commercial sailor, with free food and private accommodations... Despite the pay and perks, maritime jobs go begging, and it is raising national-security concerns.” Other selling points include “six months vacation, live wherever you want, and you’re serving the nation” and onboard “gyms, connectivity, and cuisine”. The catch is that you have to be at sea for months at a time. 42: Study (h/t @KierkegaardEmil): there was minimal “learning loss” from COVID school closures, best estimate is “0.02 standard deviations per 100 days of school closure”. I correctly predicted this back in 2021, but I also wrote in March of this year about how there’s been a general decline in NAEP scores since then. It seems like maybe a student having their specific school closed for longer than other schools didn’t hurt them, but some sort of general cultural change, maybe related to COVID, did hurt. 43: Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother on why she thinks his trial was unfair. SBF is appealing his conviction and will probably be making some of these same points in court. Can’t find a prediction market directly on the appeal, but this one says only 15% chance he serves under 10 years, this one says 15% chance of a Trump pardon, so it doesn’t seem like there’s much room for him to be freed (or get a significantly shorter sentence) on appeal. And Wired says that only 5-10% of appeals like these succeed. 44: Related: Trump pardons Juan Orlando Hernandez, former Honduran president extradited to the US for narco-corruption. Some sources are trying to find a Prospera angle - Prospera and other ZEDEs were approved under JOH’s administration, and the Prosperans seem to have good MAGAworld connections - but I don’t think this is their top priority, and I don’t know if it requires much explanation for Trump to be pro-right-wing Latin American politicians convicted by the Biden administration. More interesting is that apparently JOH and SBF were cellmates (X), “SBF spent extensive time helping JOH with trial prep” and SBF told an interviewer that “Juan Orlando is the most innocent prisoner I’ve met, myself included.” ChatGPT is not impressed with the Trump/SBF case for JOH’s innocence. Related: JOH’s conservative party on track to win this month’s extremely-close Honduran elections, great news for Prospera if it happens. 45: The “100 Above The Park” building in St Louis (h/t Bobby Fijan on X): 46: The death toll of the ongoing Sudan genocide has risen to about 150,000. Nicholas Kristof writes that the world has once again failed to prevent atrocities, and argues that the most important point of leverage is pressure on the United Arab Emirates, which is arming the genociders. Sam Kriss also writes about the situation in The World’s First Matcha Labubu Genocide, but is unimpressed with Kristof’s take: Sudan is passed over in a deeply uncomfortable silence. The absolute most you can do is blame the Emiratis. From what I’ve seen, more people seem to be appalled at the UAE for its frankly marginal role in arming the RSF than at the RSF itself. This is the approved way of understanding any inscrutably indigenous foreign conflict: you just worm out any third-party involvement and then act like you’ve solved the whole thing. I side with Kristof here, for reasons that Sam himself touches on later in his piece, in a section comparing Darfur with Gaza. It would be very easy to make people care about Darfur again. All it would take is a loud, vocal contingent of RSF apologists in the Western media. I agree, but would frame it less cynically: the reason Westerners pay attention to Gaza is that there’s a lever to push: not only does America support Israel, but many of their friends support Israel, so they can imagine convincing America or at least their friends to stop, and at least feel like there is some remote chance of making a small difference (and in fact, Trump getting mad at Israel and deciding to pressure them was decisive in effecting the cease-fire). On the other hand, we don’t have many levers to affect ethnic Baggara in the Rapid Support Forces of Sudan, so it doesn’t really feel useful to write blog posts arguing that they should stop; obviously they should stop, nobody disagrees with this, and it goes without saying - so nobody says it. But the US does support the UAE, and many of our friends like the UAE or at least go there on vacation, so maybe it’s possible to have make some small difference by embarrassing them. 4D chess take is that Sam Kriss agrees with all of this, but “loudly” and “vocally” argued against it to give people like me a hook to write about this genocide with, in which case I thank him for his sacrifice. It would also be nice to be able to donate, but I don’t know who to trust in the region - other than Doctors Without Borders, who are usually pretty good. 47: The AI Futures Project (group of AI-will-be-fast intellectuals) and the AI As A Normal Technology team (group of AI-will-be-slow intellectuals) wrote an adversarial collaboration in Asterisk explaining what they agree on, for example: That there’s an important distinction between existing AI and “strong AGI”

[I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]

Indo-European2 mentions across 2 issues

Indo-European is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between December 01, 2023 and January 09, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "ancestral backgrounds studied were very high level (Ievel of Indo-European vs. pre-IE farmer ancestry)"; "derived from the Indo-European word múh₂s, meaning “mouse”". It most often appears alongside Abraham Davenport, Afghanistan, AI Policy Institute.

Article page: Indo-European
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: December 01, 2023
Last seen: January 09, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Links For November 2023 December 01, 2023
Bureaucracy Isn't Measured In Bureaucrats January 09, 2025

Abraham Davenport 1 shared issues
Afghanistan 1 shared issues
AI Policy Institute 1 shared issues
America 1 shared issues
Arizona 1 shared issues

Source context

Links For November 2023

December 01, 2023 · Original source

10: Ancestral genetic components are consistently associated with the complex trait landscape across Europe. People of different ancestral backgrounds have different genetic predispositions to 32 out of 53 complex traits tested, including things like BMI, likelihood of smoking, and levels of various immune cells. Caveats: the paper tried hard to eliminate various confounders (like if Irish drink more beer, then genes common in the Irish will look like genes for beer-drinking) but can’t prove they got this 100%; the ancestral backgrounds studied were very high level (Ievel of Indo-European vs. pre-IE farmer ancestry) and not as fine-grained as the ethnicities normal people think about.

Inline links: Ancestral genetic components are consistently associated with the complex trait landscape across Europe

Bureaucracy Isn't Measured In Bureaucrats

January 09, 2025 · Original source

More important, can DOGE get nominative determinism on their side? “Ramaswamy” means “Lord Rama”, who - although cool - is not really associated with smallness. But it seems like the word “Musk” may ultimately derive from the Indo-European word múh₂s, meaning “mouse”. This makes me bullish on DOGE’s eventual success.

Inline links: may ultimately derive

influenza A2 mentions across 2 issues

influenza A is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between February 10, 2024 and January 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "reserving the extra slot in vaccines for potentially dangerous influenza A strains"; "Influenza A evolved in birds". It most often appears alongside Blueprint Biosecurity, Duncan Purvis, Metaculus.

Article page: influenza A
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: February 10, 2024
Last seen: January 01, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

ACX Grants Results 2024 February 10, 2024
H5N1: Much More Than You Wanted To Know January 01, 2025

Blueprint Biosecurity 2 shared issues
Duncan Purvis 2 shared issues
Metaculus 2 shared issues
Operation Warp Speed 2 shared issues
Scotland 2 shared issues

Source context

ACX Grants Results 2024

February 10, 2024 · Original source

Duncan Purvis, $30,000, for work on improving flu vaccines. Previous vaccines have included four strains of flu, but one strain recently died out. The World Health Organization, which coordinates flu vaccines, is planning to downgrade to a three-strain vaccine. But Duncan thinks there’s room to improve resistance to future pandemics by reserving the extra slot in vaccines for potentially dangerous influenza A strains. He plans to attend conferences, publish papers, and otherwise build a coalition to make this happen.

H5N1: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

January 01, 2025 · Original source

Flu is a disease caused by a family of related influenza viruses. Pandemic flu is always caused by the influenza A virus. Influenza A has two surface antigen proteins, hemagglutinin (18 flavors) and neuraminidase (11 flavors). A particular flu strain is named after which flavors of these two proteins it has - for example, H3N2, or H5N1.

Influenza A evolved in birds, and stayed there for at least thousands of years. It crossed to humans later, maybe during historic times - different sources give suggest dates as early as 500 BC or as late as 1500 AD. It probably crossed over multiple times. Maybe it died out in humans after some crossovers, stuck around in birds, and crossed over from birds to humans again later.

From “Genesis and pathogenesis of the 1918 pandemic H1N1 influenza A virus”, linked above. You may recognize the lead author - Michael Worobey has also been a leading voice on the zoonotic side of the COVID origins debate. The recent history of the flu, as far as I can tell, is: 1918: An H1N1 flu (“Spanish flu”) jumped from birds to humans in America and killed 50 million people worldwide. This replaced all older strains, so most seasonal flus during this era were H1N1. 1957: An H2N2 flu (“Asian flu”) crossed from birds to humans in China, and killed about 2 million people worldwide. It replaced the H1N1 strain, so most seasonal flus during this era were H2N2. 1968: An H3N2 flu (“Hong Kong flu”) crossed from pigs (?) to humans in Hong Kong, and killed another 2 million people worldwide. It replaced the H2N2 strain, so most seasonal flus during this era were H3N2. 1977: An H1N1 flu (“Russian flu”) leaked from a biology lab (?) in Russia (it might have been a strain from the 1940s, which the Russians were trying to make a vaccine for). It didn’t kill that many people, but it stuck around, and from then on, seasonal flus could be either H3N2 or H1N1. 2009: An H1N1 flu (“Mexican flu” until the PC police stepped in; afterwards “swine flu”) took some horrible circuitous route between birds and pigs and back again, crossed over into humans in Mexico, and killed 200,000 people. It outcompeted older strains of H1N1, but couldn’t crowd out H3N2, so seasonal flus are still either H3N2 or H1N1. …which brings us to the present, hopefully illuminating why “new flu strain crosses over from animals into humans” is such an “uh oh” moment. The Bird Flu Technically, all pandemic flus start as bird flus. Influenza A evolved in birds. Sometimes it spreads to other animals, including pigs, cattle, and humans. The most common way for a bird flu to spread to humans is to “reassort” (not exactly virus sex, but close enough, and the real version is less memorable) with a human flu virus (ie one that has already crossed over to humans). The resulting virus has all of the human flu virus’ human adaptations, but borrows enough new antigens from the bird virus to evade the immune system. Pigs can be infected by both human and bird viruses, so they are a common place for this reassortment to take place. If reassortment is sort of like viral sex, pigs are sort of like Tinder. When a bird flu and human flu reassort in pigs, the resulting disease is called a swine flu. At least the 2009 flu pandemic was a swine flu, and a minority opinion thinks the 1918 pandemic was too. There aren’t major epidemiological differences between direct-from-bird flus and swine flus. H5N1 was first noticed in birds - specifically, a flock of chickens in Scotland in 1959 - after which it disappeared for forty years. In 1996, it showed up in geese in China, then gradually increased its market share among birds worldwide. In 2022, it was found in minks; apparently it had learned to infect mammals. By early 2024, it was seen in cows. Now it’s in cow herds in 16 states, and one of them (California) has declared a state of emergency. And in October, H5N1 was found in pigs for the first time. It’s not uncommon for humans to catch an animal disease. This doesn’t mean the disease has “crossed over” to humans. If the virus isn’t suited to human-to-human transmission, it simply dies off (either before or after killing its human host). Thus, chicken farmers have been reporting scattered H5N1 cases since 1997; now that the virus has spread to cattle, cow farmers have started reporting the same. A Metaculus comment on this topic introduced me to the phrase “biocomputational surface”. Every viral replication that takes place in a human gives the virus one more chance to develop the set of mutations that makes it human-transmissible and start the next pandemic. Or, more likely, every viral replication that takes place in a human who has both the H5N1 bird flu and a normal human flu - or in a pig which has both viruses - gives the virus one extra chance to reassort in a way that produces a bird-antigen-fortified human-adapted flu virus. This doesn’t mean H5N1 will definitely become human-transmissible soon. Many viruses hang out on the borders of transmissibility for decades. Some, for unclear reasons, never cross over at all. But all of this is compatible with the virus becoming transmissible soon. So: What Is The Chance Of A Pandemic? The prediction markets on this topic ask a question about “10,000 cases in the United States”. Does this necessarily mean “pandemic”? Might it be possible to get to 10,000 cases just from the scattered chicken and cow farmers, with no human-to-human transmission? Despite many chicken and cow infections this year, there have only been 60 - 70 recorded human cases. Unless there is a phase change in screening methods, it seems hard for this number to increase to 10,000 off farmers alone. I think it’s fair to treat this question as operationalizing “what is the chance of a pandemic”? By this definition, Manifold estimates a 40% chance of an H5N1 pandemic in 2025. Metaculus estimates a 5% chance. You can see below whether that’s changed since I wrote this essay: 5% versus 40% is a big difference! Who do we trust? I trust Metaculus. Metaculus has beaten Manifold in both of the two head-to-head comparisons that I know of (Jeremiah Johnson’s and mine). Manifold’s number swings by a factor of two from week to week; Metaculus has been steady. But also, Metaculus hosts a CDC-sponsored respiratory disease forecasting tournament which has enriched them in epidemiological expertise. And if you look at the quality of comments on both sites, it’s pretty obvious where the people with more intellectual chops are hanging out. The Manifold comments are mostly single sentences, or occasionally just links to an article about new cases. The Metaculus comments look more like this one by dimaklenchin: Despite the panic propaganda, H5N1 is unlikely to be "just a single mutation away from switching host preference": 1) It normally takes a lot more than a single mutation to switch hosts. E.g., there are at least five different reasons why SIV (monkey equivalent of HIV) is not infectious to humans. Heck, a variant of SIV that bears HIV's receptor-recognizing surface protein (SHIV) is still not infectious to humans. HIV most certainly evolved from SIV but, almost as certainly, it took a very long time to get there. Not that all viruses are the same and things can't turn out differently with flu, but I don't subscribe to the idea that a mere change of receptor specificity (something that can take 1-2 mutations) will be sufficient. 2) We have data. Lots of human infections with other varieties of bird flu in the past - all those viruses ultimately went nowhere. Why would H5N1 be radically different? E.g., the "Canadian teen", despite what sounds like a prolonged exposure, failed to infect anyone around him. Since I am at 18% for the h-2-h H5N1 detection in 2025, I am arbitrarily going ~ an order of magnitude lower than that for something as unprecedented as 10K human infections. Maybe should be much lower but hedging for the time being and will allow another couple months of observations. And Sergio: I'm currently at 20% on the question of reported human-to-human transmission of highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 globally before 2026. However, this question is only about the US, and is more general about all subtypes of H5. But H5N1 very strongly appears to be the most important subtype to consider in this time period. And, given the current situation in the US with H5N1 human cases derived from exposure to poultry or cattle (with cattle(mammals) being more worrisome), h2h transmission seems quite more likely to arise in North America than elsewhere before 2026. Conditioning on h2h transmission in the US (and also trying to consider, with lower probability, a start in Canada), I want to estimate the chances that it becomes sustained and out of control (in which case, if it starts in Canada, I largely expect it to spread to the US). The (6) past events of probable h2h transmission of avian H5(N1), none of which were sustained, could serve as a base rate, although I'm a bit wary of giving much weight to this precedent, since the last event was quite a while ago (2007), and also because reporting and testing standards may have improved considerably since then (so perhaps they might not have been classified as h2h transmission events if they had occurred more recently). The current situation in the US, and events such as the Canadian teen who got sick with H5N1, do suggest a higher background level of risk than normal (which would be reduced if a vaccine for cattle is licensed soon), but I'm wary of overupdating. Conditioned on sustained h2h transmission, reaching over 10k cases in a few months seems likely, although perhaps very strong monitoring and surveillance could contain the situation in time (at the very least to moderate the growth rate). Trying to combine all these factors somewhat haphazardly, I'm currently at 3.5% for this question. That’s before 2026. What about longer-term? Manifold gives a ~50% chance before 2030; Metaculus uses a more complicated method but it says about 25% chance before 2030. H5N1 may cross to humans, but it could take a while. Superforecaster Juan Cambeiro at The Institute For Progress estimated a 4% chance of a “worse than COVID” H5N1 pandemic in “the next year”, but their estimate was made in 2023, without the benefit of the Metaculus estimates or most of our current knowledge. This feels high now - Metaculus says 5% total for H5N1 pandemic, and most pandemic flus are not worse than COVID. IFP also seem to be expecting a case fatality rate greater than 10%, which I find unlikely for the reasons mentioned above. I trust their estimate less than Metaculus’ current ones. I conclude that the most plausible estimate for the chance of an H5N1 pandemic in the next year is 5%. Interestingly, 5% is about the base rate for pandemic flus per year: five in the past century = one per twenty years = 5% chance per year. Isn’t it surprising that we’re still at the base rate when we can see a dangerous-looking flu virus spreading through the types of animals that have caused pandemic flus in the past? Part of the answer is that we’re not - in addition to the 5% chance of H5N1, we have to add the chance of some other pandemic flu. This probably isn’t 5% on its own; scientists monitor flu strains closely, and they haven’t found any others which are giving off as many red flags as H5N1. Still, something could always come out of left field. Maybe we should add a 2.5% chance of some other strain, for a total of 7.5% chance of a flu pandemic (ie beyond normal seasonal flu) next year. But still, isn’t it surprising that we’re so close to the base rate? One way to think about this: the base rate represents how concerned we should be if there was no epidemiological monitoring at all. In that case, we would estimate a probability distribution across different epidemiological landscapes, most of which contain some concerning-looking flu strains. Since we are doing the epidemiological monitoring, we can collapse that distribution into a single picture: one flu strain, H5N1, is in fact pretty concerning, and other strains mostly aren’t. This is enough to move our prior from 5% to 7.5%, but no more. The forecasters I talked to raised one other point of uncertainty: does the flu work more like a dice roll, or like a bus? Dice rolls are uncorrelated with their predecessors; even if it’s been a hundred rolls since you last rolled a 6, your chance this time is still 1/6. But buses come at fixed intervals; if the buses are hourly, and you haven’t seen a bus in the past 59 minutes, then your chance of seeing a bus in the next minute is very high. It’s been 16 years since the last flu pandemic; these pandemics come (on average) every 20 years. I don’t think anyone has a good sense of how to think about this. But it was 40 years between the Spanish and Hong Kong flus, so the twenty year number is at best a rule of thumb. The 5% number feels very low to me (and, apparently, to the average Manifold forecaster). Isn’t H5N1 spreading to cows and pigs and all sorts of other mammals? Isn’t it in the news all the time? I trust Metaculus a lot, but I agree that this is a surprising update, and I’m taking it on faith rather than feeling it in my bones. What Would The Fatality Rate Be For An H5N1 Pandemic? There are four basic stories you could tell about likely H5N1 mortality. First, maybe mortality would be 50%. The argument here is that official statistics report this mortality rate in the chicken farmers who have been infected with H5N1 so far. Several news sources and even some scientists have raised the specter of a pandemic version of H5N1 pandemic with this same death rate, which could kill a quarter to a third of the world population. THIS IS EXTREMELY FAKE. The official statistics only report fatality rate in the infections we know about. Bird flu is rare, there’s no mass testing, and we only learn that somebody had it if they’re in a hospital and the doctors are worried enough to test for rare conditions. Of Americans who got bird flu in the past year, 0 out of 61 have died. Probably this is mostly because America upped its detection game and is now finding milder cases; we also can’t rule out the virus mutating to become less virulent. Metaculus estimates the current true mortality rate as 1.25%. …but leaves a wide 90% confidence interval, from 0.5% to 7%. Second, maybe mortality would be somewhere around 1.25%. The argument here is that Metaculus uses this as its central estimate of US mortality. But Sentinel discusses some reasons to be skeptical of broad inferences from the US numbers: Scientists have been puzzled by the apparently low H5N1 case fatality rate in humans in the US. They offer a number of hypotheses: “The way in which the virus is being transmitted — along with the amount of virus exposure — is limiting the severity of disease.”

Inline links: was found in pigs, Jeremiah Johnson’s, mine, a CDC-sponsored respiratory disease forecasting tournament, dimaklenchin, Sergio, reported human-to-human transmission of highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 globally before 2026, human cases, past events, vaccine for cattle is licensed soon, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!fL7J!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd6a70fa6-b356-422d-ba9a-5db431e5a056_751x471.png, The Institute For Progress estimated, news, sources, scientists, Sentinel discusses

Inquisition2 mentions across 2 issues

Inquisition is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between October 28, 2022 and October 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "and then they snitch on you to the Inquisition and you freak out and confess"; "The Inquisition, relentlessly slaughtering, tearing, and burning the flesh of so many victims". It most often appears alongside Catholic Church, Devil, Germany.

Article page: Inquisition
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: October 28, 2022
Last seen: October 01, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: Malleus Maleficarum October 28, 2022
The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know October 01, 2025

Catholic Church 2 shared issues
Devil 2 shared issues
Germany 2 shared issues
God 2 shared issues
Mass 2 shared issues

Source context

Book Review: Malleus Maleficarum

October 28, 2022 · Original source

Certain Remedies prescribed against those Dark and Horrid Harms with which Devils may Afflict Men. IV: Witches Get Stitches At last we reach witch trials. Witch trials are preferably conducted in the courts of the Inquisition, but secular courts may conduct them when needed, since witches also do secular harm (eg kill cattle). When overseen by the Inquisition, witchcraft is treated as an especially vile subspecies of heresy, and the normal rules for heresy trials apply. On paper, Kramer and the system he represents are very concerned about protecting the innocent. “The proof of an accusation,” he writes, “ought to be clearer than daylight; and especially ought this to be so in the case of the grave charge of heresy”. How do you prove an accusation? Kramer’s preferred method is with at least three witnesses (although judges are permitted to occasionally convict with fewer). Who may serve as a witness? Kramer thinks about this pretty hard. It would seem that maybe the suspect’s enemies should not be allowed to testify against her, because they might be motivated by grudges. On the contrary side, most witches are people of bad reputation who have alienated their whole village, on account of all the witching they do. It would hardly be fair if a suspected witch had to be set free because everyone hated them and no non-enemy could be found to testify. So Kramer compromises again: enemies may testify, but not mortal enemies. A person is considered a mortal enemy of a suspect if one of them has tried to kill the other, or their families have a blood feud, or something of that nature. Should suspects be able to confront the witnesses who testify against them? Kramer recognizes that it would be unfair if they couldn’t. But he’s also concerned about retribution; snitching on a witch to the Inquisition sounds like a one way ticket to Curseville. He concludes that if a witness is scared that they might be harmed if their identity is revealed, their identity should be kept a secret, WHICH BY THE WAY MEANS THAT THE F@#KING INQUISITION HAS MORE PRINCIPLES THAN THE NEW YORK TIMES. I find this solution unsatisfying, but given Kramer’s premises I’m not sure I know a better option (although if there was one, we could call it the Witchness Protection Program). These two decisions lead to a new problem: witch hunters are nomadic types. They don’t know who is mortal enemies with whom in every little village. So suppose so-and-so testifies against a witch. The Inquisitor asks “Are you this woman’s mortal enemy?”, and the witness of course says no. Without asking the suspect to confirm, how do we know if he’s lying? But if we do ask the suspect, how do we prevent her from knowing he’s the witness? Kramer’s proposed solution is to ask the suspect to list off all her mortal enemies; if she names the witness, something is afoot. (Some of you may have already noticed a loophole here. A History Of The Inquisition In Spain describes the case of one Gaspar Torralba, accused in 1531: “There were thirty-five witnesses against him, for he was generally hated and feared. In his defence he enumerated no less than a hundred and fifty-two persons, including his wife and daughter, as his mortal enemies, and he gave the reason in each case which amply justified their enmity . . . The tribunal evidently recognized the nature of the accusation; he was admitted to bail, July 1, 1532, and finally escaped with a moderate penance.”) “Here’s an itemized list of thirty years of disagreements” “Sweet Jesus!” So you have your three witnesses. You’ve questioned them separately, to see if their stories match, then questioned the suspect separately a bunch of times to see if she changes her story. All the witnesses agree, and the suspect still seems suspicious. Now you can burn her as a witch, right? Wrong. The Holy Inquisition is forbidden to burn anyone as a witch until they confess with their own lips, and confessions obtained under torture don’t count. THIS IS AN EXTREMELY FAKE RULE. The first way it is fake: a confession obtained under torture doesn’t count, but you can torture the witch, let her confess during the torture, and then later, after the torture is over, say “Okay, you confessed, so obviously you’re a witch, please confirm”. If she doesn’t confirm, you can torture her more and repeat the process. The second way it is fake is that you are allowed to lie to her in basically any way to make her confess. Kramer recommends saying “If you confess, I won’t sentence you to any punishment”. Then when she confesses, you hand her over to a different judge for the sentencing phase, and he sentences her to the punishment. Or a judge can promise mercy, “with the mental reservation that he means he will be merciful to himself or the State, for whatever is done for the safety of the State is merciful”. You may, if you wish, transport the suspect to some kind of weird far-off castle (this is the Middle Ages, they have so many weird far-off castles they don’t know what to do with them). Keep her there for a while until she thinks everyone has forgotten about her and the witch trial is over. Have all the ladies and servants of the castle be very friendly to her. One day the lord of the castle will be gone on some errand, and one of the ladies who has befriended her will say: I hear you were a witch once, I really need to bewitch someone, would you mind telling me how to cast a spell? And everyone there has always been so nice, and the witch trial is long forgotten, so she’ll say yeah, sure, and explain how to cause a hailstorm or something. And then you can jump out from behind a tapestry or something and say “Ha! We got you!” Does this really work? Quite lately a witch was detained in the Castle of Königsheim near the town of Schlettstadt in the Diocese of Strasburg, and could not be induced by any tortures or questions to confess her crimes. But at last the castellan used the method we have just described. Although he was himself present in the castle, the witch thought he was away, and three of his household came in to her and promised they would set her free if she would teach them how to do certain things. At first she refused, saying that they were trying to entrap her; but at last she asked what it was that they wanted to know. And one asked how to raise a hailstorm, and another asked about carnal matters. When at length she agreed to show him how to raise a hailstorm, and a bowl of water had been brought in, the witch told him to stir the water with his finger, and herself uttered certain words, and suddenly the place which he had named, a wood near the castle, was visited by such a tempest and storm of hail as had not been seen for many years. Caught red-handed! The third and final way this rule is extremely fake is that, if none of this makes the suspect confess, the judge can turn her over to the secular courts to be tried for witchcraft-as-a-secular-crime. He is supposed to recommend mercy, but realistically the secular courts will kill her anyway. So do all witch trials end in death? No. If a judge wants a witch trial to end in death, he has plenty of ways to make it happen. But the Malleus gives a list of scenarios (some evidence + no witnesses; some evidence + many witnesses, etc, etc) and most end in “acquittal”. I use the quotes because there is one more hurdle: a ritual called “purgation”, where the suspect brings X witnesses of her same station (eg lord for lord, peasant for peasant) to the town square. There, the witnesses publicly vouch for her good character, and she swears that she is not a witch and forsakes all witchcraft forever. Then everything’s good - but the key is that the more suspicious you seem, the higher the judge will set X. And if you can’t find X people to vouch for your good character, you’re in contempt of court and probably a witch. Also, except in the most cut-and-dry cases of innocence, suspects are released on something like probation: any further accusations of witchcraft will be taken much more seriously. Since people were already willing to falsely accuse you of witchcraft once, good luck with the probation, I guess. Other highlights of this section: Question IX: What Kind Of Defense May Be Allowed, And Of The Appointment Of An Advocate All suspected witches have the right to an attorney. But if the attorney goes overboard defending the client, it is reasonable to suspect him of being a witch himself. Question XVII: Of Common Purgation, And Especially Of The Trial Of Red-Hot Iron, To Which Witches Appeal It might seem that you should give witches trial by ordeal, because that way God can decide their guilt or innocence, and (as has already been established), God really hates witches. The most common trial by ordeal is the trial by iron, where the suspect must hold a red hot iron, and if she drops it, she’s guilty. Unfortunately, witches can use witchcraft to hold the iron, so this doesn’t work. Witches always ask for this kind of trial and are always found innocent, so best to give them a normal trial with witnesses and stuff. Question XXII: Of The Third Kind Of Sentence, To Be Pronounced On One Who Is Defamed, And Who Is To Be Put To The Question Kramer advises: “Let not the Judge be too willing to subject a person to torture, for this should only be resorted to in default of other proofs”. He then goes on to explain that torture usually doesn’t work, because “some are so soft-hearted and feeble-minded that at the least torture they will confess anything, whether it be true or not” and “others are so stubborn that, however much they be tortured, the truth is not to be had from them.” But his conclusion is only that “there is need for much prudence in the matter of torture”, and he goes on to talk a lot about how to torture people. He seems to think of false confessions (and false silence) as minor issues that deserve some attention but shouldn’t keep a judge from torturing someone if he really wants. It’s actually worse than this, because he goes on to say that the Devil often makes witches immune to torture. If someone doesn’t seem to mind being tortured at all, they’re probably a witch. If someone doesn’t cry when being tortured, that’s another red flag, because witches can’t cry (source: everyone knows this). To Kramer’s credit, he is willing to follow the logical implications of his belief: he agrees that if a suspect does cry, that means she’s innocent. Being really mean, trying to make her cry, and then letting her go if she does is . . . actually a valid witch trial method! But you have to be careful: sometimes witches try to game the system by carrying a concealed pouch of noxious herbs to make their eyes tear up. You should only release someone for crying if you’re sure they haven’t done this. Also interesting in Part 3: How the Trial is to be Proceeded with and Continued. And how the Witnesses are to be Examined in the Presence of Four Other Persons, and how the Accused is to be Questioned in Two Ways

Inline links: Certain Remedies prescribed against those Dark and Horrid Harms with which Devils may Afflict Men., A History Of The Inquisition In Spain, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!E3BT!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F42272c44-49f7-4100-8cab-b70967a0154f_1280x720.jpeg, How the Trial is to be Proceeded with and Continued. And how the Witnesses are to be Examined in the Presence of Four Other Persons, and how the Accused is to be Questioned in Two Ways

(And I don’t want to completely rule out that some people actually tried witchcraft. If you live the horrible life of a medieval peasant woman, and you hear that making a pact with the Devil gives you amazing magic powers that let you take revenge on all your enemies, maybe you start invoking the Devil. The history of modern occultism implies that any sufficiently schizo-spectrum person who asks to see the Devil will come away satisfied. So you see him, thank him, cackle a bit at your neighbor, feel good when some of their cattle die, and then they snitch on you to the Inquisition and you freak out and confess. I don’t know if this ever happened, but nothing I know about human nature rules it out. Honestly it seems less weird than school shooters.)

“Here’s an itemized list of thirty years of disagreements” “Sweet Jesus!” So you have your three witnesses. You’ve questioned them separately, to see if their stories match, then questioned the suspect separately a bunch of times to see if she changes her story. All the witnesses agree, and the suspect still seems suspicious. Now you can burn her as a witch, right? Wrong. The Holy Inquisition is forbidden to burn anyone as a witch until they confess with their own lips, and confessions obtained under torture don’t count. THIS IS AN EXTREMELY FAKE RULE. The first way it is fake: a confession obtained under torture doesn’t count, but you can torture the witch, let her confess during the torture, and then later, after the torture is over, say “Okay, you confessed, so obviously you’re a witch, please confirm”. If she doesn’t confirm, you can torture her more and repeat the process. The second way it is fake is that you are allowed to lie to her in basically any way to make her confess. Kramer recommends saying “If you confess, I won’t sentence you to any punishment”. Then when she confesses, you hand her over to a different judge for the sentencing phase, and he sentences her to the punishment. Or a judge can promise mercy, “with the mental reservation that he means he will be merciful to himself or the State, for whatever is done for the safety of the State is merciful”. You may, if you wish, transport the suspect to some kind of weird far-off castle (this is the Middle Ages, they have so many weird far-off castles they don’t know what to do with them). Keep her there for a while until she thinks everyone has forgotten about her and the witch trial is over. Have all the ladies and servants of the castle be very friendly to her. One day the lord of the castle will be gone on some errand, and one of the ladies who has befriended her will say: I hear you were a witch once, I really need to bewitch someone, would you mind telling me how to cast a spell? And everyone there has always been so nice, and the witch trial is long forgotten, so she’ll say yeah, sure, and explain how to cause a hailstorm or something. And then you can jump out from behind a tapestry or something and say “Ha! We got you!” Does this really work? Quite lately a witch was detained in the Castle of Königsheim near the town of Schlettstadt in the Diocese of Strasburg, and could not be induced by any tortures or questions to confess her crimes. But at last the castellan used the method we have just described. Although he was himself present in the castle, the witch thought he was away, and three of his household came in to her and promised they would set her free if she would teach them how to do certain things. At first she refused, saying that they were trying to entrap her; but at last she asked what it was that they wanted to know. And one asked how to raise a hailstorm, and another asked about carnal matters. When at length she agreed to show him how to raise a hailstorm, and a bowl of water had been brought in, the witch told him to stir the water with his finger, and herself uttered certain words, and suddenly the place which he had named, a wood near the castle, was visited by such a tempest and storm of hail as had not been seen for many years. Caught red-handed! The third and final way this rule is extremely fake is that, if none of this makes the suspect confess, the judge can turn her over to the secular courts to be tried for witchcraft-as-a-secular-crime. He is supposed to recommend mercy, but realistically the secular courts will kill her anyway. So do all witch trials end in death? No. If a judge wants a witch trial to end in death, he has plenty of ways to make it happen. But the Malleus gives a list of scenarios (some evidence + no witnesses; some evidence + many witnesses, etc, etc) and most end in “acquittal”. I use the quotes because there is one more hurdle: a ritual called “purgation”, where the suspect brings X witnesses of her same station (eg lord for lord, peasant for peasant) to the town square. There, the witnesses publicly vouch for her good character, and she swears that she is not a witch and forsakes all witchcraft forever. Then everything’s good - but the key is that the more suspicious you seem, the higher the judge will set X. And if you can’t find X people to vouch for your good character, you’re in contempt of court and probably a witch. Also, except in the most cut-and-dry cases of innocence, suspects are released on something like probation: any further accusations of witchcraft will be taken much more seriously. Since people were already willing to falsely accuse you of witchcraft once, good luck with the probation, I guess. Other highlights of this section: Question IX: What Kind Of Defense May Be Allowed, And Of The Appointment Of An Advocate All suspected witches have the right to an attorney. But if the attorney goes overboard defending the client, it is reasonable to suspect him of being a witch himself. Question XVII: Of Common Purgation, And Especially Of The Trial Of Red-Hot Iron, To Which Witches Appeal It might seem that you should give witches trial by ordeal, because that way God can decide their guilt or innocence, and (as has already been established), God really hates witches. The most common trial by ordeal is the trial by iron, where the suspect must hold a red hot iron, and if she drops it, she’s guilty. Unfortunately, witches can use witchcraft to hold the iron, so this doesn’t work. Witches always ask for this kind of trial and are always found innocent, so best to give them a normal trial with witnesses and stuff. Question XXII: Of The Third Kind Of Sentence, To Be Pronounced On One Who Is Defamed, And Who Is To Be Put To The Question Kramer advises: “Let not the Judge be too willing to subject a person to torture, for this should only be resorted to in default of other proofs”. He then goes on to explain that torture usually doesn’t work, because “some are so soft-hearted and feeble-minded that at the least torture they will confess anything, whether it be true or not” and “others are so stubborn that, however much they be tortured, the truth is not to be had from them.” But his conclusion is only that “there is need for much prudence in the matter of torture”, and he goes on to talk a lot about how to torture people. He seems to think of false confessions (and false silence) as minor issues that deserve some attention but shouldn’t keep a judge from torturing someone if he really wants. It’s actually worse than this, because he goes on to say that the Devil often makes witches immune to torture. If someone doesn’t seem to mind being tortured at all, they’re probably a witch. If someone doesn’t cry when being tortured, that’s another red flag, because witches can’t cry (source: everyone knows this). To Kramer’s credit, he is willing to follow the logical implications of his belief: he agrees that if a suspect does cry, that means she’s innocent. Being really mean, trying to make her cry, and then letting her go if she does is . . . actually a valid witch trial method! But you have to be careful: sometimes witches try to game the system by carrying a concealed pouch of noxious herbs to make their eyes tear up. You should only release someone for crying if you’re sure they haven’t done this. Also interesting in Part 3: How the Trial is to be Proceeded with and Continued. And how the Witnesses are to be Examined in the Presence of Four Other Persons, and how the Accused is to be Questioned in Two Ways

Inline links: How the Trial is to be Proceeded with and Continued. And how the Witnesses are to be Examined in the Presence of Four Other Persons, and how the Accused is to be Questioned in Two Ways

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

October 01, 2025 · Original source

Interlude: The Anti-Clerical Union As mentioned briefly before, 1910s Portugal was in a period of transition. In 1910, a group of proto-socialist revolutionaries overthrew the monarchy. The monarchy and church had been in cahoots, so the revolutionaries cracked down on Catholicism, closing the monasteries and persecuting the churches. This was a bold move - only an upper crust of educated urbanites were proto-socialist, and 99%+ of the country identified as Catholic, albeit at various levels of religiosity. In the 1920s, conservatives would regain the upper hand, overthrow the proto-socialists and restore a pro-church dictatorship. Still, the small urban educated ruling class of 1910s Portugal was a hotbed of atheistic anti-church sentiment. Probably the child-seers of Fatima were only dimly aware of this, but their prophecies were a spark entering a powder keg, and many of the more worldly witnesses were aware of this context. While reading through Fatima-related documents, I came across some pamphlets by Grupo Anticlerical, one of the era’s leading atheist organizations. They are totally irrelevant to our primary goal of trying to figure out what’s up with the miracle. But I love them so much that I can’t resist adding one as an interlude. I have slightly edited the machine translation for clarity and readability: To defend the sacred freedom of conscience—guaranteed by the original Law of Separation of Church and State—from the furious attacks of implacable Jesuitism—the greatest enemy of all human happiness!—the Anticlerical Group was organized in this town, similar to what is being done in many parts of the country! This was necessary. They call us to fight. We present ourselves courageously! The great, formidable battle of progress against Ultramontane Reaction, of Freedom against Tyranny, of Truth against Lies is waged again with enthusiasm and ardor! The redemptive dawn that the Portuguese people saw emerge on October 5, 1910, is about to be eclipsed, intercepted by the immense flood of black cassocks!... But in the dark night that seeks to envelop Reason; where moral suffering takes on tragic proportions in a frightening asphyxiation, the Light will once again break through!... the consoling light of elevated spirits... and like a sinister scarecrow, the grim reaction will flee in terror! Liberal people! Hear us! This fight is terrible! Many of our people will perhaps be crushed and tortured on the battlefield, but what does it matter?! Every war against reaction is a holy war because it frees consciences from the clutches of their enemies!... It is the fight of Justice against Iniquity, of Love against Hate, of Good against Evil!... To the fight, then, for the Progress that makes life beautiful; for the Freedom that redeems the people; and for the science that guides us all as an eternal beacon to the Light of Truth! Gago Coutinho and Sacadura Cabral [two Portuguese aviators who had recently flown across the Atlantic] are prodigious spirits before whom our souls kneel religiously – boldly breaking through the air with the mathematical certainty of someone who knows the path to be taken to get from one point to another determined point; flying through the immense blue as sure of their route as any of us walking on earth, they showed us that Science is not an empty word! The power of their prodigious sextant, the fruit of immense scientific lucubrations, is more real and positive than the cross of Christ painted on their device, which could not even have saved them from falling due to lack of gasoline in the middle of the sea at the mercy of the waves. Their extraordinary journey, an adventure which moved us to tears, was the most resounding scientific victory of recent times! It was, above all, a powerful affirmation of science! Let us therefore make science our religion, for scientific religion is Freedom of Thought! To be a Free Thinker is to love immortal science, eagerly waiting for it to reveal to us the truth of the great enigmas of the Universe! And only it can reveal them! People! Let us always fight! From the victory of progress, science, freedom, and free thought, will result human happiness, joy, love, fraternity, respect for women, veneration for mothers, adoration for children, affection for the elderly, protection for the sick, the unfortunate, the tortured. The victory of reaction, of clericalism, of black, cruel and ferocious Jesuitism will result in: the gallows, the acts of faith with their human destruction, persecution, exile, robbery, arson, the deflowering of women, the killing of children, the monstrous torture of all free spirits! The history of so many crimes committed in the name of God horrifies us! The Inquisition, relentlessly slaughtering, tearing, and burning the flesh of so many victims, is still today, in the twentieth century, a sinister specter haunting us!... O most holy mothers! O holy, pious mothers who so love your sweet little children! Have compassion on your beautiful little children, sacred fruits of your blessed wombs: Love Freedom! Love Liberty, O loving mothers, immaculate saints of our altar! We pray for them... for your children, who are the light of your candid eyes, the life of your life... for little children... for all children, tender rosebuds that retrogression furiously lashes, – love Liberty!. And you, O parents! Heads of families who so tremble at your loved ones, snatch them from the merciless clutches of the reactionaries who twist their brains and kill their reason! Hear us all, men, women, and children; listen: Freedom writhes in horrible convulsions... it vibrates in space, echoing from mountain to mountain, an anguished cry for help!... It is Freedom that falls, annihilated! It is Freedom that dies in the bloody clutches of Jesuitism! The Miracle of Fatima, people, is a ridiculous lie, it is a comedy, it is not religion! Come on, liberals! Let us all rise up from this criminal apathy and, without delay, fight not the religious sentiment of the Portuguese people, such a good people, a race of heroes, but rather the exploitation that clericalism is inflicting on the people, foisting upon them, at a good price, images of the saint —trademarked to avoid competition from other vampires! —the shamelessness!—and leading them, through suggestion, to wallow and drink madly, the miraculous water, foul, filthy water, full of rot, pus, and pestilent microbes that the sore flesh of the sick leaves deposited there in the washings! We, all as one man, will fight the reaction, forcing it to retreat and thus, with our efforts, we will save the Republic and the Portuguese Land from its fatal annihilation! … …anyway, Interlude over, let’s get back to the miracle. 2: The Skeptical Explanations Re-invigorated by the rousing prose of Grupo Anticlerical, can we come up with a materialist explanation for the sun miracle? 2.1: Pilgrim, Avert Thine Eyes Starting in October 1917, doubters have focused on one obvious possibility: staring at the sun is harmful to your health. If you stare too long, you go blind. If you stare just slightly less long than that . . . maybe something strange happens? Just to get a particular theory out there: everyone knows that if you stare at a bright light source for a few seconds, you get a temporary afterimage - often pink or bluish-green - on your retina. Suppose the pilgrims stared at the sun. Their eyes would inevitably make microsaccades - small natural jerking motions - and the afterimage would appear somewhere slightly different than the true sun. This might look like the sun turning pink or blue and moving in a zig-zag pattern. Believers in the miracle counter this proposal in several ways. First, although it might explain the sun changing colors and dancing, it doesn’t give an explanation for spinning, sparkling, or falling to earth and threatening to crush everybody (exactly three times in a ten minute interval, no less). Second, although witnesses describe the sun changing color, they also describe everything around them changing color to match the sunlight, which doesn’t match localized afterimages. And one scientifically-minded witness specifically describes closing his eyes to see if there was a persistent afterimage; he says there was not. Third, there are no reports of eye injuries or blindness from a crowd that was, supposedly, staring straight at the sun for ten minutes. This is a good match to witness reports (that the sun was unusually pale and didn’t hurt to look at) and with Dalleur’s theory (that it wasn’t the sun). But it’s a bad match to any theory depending on eye injuries. Fourth, this would require Portuguese people to be total idiots. Everyone already knows bright lights cause afterimages. Surely if you stare at the sun for ten minutes and get some afterimages, you’re not going to freak out and start screaming about miracles and the end of the world. Even if the peasants had somehow remained ignorant of afterimages their whole lives, the scientists and doctors in attendance wouldn’t be fooled. If we are to keep this theory, maybe we should posit some retinal phenomenon much stronger than the ones we know. Everyone thinks they know how much an illusion can fool you - “yeah, okay, obviously the cookie that looks very slightly bigger will actually be the same size” - which is exactly why the really good ones, like the Checker Shadow Illusion, come as such a shock. Squares A and B are the same color. Source: Checker shadow illusion. There’s no way around it: we need to hear from someone who has stared directly into the sun. August Meessen was a physics professor at a Catholic university, which sounds like exactly the job profile we want for this sort of thing. He found himself sufficiently interested in the Fatima miracle to stare straight into the sun for a few minutes and record what happened. From his paper: In November 2002, I looked directly into the sun, at about 4 p.m. The sun was relatively low above the horizon and its light intensity was attenuated, although the sky was clear. I was able to look right into the sun and was amazed to see that the sun was immediately converted into a grey disc, surrounded by a brilliant ring. The grey disc was practically uniform, while the surrounding ring was somewhat irregular and flamboyant, but did not extend beyond the solar disk. It coincided with its rim. I stopped the experiment, since I wanted to be prudent, but I had experienced myself the initial phase of a typical “miracle of the sun” and I could explain it. The sun became grey, since my eyes immediately responded to its great luminosity by an automatic reduction of their sensitivity. This adaptation is not simply due to the bleaching of pigments in the colour-sensitive cones of the fovea, where the image of the sun is projected, but to secondary processes. By “initial phase”, he means the part where the sun looks pale and well-defined, like a full moon. This isn’t something I think needs explanation (see above), but he sure has explained it. Moving on: In a second experiment, realized at 3 p.m. in December 2002, I looked straight at the sun during a much longer time. After some minutes, I saw impressive colours, up to 2 or 3 times the diameter of the sun. They changed, but were mainly pink, deep blue, red and green. Further away, the sky became progressively more luminous. I stopped there, since I understood that these colours resulted from the fact that the red, green and blue sensitive pigments are bleached and regenerated at different rates. This is frustratingly vague. Are the “impressive colors up to 2-3 times the diameter of the sun” just the normal aftereffects of staring at a bright object? Or something surprising even to physics professors? And the spinning? What about the motions of the sun? I didn’t see them, because I didn’t look at the sun for a sufficiently long time or my brain knew already too much. Once, after I had been looking at a very long passing train, I had (for about 30 seconds) the illusion of an opposite motion. Joseph Plateau discovered that when we look at the centre of a spiral that is rotating at some given velocity about this point, and when we stop this rotation, we see a reversed rotation. It lasts for several minutes, although in reality, there is no motion at all. This is a good example of motional after-effects. The “dance of the sun” is initiated, however, by a spontaneous generation of apparent motion. This feels suspiciously like a just-so story. His explanation for the sun falling to earth to crush everyone - which he also did not see - is equally ad hoc: A very interesting study was recently devoted to this “zoom and loom effect”. It tends to appear when the brain is confronted with the two-dimensional retinal image of an object that is situated at some unknown distance. The brain will then consider the possibility that it could come closer, by performing an illusory mental zoom, where the apparent size of the object is progressively increased. This results from the fact that evolution preserved the tendency to take into account the possibility of a dangerous approach: a rapid evasive action could be beneficial for survival. If true, it sounds like you should be able to generate this effect not just by staring at the sun (ill-advised, causes blindness), but by staring at the moon. I would like to test this, but unfortunately I am writing this on the night of a new moon; I’ll check back in two weeks. Still, I am skeptical that no human being living before 1917 AD ever figured out that staring at a celestial body long enough would make it appear to fall to earth and crush you. Compare to much gentler illusions - like how the moon looks bigger right when it starts to rise - which everybody knows about. I was able to find a thirdhand report (Fr. Stanley Jaki → G. J. Strangfeld → consultation with bishop) of another sun miracle investigator, one “Professor Dr. Stöckl” in Germany, who made a similar experiment: After almost a minute (the time varies according to the condition of the atmopshere and the momentary condition of the eyes) one thinks to see a dark blue disk in front of the sun (this is already a sign of the highly excited state of the retina). According to my experience … this dark blue disk is somewhat smaller than the solar disk, so that the edge of that disk stands out as a ring beyond that dark blue disk. Then one has right away the impression that the solar disk rotates with great speed in one or the other direction. This I have experienced often enough. All this is a subjective appearance that has nothing to do with the external world. These reports are suggestive, but weaker than all but the barest Fatima testimonials. Dr. Messeen admits as much, saying that “I didn’t look at the sun for a sufficiently long time”. Can we find people even more committed - or reckless, or masochistic - than Professors Messeen and Stöckl? Absolutely yes: there was a whole subfield of late 18th / early 19th century psychophysicists who experimented with staring at the sun for long periods, many of whom went blind. Joseph Plateau (1801 - 1883, went blind in 18432) summarizes their work in his aptly-named On The Contemplation Of Bright Objects. He lists twenty-six scientists who tried staring at the sun for a really long time. Most describe what we now recognize as typical retinal afterimages, and Plateau spends most of his time talking about how long these last and what colors they pass through. The only one of Plateau’s sources who reports anything even slightly interesting to us is Robert Darwin (father of Charles; cf. Secrets of the Great Families). After stating that: The author has frequently observed that when he gazed at the midday sun for a long time, until its disk appeared pale blue, he saw a bright blue specter on other objects for more than two days. …he mentions how When looking at the meridian sun as long as the eyes can well bear its brightness, the disc first becomes pale, with a luminous crescent, which seems to librate from one edge of it to the other owing to the unsteadiness of the eye. Here is pallor, and at least a hint of motion. But it’s pretty different from spinning, and not really clear how it relates to the sun miracle. Gustav Fechner (1801 - 1887, went blind in 1839) may have stared for even longer; you can read more of his story - including his ensuing insanity and subsequent attempts to found a new religion - on Adam Mastroianni’s blog. But all that he records about his ill-fated experiment is that: …after looking at the sun through homogeneously colored lenses, if you close your eyes, the primary impression remains for a long time and the entire afterimage usually disappears without a complementary coloration having clearly emerged. These people are great, and they all sound like minor Sam Kriss characters. But after whole careers dedicated to staring at the sun much longer than any normal person would ever try, they report only the barest hints of odd phenomena. Indeed, if anything they saw less of interest to the Fatimologist than Profs. Messeen and Stöckl. Worse, all of these authorities saw their phenomena after seconds to minutes of deliberate staring. Surely if it had taken a minute of staring at the sun before anything happened, some of our eyewitnesses would have mentioned this; after all, several mention that they were starting to doubt after the child-seers’ deadline had passed a few minutes earlier. But by all accounts, the miracle was near-instantaneous. Although Messeen and Stöckl’s reports of miracle-like phenomena are intriguing, it doesn’t seem like they can be the whole picture. Let’s move on. 2.2: Aurora Borealis? At This Time Of Year? In This Part Of The Country? Localized Entirely Within Your Kitchen? Could the miracle at Fatima have been some kind of weird weather phenomenon? The main argument against is that if it were a common weather phenomenon, it would not have awed and terrified tens of thousands of people. But if it were a rare weather phenomenon, then the seers’ successful prophecy that the rare weather phenomenon would happen at solar noon on October 13 1917 becomes almost as impressive as an outright miracle. The argument in favor is that dozens of people have written books and papers about this possibility, we would feel remiss if we didn’t mention them, and anyway it gives us the opportunity to look at pretty pictures of interesting weather phenomena. This is a sun dog. It’s caused by ice crystals in the upper atmosphere that refract sunlight in a very specific way. It’s very cool, but aside from a resemblance to a wheel, it looks nothing like the miracle of Fatima. A sun dog doesn’t have any unusual colors, it doesn’t change size, and it doesn’t spin (I’ve embedded a YouTube video not because a still image would be misleading - it wouldn’t be - but just in case you want to see for yourself how completely motionless it is). It’s just a halo shape with two smaller illusory suns on either side of the real one - something which no one at Fatima reported. (source) This is a solar corona3; cloud iridescence is a related phenomenon. I don’t know how much work the exposure length is doing in this particular photo, but I’m guessing more than zero. Coronae are also very pretty, and might explain the description of wheels and colors. They seem surprisingly common for something that I can’t ever remember seeing, supposedly happening several times a year in most locations. But they don’t spin, the colors don’t change or stain the surrounding landscape, and they don’t fall to earth and crush people. Let’s keep this one as a backup option and move on. This is a dust storm. Steuart Campbell wrote a paper arguing that the miracle was caused by one of these, and I admit if I saw this I would start praying pretty hard. Dust storms can change the color of the sun (including unusual colors like green or blue). And very, very charitably, whirling dust could look like the sun itself spinning around, and the thickening and thinning of dust could look like the sun approaching or receding. But this would require a dust storm localized to a 20 mile region of Portugal which does not, technically, have any dust (and where it was, technically, raining at the time). Campbell proposes that perhaps a storm blew a 20 miles x 20 mile dust cloud from the Sahara out to the Atlantic, then onto Fatima for ten minutes during a break in the rain, then back to the Atlantic again. But I don’t think any dust storm has ever behaved in quite this way. If it did, it probably wouldn’t be at the exact moment predicted by child-seers months in advance. At this point, we might as well talk about literal meteors. The way I’m imagining it is this: as a meteor approaches Earth, it breaks up into three big parts and a host of smaller particles. They strike the atmosphere head-on, from the approximate direction of the sun. The small particles hit first and make a firework show. Then the three big pieces hit, producing multicolored fireballs (meteors can absolutely stain the sky bright colors - see the video). Finally, they burn out a few miles above the ground, , convincingly producing the appearance of the sun falling to earth and nearly striking the spectators. This could even explain the warmth and dry clothes - a local meteor strike produces a lot of heat! I like this because it’s the only one that takes seriously the facet of the event which most impressed the witnesses - the part where it looked like the sun was plummeting to earth and about to kill them. But against it: would a rain of micrometeorites really look like the sun was “dancing”, “spinning”, or “zig-zagging”? Aren’t most nearby meteor strikes very loud? (the Fatima event was, according to witnesses, silent) Don’t they usually break windows? Aren’t most meteor strikes of this size visible for hundreds of miles, not just the twenty miles from which we have witness testimonies? Wouldn’t the strike have to be remarkably head-on, and remarkable close to the position of the sun, in order to look like a solar phenomenon rather than a long streak? Aren’t most meteor fireballs visible for between a few seconds and a minute, not the ten minutes of the Fatima event4? And if there were some extremely unusual meteor strike that was the exception to everything, wouldn’t it still be pretty surprising for it to happen at the exact time and place predicted by child-seers months in advance? We come to the unpromisingly-titled Derivation of equations of the model of the dynamic behavior of the three-dimensional atmospheric cloud of electrically charged ice crystals under the influence of electrostatic forces, in which Artur Wiroski argues that Fatima was a three-dimensional atmospheric cloud of electrically charged ice crystals under the influence of electrostatic forces. Actually, he offhandedly mentions Fatima in three sentences, with the majority of the paper looking more like the image above - but he eventually makes it into a Guardian article where he emphasizes that yes, he is trying to explain the miracle of the sun. However, if I’m understanding him correctly, he says that his theoretical ice crystal phenomenon can only happen when the sun is at an altitude below 22 degrees. But during the Fatima miracle, the sun was at 42 degrees (and Dalleur’s mysterious light source was at 30 degrees), so none of this applies. I’ve tried to include pictures of all the phenomena I mention in this section. I failed for this one, because it’s never been spotted or photographed. It’s just some incredibly weird thing that one scientist says ice crystals might do if parameters were ever exactly right, with such a precise definition of “exactly right” that it’s never happened in real life. If it ever did happen, it probably wouldn’t be at exactly the moment predicted by child-seers several months in advance. 2.3: Everyone’s Mad Here Except You And Me Another common response calls the Sun Miracle a “mass hallucination”. Can 70,000 people really hallucinate the same thing? “Mass hallucination” on Wikipedia redirects to List Of Mass Panic Cases. The Miracle of the Sun is on there, but listed as “(disputed)” - the only item to earn such a parenthetical. The other fifty items mostly belong to three categories: A disease with unusual symptoms spreads through a population; doctors eventually pronounce it psychosomatic.

Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Wkjz!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcff92f63-ad21-42fa-ad6f-c412b71f8524_631x481.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!mhyb!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa5fdf3d3-3e36-403e-95b9-f9fcbe7a06f0_1280x974.png, Checker shadow illusion, his paper, 2, Secrets of the Great Families, Adam Mastroianni’s blog, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kvPF!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F30bf02a3-f57b-4a9f-a849-e7e318c65b6f_900x600.jpeg, source, 3, cloud iridescence, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Y1Qt!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9bbd9216-eb7d-4012-b114-bae56dbb0d4c_1024x681.webp, wrote a paper, 4, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Id7a!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3c37c56e-bdf1-46e2-8d29-d395987be105_851x310.png, Derivation of equations of the model of the dynamic behavior of the three-dimensional atmospheric cloud of electrically charged ice crystals under the influence of electrostatic forces, a Guardian article, List Of Mass Panic Cases

Integral Theory2 mentions across 2 issues

Integral Theory is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between December 09, 2022 and August 16, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "philosophies/frameworks of Spiral Dynamics and Integral Theory elucidate"; "Integral Theory". It most often appears alongside 417th Marquess of Cornwallshireshire, ACX, ACX.

Article page: Integral Theory
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: December 09, 2022
Last seen: August 16, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On Bobos In Paradise December 09, 2022
In Defense Of Describable Dating Preferences August 16, 2023

417th Marquess of Cornwallshireshire 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
Alice 1 shared issues
America 1 shared issues

Source context

In Defense Of Describable Dating Preferences

December 09, 2022 · Original source

Is spot on, and it's exactly what the philosophies/frameworks of Spiral Dynamics and Integral Theory elucidate. There's been a constant swing back and forth between the right/left divides, each at times playing the "establishment" and the other the "rebel", pushing and pulling, while the entire thing trends/spirals in a more complex and evolutionarily appropriate direction for the complexities of the time.

Oh, I had always assumed that Integral Theory Spiral Dynamics was just vague meaningless stuff, but maybe I should check it out.

August 16, 2023 · Original source

Hi, I’m Sky! I’m an Aries, although my friends say I sometimes act like more of a Virgo. I’m looking for a deep, fulfilling relationship where we inspire each other to become our best selves and face each day’s challenges anew. My interests include Non-Violent Communication, Internal Family Systems therapy, somatic experiencing, and Integral Theory. My ideal partner would be deeply spiritual and interested in co-exploring this beautiful maze we call Life alongside me.

intelligentsia2 mentions across 2 issues

intelligentsia is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between March 05, 2021 and December 01, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "the concept of intelligentsia - a class materially poor but mentally rich"; "I’d never really understood the idea of “intelligentsia” before. I knew it meant the class of smart people". It most often appears alongside Bobos In Paradise, David Brooks, Elon Musk.

Article page: intelligentsia
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: March 05, 2021
Last seen: December 01, 2022

Outbound links

Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On Class March 05, 2021
Book Review: First Sixth Of Bobos In Paradise December 01, 2022

Bobos In Paradise 2 shared issues
David Brooks 2 shared issues
Elon Musk 2 shared issues
Fussell 2 shared issues
Paul Fussell 2 shared issues

Source context

Highlights From The Comments On Class

March 05, 2021 · Original source

Perhaps the most important thing that separates Eastern bloc culture from e.g. British culture is the concept of intelligentsia - a class materially poor but mentally rich, the artists and writers and academics. There is a strong implicit understanding that such a class is the heart of society, responsible for its "spirit" and the safekeeping of its values. Between WW2 and the subsequent Soviet occupation, this class has been essentially gutted, to a large extent physically (see e.g. Katyn massacre). In parallel, the communist effort to separate kulaks from both their holdings and the mortal coil has been successful, and there are no pre-war fortunes whatsoever. Communism falls, and now we have a tabula rasa society.

The lower class works basically as described in the book. The middle class is stuck in a curious position. Do we aim to be the new intelligentsia, perhaps inspired by our own grandfathers? Do we enthusiastically jump in the rat race and attempt to out-earn and out-Instagram everybody else (cf. the lower middle class of the book)? Do we ostentatiously drop both status ladders and do our own thing? The middle class is fractured and occupied by sneering at everybody climbing a different ladder than themselves.

Book Review: First Sixth Of Bobos In Paradise

December 01, 2022 · Original source

The meritocrats didn’t exactly have a culture of their own to bring to the fight. They were a haphazard faction thrown together by 1950s college admissions policies. But their links to academia let them lift the pre-existing culture of the intelligentsia and bohemians.

I’d never really understood the idea of “intelligentsia” before. I knew it meant the class of smart people, but eg English professors never seemed like a substantially different class than anyone else. Brooks says this isn’t a coincidence; the modern upper class copied and absorbed the intelligentsia, ending their existence as a separate group.

These groups had evolved alongside and in opposition to the aristocracy. Their values were anti-capitalist - sometimes in the sense of being outright Marxists, but always in the sense of contempt for the boorish pursuit of money or status. To the intelligentsia and bohemians, the suburban white-picket-fence two-point-five-children lifestyle was infinitely contemptible compared to a passionate commitment to suffer for art or politics or erudition or whatever; they had spent the past two hundred years harping on this theme in approximately every novel ever written. The new meritocrats adopted these ideas as rallying cries for their cultural crusade against the bourgeois WASPs.

International Style2 mentions across 2 issues

International Style is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between December 04, 2024 and December 05, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "one of the first great International Style skyscrapers"; "the International Style was finishing off the demand for it"; "To those who complained that International Style buildings were cramped". It most often appears alongside Bauhaus, Beaux-Arts, From Bauhaus To Our House.

Article page: International Style
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: December 04, 2024
Last seen: December 05, 2024

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: From Bauhaus To Our House December 04, 2024
Friendly And Hostile Analogies For Taste December 05, 2024

Bauhaus 2 shared issues
Beaux-Arts 2 shared issues
From Bauhaus To Our House 2 shared issues
3D printing 1 shared issues
@dieworkwear 1 shared issues

Source context

Book Review: From Bauhaus To Our House

December 04, 2024 · Original source

The problem was alienation - the people designing the buildings weren’t the ones residing in them - or, in many cases, even viewing them as they walked by. Wolfe thinks that the people with the most exposure were least happy with the results. Here’s his discussion of the Seagram Building, one of the first great International Style skyscrapers:

To those philistines who were still so gauche as to say that the new architecture lacked the richness of detail of the old Beaux-Arts architecture … [the modernists] would say with considerable condescension: “Fine. You produce the craftsmen who can do that kind of work, and then we’ll talk to you about it. They don’t exist anymore.” True enough. But why? Henry Hope Reed tells of riding across West Fifty-third Street in New York in the 1940s in a car with some employees of E.F. Caldwell & Co, a firm that specialized in bronze work and electrical fixtures. As the car passed the Museum of Modern Art building, the men began shaking their fists at it and shouting: “That goddamn place is destroying us! Those bastards are killing us!” In the palmy days of Beaux-Arts architecture, Caldwell had employed a thousand bronzeurs, marble workers, model makers, and designers. Now the company was sliding into insolvency, along with many similar firms. It was not that craftsmanship was dying. Rather, the International Style was finishing off the demand for it, particularly in commercial construction.

To those who complained that International Style buildings were cramped, had flimsy walls inside as well as out, and, in general, looked cheap, the knowing response was “These days it’s too expensive to build in any other style”. But it was not too expensive, merely more expensive. The critical point was what people would or would not put up with aesthetically. It was possible to build in styles even cheaper than the International Style. For example, England began to experiment with schools and public housing constructed like airplane hangars, out of corrugated medal tethered by guy wires. Their architects also said: “These days it’s too expensive to build in any other style.” Perhaps one day soon everyone (tout le monde) would learn to take this, too, like a man.

Friendly And Hostile Analogies For Taste

December 05, 2024 · Original source

Taste seems to constantly change. In 1930, all the sophisticated people said that Beaux-Arts architecture was very tasteful. In 1950, they’d laugh at you if you built Beaux-Arts; everyone with good taste was into International Style. This is very suspicious! Human universals don’t change that fast! Rules about what is vs. isn’t “jarring” don’t change that fast! Only fashion changes that fast!

intersectionality2 mentions across 2 issues

intersectionality is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between February 09, 2021 and July 26, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "there is a very obvious ideology which has captured the Democratic Party ... (ie 'intersectionality')"; "more trendy to discuss intersectionality / race issues from about 2016 onwards". It most often appears alongside Trump, 1960s America, 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Article page: intersectionality
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: February 09, 2021
Last seen: July 26, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: Why We're Polarized February 09, 2021
Your Review: The Astral Codex Ten Commentariat (“Why Do We Suck?”) July 26, 2025

Trump 2 shared issues
1960s America 1 shared issues
1964 Civil Rights Act 1 shared issues
4chan 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues

Source context

Book Review: Why We're Polarized

February 09, 2021 · Original source

But I'm not sure I can really go along with the conclusion, since there is a very obvious ideology which has captured the Democratic Party, it's based exactly on uniting non-modal people against modal ones (ie "intersectionality"), and it's at least as zealous and viral as anything the Republicans have been able to dream up. A Republican writing a similar book might argue that although the Republicans have the advantage of being able to say "We have beliefs/characteristics X, Y, and Z", the Democrats have the advantage of being able to say "People with beliefs/characteristics X, Y, and Z are the enemy". And Klein has already shown that negative partisanship is more powerful than positive partisanship! Having a clearly defined set of people to be against can be more unifying than being anyone in particular yourself.

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

July 26, 2025 · Original source

The real world intruded on the Commentariat’s hyperfixations In The Rise and Fall of Online Culture Wars, Scott notes that online feminism was absolutely everywhere from around 2014-16 and then just sort of… disappeared one day. This has some parallels (down to the timing) for engagement with the SSC Comments section – from 2014-16 engagement with the comments section seems to be on an unstoppable upward trajectory and then in April 2016 it just sort of… reverses. I have already mentioned that April 2016 marked an extreme high-water mark for usage of the term ‘SJW’. From what I can see, there’s no particular reason for this specific to SSC – April 2016 has two threads with significant usage of the token, but they are completely random threads – OT47 and Links 4/16 (Links 4/16 does have a link about social justice warriors so that makes some sense, but OT47 doesn’t, so my conclusion is that there is just something that was in the water around that time). This theory says that the Commentariat really liked talking about SJWs, and when they were prevented from talking about SJWs they just stopped engaging with the blog altogether. The problem with this theory is that there is nobody really preventing the Commentariat from talking about SJWs to their heart’s content after April 2016. In February 2016, Scott requested that all Culture Wars topics be quarantined to a single Culture Wars thread on the r/slatestarcodex subreddit (link). This seems like the most common-sense explanation for the observation that the comment section changes dramatically around this time - of course engagement and usage of the term ‘SJW’ falls off when usage of the term ‘SJW’ is quarantined to a single thread in an offsite forum. However, the major problem with this explanation is that it doesn’t fit the data – comment section engagement increases throughout February – April 2016 and only starts dropping in May, when as far as I can see there is no specific events occurring in the r/slatestarcodex subreddit to explain it. Also, in February 2019 the Culture Wars Thread was euthanised (link) but there is no corresponding uptick in comment section engagement as people migrated back from the Culture Wars thread to the SSC comments section. I thought perhaps discussion of SJWs might have been drowned out by discussions of something else, such that it became passé to be discussing SJWs when there was some other Culture Wars issue at stake. This would mirror what happened to online feminism, where it became passé to discuss women specifically and more trendy to discuss intersectionality / race issues from about 2016 onwards. The obvious candidate for this switch is Trump and the rise of the MAGA movement. March 2016 was probably the last period where you could kind of convince yourself Trump wasn’t going to win the Republican Primary. In March 2016 it was just about possible Cruz could have won, but by April 2016 Trump was winning every Primary with decisive majorities. If you are slightly younger you may not have been online during that period, but I can attest that it was completely crazy commenting in political spaces around that time; I’d argue a strong candidate for the most toxic comments section ever is You Are Still Crying Wolf, where Scott offers some extremely guarded non-criticism of Trump, arguing that he was not unusually racist by American Presidential standards. This didn’t make my database because Scott nuked the comments for being too toxic, so we will never know mathematically how bad the comments were, but anecdotally they were pretty standout – closer to 4Chan than ACX in places. The evidence for this hypothesis is kind of mixed – if you abandon all sense of statistical appropriateness you can freehand draw a line which kind of looks like the decline in ‘SJW’ tokens is mirrored by a rise in ‘Trump’ tokens when you normalise the two terms, but you can also do that with any other word that was trending in April 2016, like ‘Snowden’ or ‘Wikileaks’ (or ‘Harambe’ as per the graph below). Looking just at the data it isn’t really a very impressive correlation to draw. I appreciate it is so boring to conclude that Trump is the Great Satan for the millionth time. However, I do think if you add in contextual factors there is reason to be cautiously supportive of a ‘Donald Trump killed the AXC Comments Section’ theory: The volume of ‘Trump’ comments is absolutely massive - around 11% of all comments were about Trump in January 2017, which is greater than comments about Russia during their invasion of Ukraine (10%) and comments about COVID during the first few months of the pandemic (7%). Even a topic like SJWs, which the Commentariat really liked talking about, could only manage a peak of around 1.2% (although eg ‘gender’ peaks at 5.5% and ‘feminis*’ peaks at 3.7%). Concepts like ‘Harambe’ and ‘Wikileaks’ barely register on this scale, at 0.3% and 0.5% peaks respectively. So even though the shape of the two curves looks similar when you normalise them, it is reasonable to believe Trump could have had a significant enough impact on the comments section to dislodge forum norms, in a way Harambe did not.

Inline links: The Rise and Fall of Online Culture Wars, OT47, Links 4/16, link, link, You Are Still Crying Wolf, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!6J8h!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Faea86860-bafc-41c3-94f3-76f3b7424e18_863x331.png

IQ test2 mentions across 2 issues

IQ test is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between March 20, 2024 and June 27, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "only the smartest people remember their IQ test scores"; "You can signal intelligence with an IQ test". It most often appears alongside 10,000 hour rule, 2 Hour Learning, Inc, 2-hour Learning.

Article page: IQ test
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: March 20, 2024
Last seen: June 27, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

The Mystery Of Internet Survey IQs March 20, 2024
Your Review: Alpha School June 27, 2025

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

Source context

The Mystery Of Internet Survey IQs

March 20, 2024 · Original source

The average ClearerThinking user reported their IQ as 130. These are implausibly high. Only 1/200 people has an IQ of 138 or higher. 1/50 people have IQ 130, but the ClearerThinking survey used crowdworkers (eg Mechanical Turk) who should be totally average. Okay, fine, so people lie about their IQ (or foolishly trust fake Internet IQ tests). Big deal, right? But these don’t look like lies. Both surveys asked for SAT scores, which are known to correspond to IQ. The LessWrong average was 1446, corresponding to IQ 140. The ClearerThinking average was 1350, corresponding to IQ 134. People seem less likely to lie about their SATs, and least likely of all to optimize their lies for getting IQ/SAT correspondences right. And the Less Wrong survey asked people what test they based their estimates off of. Some people said fake Internet IQ tests. But other people named respected tests like the WAIS, WISC, and Stanford-Binet, or testing sessions by Mensa (yes, I know you all hate Mensa, but their IQ tests are considered pretty accurate). The subset of about 150 people who named unimpeachable tests had slightly higher IQ (average 140) than everyone else. Thanks to Spencer Greenberg of ClearerThinking, I think I’m finally starting to make progress in explaining what’s going on. Problem #1: The Biggest SAT → IQ Conversion Site Is Wrong Thanks to Sebastian Jensen for pointing this out! He writes: A search of ‘SAT to IQ’ on google results in being presented with the website ‘iqcomparisonsite.com’. This man has directly converted the SAT percentiles to IQ scores, which is not what should be done. Tests like the ACT and SAT correlate with IQ at about 0.8-0.85 [rca], [my analysis], [emil article], [scholarly article]. The general factor of academic achievement and IQ correlate at about 0.81-0.88 [psychometric test], [GCSE grades]. This discrepancy occurs because they measure different abilities - an IQ test will test many different abilities, while the SAT/ACT only tests verbal/mathematical ability. In addition, these percentiles are very outdated as the average SAT score has changed over time due to changes in the content of the test. Instead, the ideal way to do this is to take the percentiles from the current versions of the SAT and then convert those into z-scores and then regress those z-scores by the mean by the estimated regression coefficient. Using Sebastian’s updated tables, we find that the average Less Wrong IQ as predicted by SATs goes down from 140 → 132, and the ClearerThinking IQ goes down from 134 → 124. So people probably exaggerated their IQs somewhat, and unrelatedly we were using an SAT → IQ conversion that exaggerated IQs, and so the numbers falsely appeared to match. Okay! It’s a start! Interlude: The ClearerThinking IQ Test The ClearerThinking survey included a battery of cognitive tests of exactly the sort that could usually be used to determine IQ. Unfortunately none of them were normed, so we know how all the 3700 subjects did relative to each other, but not where the 100 point is. Spencer was able to norm them to the general population based on education level. That is, he asked his sample about their educational attainment (college degree, PhD, etc) and found they were a little more educated than the US average. Since the US average IQ is 100, his sample should have an average a little higher than this. He was able to calculate how much higher. Then he mapped a bell curve to everyone in his sample’s performance on his tests. Since he had 3700 people, he was able to do this relatively smoothly. He found an average IQ of 110, which originally surprised me, because I thought his sample was supposed to be random crowdworkers, who should be close to the US average of 100. But in fact, his survey was a combination of 1900 crowdworkers and 1800 people who saw it on social media - eg friends and friends-of-friends of Spencer. Separating this out by group, we find that the crowdworkers have an average normed-IQ of 100, and the social media referrals have an average normed-IQ of 120, making the overall average of 110. This seems pretty trustworthy, since it correctly estimates the crowdworkers (completely average) as 100. Spencer studied math at Columbia, his friends and friends-of-friends are pretty smart, and I think the 120 estimate for them is also okay. But there’s still a problem here. Using an accurate SAT score → IQ calculator, we determined that the ClearerThinking average should be 124. But using real cognitive tests, it looks like it’s 110. What went wrong? Problem #2: Only The Smartest People Report Their SATs Using Spencer’s cognitive test results, we can compare people who did vs. didn’t take the SAT. We find: People who didn’t take the SAT (remember, this includes current high schoolers) have tested-IQ 110.

Inline links: corresponding to, for pointing this out!, [rca], [my analysis], [emil article], [scholarly article], [psychometric test], [GCSE grades], changed

People who took the SAT and do remember their score have tested-IQ 116. Either smarter people are more likely to remember their SAT scores, or people who did well on the SAT are more likely to make a point of remembering! Since the only reported SAT scores come from people who remember them, this means that SAT scores overestimate the full-sample IQ, at least in this case. We previously had a gap between the 124 IQ from SAT conversion and the 110 observed IQ. This resolves about half of the gap, bringing it down to 124 predicted vs. 116 observed. Problem #3: Something Is Wrong With Self-Reported IQ Test Scores The ClearerThinking sample has a tested-IQ of 110. But the subset of people who report having taken a past IQ test say they got an average score of 131. What’s going on? It could either be that only the smartest people remember their IQ test scores (as with SATs), or that these people are lying/misremembering/deluded. Which is it? The tested-IQ of this subgroup who report their scores is 114. So although they are a little smarter than the overall sample, most of the difference seems to be coming from some kind of falsehood/delusion. But it’s a surprisingly well-behaved falsehood/delusion. Self-reported IQ test score correlates 0.54 with tested IQ. So people are getting their rank order mostly right, they’re just wrong about the specific number. It looks like up to about 140, self-reported IQ and normed IQ rise together, and then the relationship breaks down. Sure enough, looking at the subset of self-reported IQ scores below 140, the correlation with tested IQ rises to .6, and looking at the subset above 140, the correlation is nonsignificant at -0.02. I don’t want to assert that the breakpoint is exactly 140, but I do think the test stops working somewhere in the 130 - 140 range. But this can’t be the whole problem. Notice that people who reported getting scores around 100 on previous IQ tests overwhelmingly got scores less than 100 on this one. So are people just taking terrible Internet IQ tests that inflate their score about 20 points? The ClearerThinking sample didn’t ask people what IQ test they took, but the LessWrong sample did. It found approximately the same score from WAIS, WISC, Stanford-Binet, and Mensa - all of which were about 10 points above what you would predict from SAT scores. So I think there are two things going on: The main problem in the LessWrong sample, and the far right end of the ClearerThinking sample, is that even official IQ tests are gobbledygook over 135. Any numbers above this should be rounded down to 135, no matter how venerable the test involved.

Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!bIlQ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe2cfc82a-1d04-4b3a-9e6b-0ac0f213a00d_674x558.png

It looks like up to about 140, self-reported IQ and normed IQ rise together, and then the relationship breaks down. Sure enough, looking at the subset of self-reported IQ scores below 140, the correlation with tested IQ rises to .6, and looking at the subset above 140, the correlation is nonsignificant at -0.02. I don’t want to assert that the breakpoint is exactly 140, but I do think the test stops working somewhere in the 130 - 140 range. But this can’t be the whole problem. Notice that people who reported getting scores around 100 on previous IQ tests overwhelmingly got scores less than 100 on this one. So are people just taking terrible Internet IQ tests that inflate their score about 20 points? The ClearerThinking sample didn’t ask people what IQ test they took, but the LessWrong sample did. It found approximately the same score from WAIS, WISC, Stanford-Binet, and Mensa - all of which were about 10 points above what you would predict from SAT scores. So I think there are two things going on: The main problem in the LessWrong sample, and the far right end of the ClearerThinking sample, is that even official IQ tests are gobbledygook over 135. Any numbers above this should be rounded down to 135, no matter how venerable the test involved.

Your Review: Alpha School

June 27, 2025 · Original source

The top performing kids are WAY ahead of the average and the lower tier kids. The kids at the top percentile achieve the median score of a graduating senior by the end of 3rd grade! And recall this is not an IQ test – this is a content test. The top 1% of 3rd graders have more content knowledge and comprehension than the median high school graduate.

Our students are conformists Many people are surprised that anyone would want to signal conformity. Don’t most people and employers value “innovative thinking”? Maybe, but not in their new hires. Elite employers generally want bright, diligent hires who will color inside the corporate lines for a few years before they start “thinking outside the box”. Most successful businesses are successful for a reason. They want new employees to enter and do what they are told to in order to understand their new business before they try to “do things differently” and change things. Caplan explains that the need to signal conformity is the hardest hurdle to disrupting education. You can signal intelligence with an IQ test, and you can signal conscientiousness with any sort of time consuming long term task (Caplan gives the example of collecting the largest ball of string in the world). But by definition, if you do anything different from the norm of going to an existing well known school, you are signalling non-conformity. Caplan himself homeschooled some of his kids, but only after he verified that homeschooling for high school wouldn’t hurt his kids chances of getting into good colleges. He was non-conformist, but only willing to act on the non-conformity if it wouldn’t be punished by the conformists. Most people are not even going to go as far as Caplan. Most people are very happy to be conformists. That conformity is one reason why humans surpassed chimps. We are really good at watching other high status members of our communities and copying their behavior. I believe that is a big part of why moving to a better neighborhood leads to better outcomes for kids – because both the kids and the parents take on the “better” lifestyles of that community. But it also means that getting people to switch from the existing school system to something like Alpha will be difficult. Once we, personally, got over the more pedestrian concerns about moving for a school, our next concern was whether our kids would even get into Alpha. We did not need to worry. Alpha does have a screening process. They won’t accept kids who are disruptive and can’t focus in front of a computer for 20 minutes at a time. But the bar is relatively low. And yet the school is still, after more than a decade in operation, under-capacity. When other elite schools have 20% or lower acceptance rates – and limited “entrance points” (i.e. get your kid in at kindergarten or you are likely out of luck), Alpha is taking almost everyone who applies and allows students to jump in at any point – even mid-year. That reality replaced our first concern with another: Do we want to join a club that will so easily accept us as a member? Both my wife and I came from a world where: Low acceptance rate ~= quality We had just assumed that if we believed Alpha was worth moving across the country for, the school would be oversubscribed with local families. But it’s not even close. The hardest schools to get into in Austin are places like St Stevens and St Andrews – veritable institutions more than 70 years old. Those are the schools that the rich, old money families who have been in Austin for generations want to send their kids to. And if that is where the elite are sending their kids, why wouldn’t you want your kids in the same place? We already know that peers matter and that education differences are marginal at best – why not just optimize for the best peers (where best means the most exclusive club)? St Stevens and St Andrews are the best socially acceptable options: not this new weird Alpha school that uses AI to teach kids. Who would do that to their kids? What is the Alpha Target Audience? So who is going to Alpha? Mostly elite non-conformists. I think that broader group breaks down into three sub-segments (to use Marketing persona jargon): David Disruptor: Tech employee who has moved from the Bay area to Austin. He was nonconformist to even get into tech, and even more non-conformist to leave California

IRL2 mentions across 2 issues

IRL is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between May 18, 2021 and July 22, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "different rules IRL"; "Now we have an acronym for that - IRL - because reality is everywhere in retreat". It most often appears alongside Ben Shapiro, Scott, Trump.

Article page: IRL
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: May 18, 2021
Last seen: July 22, 2022

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Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On Culture Wars May 18, 2021
Your Book Review: The Society Of The Spectacle July 22, 2022

Ben Shapiro 2 shared issues
Scott 2 shared issues
Trump 2 shared issues
#BLM 1 shared issues
b 1 shared issues

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Highlights From The Comments On Culture Wars

May 18, 2021 · Original source

No doubt younger people face their own issues when it comes to attraction and dating, but they grew up with a different internet and different rules IRL. How much of a ~40 year old’s experiences online or off still apply to them at all is speculative. Neither of us is going to engage the way people did in 2010, and I suspect for the older people whatever younger folks are dealing with is partially unintelligible, while the old issues we dealt with have largely become out-of-sight, out-of-mind.

Your Book Review: The Society Of The Spectacle

July 22, 2022 · Original source

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

Inline links: epistemic learned helplessness, Moloch

Iron Curtain2 mentions across 2 issues

Iron Curtain is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between November 04, 2021 and June 17, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "maybe it’s the Iron Curtain"; "have collaborated across the Iron Curtain". It most often appears alongside Europe, European Union, Germany.

Article page: Iron Curtain
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: November 04, 2021
Last seen: June 17, 2022

Outbound links

Issue trail

Dictator Book Club: Orban November 04, 2021
Your Book Review: The Future Of Fusion Energy June 17, 2022

Europe 2 shared issues
European Union 2 shared issues
Germany 2 shared issues
Alcator C-Mod 1 shared issues
Alcsutdoboz 1 shared issues

Source context

Dictator Book Club: Orban

November 04, 2021 · Original source

But why were Hungarians so opposed to refugees when the West was so eager to accept them? Lasse Skytt thinks maybe it’s the Iron Curtain. The Western psyche is still traumatized by fascism, and the opposite of fascism is taking in any dark-skinned foreigner who knocks on your door. But the Eastern psyche is traumatized by communism, and the communists were all about the Brotherhood of Man - ethnonationalist sentiments feel like a bold revolt against tyranny rather than its inevitable companion. Or maybe it’s colonial guilt: the West is wracked with it, but Hungary, never having colonized anywhere, doesn’t see why it owes anything to the rest of the world. Or maybe it’s because bad blood between the Hungarians and Roma has soured Hungary on the entire concept of having minorities. Whatever the reason, anti-immigrant measures in Hungary were polling around the mid-80s-percent. For Viktor Orban, who really likes winning, co-opting the issue was a no-brainer.

Bay Area Plant-Based Meat Reviews

June 17, 2022 · Original source

[13]: The fusion community has a long tradition of internationalism. We refused to take part in the Cold War and have collaborated across the Iron Curtain since 1958. I do wonder if we could have gotten more funding if we were trying to Beat the Russians instead of working with them.

Iron Man2 mentions across 2 issues

Iron Man is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between February 26, 2021 and June 17, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Crave's have names like 'Iron Man' and 'Donald Duck'"; "ARC is an Iron Man reference". It most often appears alongside Alcator C-Mod, American Chinese food, Apollo Program.

Article page: Iron Man
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: February 26, 2021
Last seen: June 17, 2022

Outbound links

Issue trail

Bay Area Plant-Based Meat Reviews February 26, 2021
Your Book Review: The Future Of Fusion Energy June 17, 2022

Alcator C-Mod 1 shared issues
American Chinese food 1 shared issues
Apollo Program 1 shared issues
ARC 1 shared issues
ASDEX 1 shared issues

Source context

February 26, 2021 · Original source

Ike's sandwiches have names like "Lex Luthor" and "Chester the Cheetah". Crave's have names like "Iron Man" and "Donald Duck". Both chains offer the same choice of French, sourdough, Dutch cruch, wheat, and gluten-free breads. Both give you a few free lollipops in the bag with every order. Also, Ike's is located at the intersection of Shattuck and Center Streets in Berkeley; Crave's is also located at that intersection, about 400 ft away.

Your Review: Islamic Geometric Patterns In The Metropolitan Museum Of Art

June 17, 2022 · Original source

[17]: SPARC is a nested acronym for Smallest Possible ARC. ARC is an acronym for Affordable, Robust, Compact and is an Iron Man reference.

Islamic Geometric Patterns2 mentions across 2 issues

Islamic Geometric Patterns is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between June 23, 2025 and July 18, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Finalists are Islamic Geometric Patterns"; "What makes my experience of making Islamic geometric patterns feel akin to generative art"; "The framework that classifies Islamic geometric patterns by tilings and seed angles". It most often appears alongside 16th century Spain, ACX, ACX Grants.

Article page: Islamic Geometric Patterns
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: June 23, 2025
Last seen: July 18, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Open Thread 387 June 23, 2025
Your Review: Islamic Geometric Patterns In The Metropolitan Museum Of Art July 18, 2025

16th century Spain 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
ACX Grants 1 shared issues
Ahmed al-Sharaa 1 shared issues
Alhambra 1 shared issues

Source context

Open Thread 387

June 23, 2025 · Original source

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

July 18, 2025 · Original source

If I were to take a guess, Islamic geometric patterns, like many forms of decorative art, probably occupy a vague and under-defined space in most people’s minds. Up until a few years ago, if someone had asked me to describe them, I probably could have listed a few general features but definitely would have been unable to create an example. Further, if presented with several patterns, some expertly executed and some not so much, I likely would have struggled to distinguish the masterful from the amateurish. This is perhaps not unlike how people have difficulty picking out the correct double storey “g” from a lineup. In general, we enjoy decorations, but we don’t think too deeply about them, and we can’t always tell the excellent from the good, or the good from the mediocre.

Inline links: people have difficulty picking out the correct double storey “g” from a lineup

That said, Islamic geometric patterns as a genre are quite distinguishable from other decorative traditions. These designs incorporate, or at least imply, both translational symmetry (such that a section of the design can be repeated to fill the plane) and point symmetries (exhibited by complex star- or flower-like patterns clustered around various foci). They feature interlocking or interlacing lines that suggest an infinitely continuing weave, as if executed by a meticulous yet imaginative artisan who knows precisely where to bend and twist the threads to surprise you at every turn.

Interestingly, when artists untrained in the methods of constructing Islamic geometric patterns make the mistakes mentioned above, they often fall into the same failure mode. A large number of geometric patterns have been extracted from historical examples and published in various collections, making it easy for a modern designer to look them up and reuse them. They typically recognize that these patterns can be generated by repeating a small unit, like wallpaper. Thus, when they find a design they like, they may cut out a portion and tile their canvas with it. However, the tiling unit they choose often does not correspond to the actual repeating unit, resulting in awkward seams where mismatched lines join at incongruous angles and form undesirable shapes. Even when the correct tile is used, the designer might fail to fit the region precisely. As a result, some may simply stretch the pattern, destroying the point symmetries in the process. Others allow the patterns to be cut off mid-design. A more conscientious artist might try to fill in the gaps manually if the tiles fall short of the boundaries. However, without knowledge of construction methods or an understanding of the constraints outlined earlier, they often extend the patterns in ways that produce incorrect joints, asymmetric shapes, or awkward bends.

Palestine conflict2 mentions across 2 issues

Israel/Palestine conflict is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between April 26, 2021 and January 24, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Major flare-up (significantly worse than anything in past 10 years) in Israel/Palestine conflict"; "flare-up in Israel/Palestine conflict". It most often appears alongside 538, ACX, Biden.

Article page: Palestine conflict
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: April 26, 2021
Last seen: January 24, 2022

Outbound links

Issue trail

Mantic Monday: Predictions For 2021 April 26, 2021
Grading My 2021 Predictions January 24, 2022

538 2 shared issues
ACX 2 shared issues
Biden 2 shared issues
Bitcoin 2 shared issues
BTC 2 shared issues

Source context

Mantic Monday: Predictions For 2021

April 26, 2021 · Original source

US/WORLD 1. Biden approval rating (as per 538) is greater than 50%: 80% 2. Court packing is clearly going to happen (new justices don't have to be appointed by end of year): 5% 3. Yang is New York mayor: 80% 4. Newsom recalled as CA governor: 5% 5. At least $250 million in damage from BLM protests this year: 30% 6. Significant capital gains tax hike (above 30% for highest bracket): 20% 7. Trump is allowed back on Twitter: 20% 8. Tokyo Olympics happen on schedule: 70% 9. Major flare-up (significantly worse than anything in past 5 years) in Russia/Ukraine war: 20% 10. Major flare-up (significantly worse than anything in past 10 years) in Israel/Palestine conflict: 5% 11. Major flare-up (significantly worse than anything in past 50 years) in China/Taiwan conflict: 5% 12. Netanyahu is still Israeli PM: 40% 13. Prospera has at least 1000 residents: 30%

Grading My 2021 Predictions

January 24, 2022 · Original source

1. Biden approval rating (as per 538) is greater than fifty percent: 80% 2. Court packing is clearly going to happen (new justices don't have to be appointed by end of year): 5% 3. Yang is New York mayor: 80% 4. Newsom recalled as CA governor: 5% 5. At least $250 million in damage from BLM protests this year: 30% 6. Significant capital gains tax hike (above 30% for highest bracket): 20% 7. Trump is allowed back on Twitter: 20% 8. Tokyo Olympics happen on schedule: 70% 9. Major flare-up (significantly worse than anything in past 5 years) in Russia/Ukraine war: 20% 10. Major flare-up (significantly worse than anything in past 10 years) in Israel/Palestine conflict: 5% 11. Major flare-up (significantly worse than anything in past 50 years) in China/Taiwan conflict: 5% 12. Netanyahu is still Israeli PM: 40% 13. Prospera has at least 1000 residents: 30%

Israelites2 mentions across 2 issues

Israelites is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between November 17, 2023 and September 15, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "He got the Israelites to obsess over these examples"; "When the Israelites stopped obeying the commandments". It most often appears alongside America, Bible, Israel.

Article page: Israelites
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: November 17, 2023
Last seen: September 15, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning November 17, 2023
Open Thread 399 September 15, 2025

America 2 shared issues
Bible 2 shared issues
Israel 2 shared issues
Abel 1 shared issues
Adam and Eve 1 shared issues

Source context

Book Review: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning

November 17, 2023 · Original source

He contrasts this with the Bible. Lots of Bible stories also fit the pattern. As in Babylonian and Norse mythology, the world begins with a primordial murder: Cain kills Abel. But the clearest example is the story of Joseph and his brothers. Joseph’s brothers grow jealous of him, coveting his beautiful multi-colored coat. They form a mob, gang up on him, and are about to kill him, when a slave caravan comes by and they decide to sell him as a slave instead. Then Joseph becomes as close to a god as the monotheistic Israelites are willing to accept (Prime Minister of Egypt) and founds the next stage of Israelite civilization as some kind of culture-hero figure.

So how does the Hebrew Bible escape this failure mode? Girard says divine intervention. God (here meaning literal God, exactly as the average churchgoer understands Him) tried to break the reign of Satan (here meaning metaphorical Satan, the single-victim process) over the Jewish people, by constantly providing them with examples of the single-victim process being bad and ensuring those examples were written up accurately. He got the Israelites to obsess over these examples and worship them as a holy text, trying to hammer the whole thing into their heads. Finally, He sent His only begotten Son as the perfect victim, who would undergo the process in its entirety and have it be written up with unprecedented attention to detail. This extra-compelling example finally penetrated the Israelites’ thick skulls. Although Peter and the other disciples sort of joined the mob in denying Jesus at the beginning, after the Resurrection they started thinking previously barely-thinkable thoughts, like “what if our mob was in the wrong?” and “what if mob violence is bad?”

Or what about Numbers 25? The Israelites intermarry with the idolatrous Moabites. God sends a plague as punishment. 24,000 people die. Then Phinehas kills the leader of the intermarriers, and the plague ends.

Open Thread 399

September 15, 2025 · Original source

To posit Trump's divine election is not to imply he has any positive qualities. When the Israelites stopped obeying the commandments, God punished them by raising an incompetent idolator named Jeroboam to the throne. Jeroboam started a disastrous war that killed 500,000 of his own men, after which his dynasty collapsed and his entire family was slain. Jeroboam was chosen by God to crush and humiliate Israel. But he was chosen by God. Has America been obeying the commandments lately?

Italian2 mentions across 2 issues

Italian is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between October 07, 2022 and August 24, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "honoring an Italian who killed lots of Native Americans"; "founded by an Italian immigrant trying to create food like his mother made back in Sicily". It most often appears alongside America, Adraste, Agnostic Democrat.

Article page: Italian
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: October 07, 2022
Last seen: August 24, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

A Columbian Exchange October 07, 2022
Highlights From The Comments On Dating Preferences August 24, 2023

America 2 shared issues
Adraste 1 shared issues
Agnostic Democrat 1 shared issues
American Jews 1 shared issues
Anatolia 1 shared issues

Source context

A Columbian Exchange

October 07, 2022 · Original source

Beroe: Does “Columbus Day was originally intended as a woke holiday celebrating marginalized groups; President Benjamin Harrison established it in 1892 after an anti-Italian pogrom in order to highlight the positive role of Italians in American history” count as one of the usual beats by this point?

Beroe: There’s a saying “the sovereign is he who sets the null hypothesis”. But I would add that “the sovereign is he who decides which arguments are too galaxy-brained and annoying to take seriously”. A hundred years ago, when everyone wanted to honor the Italians, it would have been galaxy-brained and annoying to object to Columbus Day. People would have accused you of just wanting an excuse for your anti-Italian bigotry. It’s not like it’s going to normalize the youth taking over the West Indies and enslaving the local population!

Adraste: Maybe those people would have been right! Maybe the point of holidays is to teach people lessons, and which holidays are good or bad depends on what lessons need to be taught. If the big conflict in society is about whether or not to accept Italians, and nobody is thinking about Native Americans either way, then maybe it’s correct to honor a famous Italian, so as to emphasize our support for Italians’ rights. And a hundred years later, when nobody worries about Italians anymore, but lots of people worry about Native Americans, then honoring an Italian who killed lots of Native Americans sends the wrong message, and so we deprecate the pro-Italian holiday in favor of a pro-Native-American one. In the very unlikely chance that, a hundred years from now, the descendants of Aztecs are powerful and privileged, but the descendants of their sacrificial victims are marginalized and there’s a debate about whether or not to accept them - then we should scrap or re-work Indigenous People’s Day to emphasize that we support the victims’ descendants. Until and unless that happens, why bother?

Highlights From The Comments On Dating Preferences

August 24, 2023 · Original source

Is it presumptuous of a restaurant to tell you what kind of food they serve? What their hours are? What their prices are? Where they’re located? The story of how they were founded by an Italian immigrant trying to create food like his mother made back in Sicily with ingredients from blah blah blah? “Oooh, look at this fancy pizza place, they think I care enough about them to read their menu online”. Again, why do you want to know less about the most important decision you’ll ever make in your life than about where to go for dinner?

Ivy2 mentions across 2 issues

Ivy is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between December 09, 2022 and July 11, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "attended an Ivy"; "all the Ivies started accepting the worst students instead". It most often appears alongside Harvard, 417th Marquess of Cornwallshireshire, ACX.

Article page: Ivy
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: December 09, 2022
Last seen: July 11, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On Bobos In Paradise December 09, 2022
Why Match School And Student Rank? July 11, 2023

Harvard 2 shared issues
417th Marquess of Cornwallshireshire 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
America 1 shared issues

Source context

Inline links: Comments Doubting The Book’s Thesis, Comments From People Who Seem To Know A Lot About Ivy League Admissions, Comments About Whether A Hereditary Aristocracy Might In Fact Be Good, Other Interesting Comments, Tangents That I Find Tedious, But Other People Apparently Really Want To Debate

December 09, 2022 · Original source

1. Comments Doubting The Book’s Thesis 2. Comments From People Who Seem To Know A Lot About Ivy League Admissions 3. Comments About Whether A Hereditary Aristocracy Might In Fact Be Good 4. Other Interesting Comments 5. Tangents That I Find Tedious, But Other People Apparently Really Want To Debate

SuperbOwl has an even more extensive gripe about the “monocausal explanation” aspect. 2. Comments From People Who Seem To Know A Lot About Ivy League Admissions Erusian writes:

Inline links: an even more extensive gripe about the “monocausal explanation” aspect, writes

Legacy admissions are roughly a third of Harvard students. Any story that starts with meritocratic dominance in the 1950-60s has to grapple with the fact that legacies remained a huge presence in the Ivy League. This is nearly fatal to this entire section's thesis.

Why Match School And Student Rank?

July 11, 2023 · Original source

We could think of “the best college” as a self-fulfilling prophecy; for whatever reason, one college has gotten a reputation as the one whose signal is most valuable. Everyone naturally tries to get in there; if they fail, they go to the college with the next-best reputation, and so on. The system is stable; the “best” college will keep its reputation (since it gets the best students) and the best students will always want to go to the best college. If, as Matt’s son suggests, all the Ivies started accepting the worst students instead, an Ivy degree would soon become a signal that you’re bad, and employers would stop respecting it.

I <3 NY1 mentions across 1 issues

I <3 NY is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 03, 2023 and July 03, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as ""A popular t-shirt design is one with 'I <3 NY' on it."". It most often appears alongside Anthropic, AutoGPT, Baidu.

Reference entry: I <3 NY
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 03, 2023
Last seen: July 03, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

Tales Of Takeover In CCF-World July 03, 2023

Anthropic 1 shared issues
AutoGPT 1 shared issues
Baidu 1 shared issues
British 1 shared issues
ChaosGPT 1 shared issues

Source context

Tales Of Takeover In CCF-World

July 03, 2023 · Original source

...with “Given that I am starting an online t-shirt business and planning to do it this way, what is a good t-shirt?” It might answer: A popular t-shirt design is one with “I <3 NY” on it. I will send this to DALL-E and save the resulting image file. Then it goes ahead and does this using some plug-in, and prompts itself with “I am starting an onli...

I H S1 mentions across 1 issues

I H S is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 01, 2025 and October 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "letters I H S flaring above them". It most often appears alongside 1910s Portugal, 1999 British eclipse, 2017 US eclipse.

Reference entry: I H S
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: October 01, 2025
Last seen: October 01, 2025

Outbound links

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/secrets-of-the-great-families

Issue trail

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

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

Source context

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

October 01, 2025 · Original source

At Lubbock, 2/3 of attendees saw the sun spinning. But about a quarter saw either Jesus or the Virgin Mary, and almost 10% saw angels. The afterimage of the sun, burnt onto the retina, may look like a spinning sun, or a multicolored sun, or an ominious looming sun. But surely it doesn’t look like the Virgin with baby Jesus cradled in her arms and the letters I H S flaring above them. Yet many witnesses report visions at least this complicated, especially at Lubbock and Heroldsbach. And when we look back upon the Fatima testimonies, we find that 5-10% of them report things of this nature as well! We had previously brushed these aside - the Catholics don’t like it because it ruins their nice objective miracle where everyone saw the same thing, and the atheists don’t like it because it ruins their simple meteorological phenomenon, so the secondary sources downplay this kind of thing. But in the original testimonies these are pretty common.

I Love New York1 mentions across 1 issues

I Love New York is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 04, 2021 and May 04, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "inventing the famous logo ‘I Love New York’". It most often appears alongside 2008, 9/11 attacks, A Brief History Of Neoliberalism.

Reference entry: I Love New York
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 04, 2021
Last seen: May 04, 2021

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: A Brief History Of Neoliberalism May 04, 2021

2008 1 shared issues
11 attacks 1 shared issues
A Brief History Of Neoliberalism 1 shared issues
ABHoN 1 shared issues
ABHoN 1 shared issues

Source context

Book Review: A Brief History Of Neoliberalism

May 04, 2021 · Original source

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

I-language1 mentions across 1 issues

I-language is a recurring concept 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 "the significant notion of I-language". It most often appears alongside Alan Turing, Amazon, Amazon jungle.

Reference entry: I-language
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 19, 2024
Last seen: July 19, 2024

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: How Language Began July 19, 2024

Alan Turing 1 shared issues
Amazon 1 shared issues
Amazon jungle 1 shared issues
Andrew Nevins 1 shared issues
artificial intelligence 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: How Language Began

July 19, 2024 · Original source

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 one means by the statement “All natural human languages have recursion.” Everett generally takes recursion to refer to the following property of many natural languages: one can construct sentences or phrases from other sentences and phrases. For example: “The cat died.” -> “Alice said that [the cat died].” -> “Bob said that [Alice said that [the cat died.]]” In the above example, we can in principle generate infinitely many new sentences by writing “Z said X,” where X is the previous sentence and Z is some name. For clarity’s sake, one should probably distinguish between different ways to generate new sentences or phrases from old ones; Pullum mentions a few in the context of assessing Everett’s Pirahã recursion claims: Everett reports that there are no signs of no multiple coordination (It takes [skill, nerve, initiative, and courage]), complex determiners ([[[my] son’s] wife’s] family), stacked modifiers (a [nice, [cosy, [inexpensive [little cottage]]]]), or—most significant of all—reiterable clause embedding (I thought [ you already knew [that she was here ] ]). These are the primary constructions that in English permit sentences of any arbitrary finite length to be constructed, yielding the familiar argument that the set of all definable grammatical sentences in English is infinite. Regardless of the details, a generic prediction should be that there is no longest sentence in a language whose grammar is recursive. This doesn’t mean that one can say an arbitrarily long sentence in real life4. Rather, one can say that, given a member of some large set of sentences, one can always extend it. Everett takes the claim “All natural human languages have recursion.” to mean that, if there exists a natural human language without recursion, the claim is false. Or, slightly more subtly, if there exists a language which uses recursion so minimally that linguists have a hard time determining whether a corpus of linguistic data falsifies it or not, sentence-level recursion is probably not a bedrock principle of human languages. I found the following anecdote from a 2012 paper of Everett’s enlightening: Pirahã speakers reject constructed examples with recursion, as I discovered in my translation of the gospel of Mark into the language (during my days as a missionary). The Bible is full of recursive examples, such as the following, from Mark 1:3: ‘(John the Baptist) was a voice of one calling in the desert…’ I initially translated this as: ‘John, the man that put people in the water in order to clean them for God, that lived in a place like a beach with no trees and that yelled for people to obey God’. The Pirahãs rejected every attempt until I translated this as: ‘John cleaned people in the river. He lived in another jungle. The jungle was like a beach. It had no trees. He yelled to people. You want God!’ The non-recursive structure was accepted readily and elicited all sorts of questions. I subsequently realized looking through Pirahã texts that there were no clear examples involving either recursion or even embedding. Attempts to construct recursive sentences or phrases, such as ‘several big round barrels', were ultimately rejected by the Pirahãs (although initially they accepted them to be polite to me, a standard fieldwork problem that Jeanette Sakel and I discuss). He does explicitly claim (in the aforementioned paper and elsewhere) that Pirahã probably has no longest sentence, which is about the most generic anti-recursion statement one can make. Chomsky and linguists working in his tradition sometimes write in a way consistent with Everett’s conception of recursion, but sometimes don’t. For example, consider this random 2016 blogpost I found by a linguist in training: For generative linguistics the recursive function is Merge, which combines two words or phrases to form a larger structure which can then be the input for further iterations of Merge. Any expression larger than two words, then, requires recursion, regardless of whether there is embedding in that expression. For instance the noun phrase “My favourite book” requires two iterations of Merge, (Merge(favourite, book)= [Favourite book], Merge(my, [favourite book])= [my [favourite book]]) and therefore is an instance of recursion without embedding. To be clear, this usage of ‘recursion’ seems consistent with how many other Chomskyan linguists have used the term. And with all due respect to these researchers, I find this notion of recursion completely insane, because it would imply (i) any language with more than one word in its sentences has recursion, and that (ii) all sentences are necessarily constructed recursively. The first implication means that “All natural human languages have recursion.” reduces to the vacuously true claim that “All languages allow more than one word in their sentences.”5 The second idea is more interesting, because it relates to how the brain constructs sentences, but as far as I can tell this claim cannot be tested using purely observational linguistic data. One would have to do some kind of experiment to check the order in which subjects mentally construct sentences, and ideally make brain activity measurements of some sort. Aside from sometimes involving a strange notion of recursion, another feature of the Chomskyan response to Everett relates to the distinction we discussed earlier between so-called E-languages and I-languages. Consider the following exchange from a 2012 interview with Chomsky: NS: But there are critics such as Daniel Everett, who says the language of the Amazonian people he worked with seems to challenge important aspects of universal grammar. Chomsky: It can't be true. These people are genetically identical to all other humans with regard to language. They can learn Portuguese perfectly easily, just as Portuguese children do. So they have the same universal grammar the rest of us have. What Everett claims is that the resources of the language do not permit the use of the principles of universal grammar. That's conceivable. You could imagine a language exactly like English except it doesn't have connectives like "and" that allow you to make longer expressions. An infant learning truncated English would have no idea about this: they would just pick it up as they would standard English. At some point, the child would discover the resources are so limited you can't say very much, but that doesn't say anything about universal grammar, or about language acquisition. Chomsky makes claims like this elsewhere too. The argument is that, even if there were a language without a recursive grammar, this is not inconsistent with his theory, since his theory is not about E-languages like English or Spanish or Pirahã. His theory only makes claims about I-languages, or equivalently about our innate language capabilities. But this is kind of a dumb rhetorical move. Either the theory makes predictions about real languages or it doesn’t. The statement that some languages in the world are arguably recursive is not a prediction; it’s an observation, and we didn’t need the theory to make it. What does it mean for the grammar of thought languages to be recursive? How do we test this? Can we test it by doing experiments involving real linguistic data, or not? If not, are we even still talking about language? To this day, as one might expect, not everyone agrees with Everett that (i) Pirahã lacks a recursive hierarchical grammar, and that (ii) such a discovery would have any bearing at all on the truth or falsity of Chomskyan universal grammar. Given that languages can be pretty weird, among other reasons, I am inclined to side with Everett here. But where does that leave us? We do not just want to throw bombs and tell everyone their theories are wrong. Does Everett have an alternative to the Chomskyan account of what language is and where it came from? Yes, and it turns out he’s been thinking about this for a long time. How Language Began is his 2017 offering in this direction. IV. THE BOOK So what is language, anyway? Everett writes: (How Language Began, Ch. 1, pg. 15) Language is the interaction of meaning (semantics), conditions on usage (pragmatics), the physical properties of its inventory of sounds (phonetics), a grammar (syntax, or sentence structure), phonology (sound structure), morphology (word structure), discourse conversational organizational principles, information, and gestures. Language is a gestalt—the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That is to say, the whole is not understood merely by examining individual components. Okay, so far, so good. To the uninitiated, it looks like Everett is just listing all of the different things that are involved in language; so what? The point is that language is more than just grammar. He goes on to say this explicitly: (How Language Began, Ch. 1, pg. 16) Grammar is a tremendous aid to language and also helps in thinking. But it really is at best only a small part of any language, and its importance varies from one language to another. There are tongues that have very little grammar and others in which it is extremely complex. His paradigmatic examples here are Pirahã and Riau Indonesian, which appears to lack a hierarchical grammar, and which moreover apparently lacks a clear noun/verb distinction. You might ask: what does that even mean? I’m not 100% sure, since the linked Gil chapter appears formidable, but Wikipedia gives a pretty good example in the right direction: For example, the phrase Ayam makan (lit. 'chicken eat') can mean, in context, anything from 'the chicken is eating', to 'I ate some chicken', 'the chicken that is eating' and 'when we were eating chicken' Is “chicken” the subject of the sentence, the object of the sentence, or something else? Well, it depends on the context. What’s the purpose of language? Communication: (How Language Began, Introduction, pg. 5) Indeed, language changes lives. It builds society, expresses our highest aspirations, our basest thoughts, our emotions and our philosophies of life. But all language is ultimately at the service of human interaction. Other components of language—things like grammar and stories—are secondary to conversation. Did language emerge suddenly, as it does in Chomsky’s proposal, or gradually? Very gradually: (How Language Began, Introduction, pg. 7-8) There is a wide and deep linguistic chasm between humans and all other species. … More likely, the gap was formed by baby steps, by homeopathic changes spurred by culture. Yes, human languages are dramatically different from the communication systems of other animals, but the cognitive and cultural steps to get beyond the ‘language threshold’ were smaller than many seem to think. The evidence shows that there was no ‘sudden leap’ to the uniquely human features of language, but that our predecessor species in the genus Homo and earlier, perhaps among the australopithecines, slowly but surely progressed until humans achieved language. This slow march taken by early hominins resulted eventually in a yawning evolutionary chasm between human language and other animal communication. So far, we have a bit of a nothingburger. Language is for communication, and probably—like everything else!—emerged gradually over a long period of time. While these points are interesting as a contrast to Chomsky, they are not that surprising in and of themselves. But Everett’s work goes beyond taking the time to bolster common sense ideas on language origins. Two points he discusses at length are worth briefly exploring here. First, he offers a much more specific account of the emergence of language than Chomsky does, and draws on a mix of evidence from paleoanthropology, evolutionary biology, linguistics, and more. Second, he pretty firmly takes the Anti-Chomsky view on whether language is innate: (Preface, pg. xv) … I deny here that language is an instinct of any kind, as I also deny that it is innate, or inborn. These two points are not unrelated. Everett’s core idea is that language should properly be thought of as an invention rather than an innate human capability. You might ask: who invented it? Who shaped it? Lots of people, collaboratively, over a long time. In a word, culture. As Everett notes in the preface, “Language is the handmaiden of culture.” In any case, let’s discuss these points one at a time. First: the origins of language. There are a number of questions one might want to answer about how language began: In what order did different language-related concepts and components emerge?

Inline links: Pullum, 4, 2012 paper, blogpost, 5, 2012 interview, Riau Indonesian, lack a hierarchical grammar, lacks a clear noun/verb distinction

I-M170 chromosome1 mentions across 1 issues

I-M170 chromosome is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 25, 2021 and November 25, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "trait down through their I-M170 chromosome to future generations". It most often appears alongside Aleksandar Vucic, awanderingmind, Biden.

Reference entry: I-M170 chromosome
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: November 25, 2021
Last seen: November 25, 2021

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Links For November November 25, 2021

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

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Links For November

November 25, 2021 · Original source

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

IAT1 mentions across 1 issues

IAT is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 03, 2023 and November 03, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "People stopped being as interested in the IAT a few years ago". It most often appears alongside 23andme, ACX Grants, administrative state.

Reference entry: IAT
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: November 03, 2023
Last seen: November 03, 2023

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Quests And Requests November 03, 2023

23andme 1 shared issues
ACX Grants 1 shared issues
administrative state 1 shared issues
Alyssa 1 shared issues
Art Nouveau 1 shared issues

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Quests And Requests

November 03, 2023 · Original source

DJKeown on the subreddit suggested using GPT for this, but Spanish speakers weren’t impressed by its translation and I doubt it would really work. 5. Automatic Implicit Association Test generator Skills needed: web/software skills, maybe psychology knowledge? Budget: Some medium amount of your time? Payoff: Platform that could produce interesting measurements of biases.

Inline links: suggested using GPT for this

The Implicit Association Test is a technique for measuring unconscious bias.

People stopped being as interested in the IAT a few years ago after learning they couldn’t really use it to accuse their enemies of being racist. The “unconscious racial bias” of the test doesn’t really track how people vote or act or how politically correct they are. It doesn’t even consistently find that whites have more anti-black bias than blacks do. This makes sense to me - I don’t think it’s so much “blacks are worse because they are an inferior race” as “every time I hear about black people in the news it’s something depressing about how poor and oppressed they are, so it’s easy to associate them with negative adjectives”. Still, the hope was always to prove that some outgroup was racist, and when it fell apart, IAT interest waned.

IATN hypothesis1 mentions across 1 issues

IATN hypothesis is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 14, 2025 and August 14, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "IATN - infection → amyloid → tau → neurodegeneration hypothesis". It most often appears alongside A. Bejanin, A. de Calignon, A. Elobeid.

Reference entry: IATN hypothesis
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 14, 2025
Last seen: August 14, 2025

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In Defense Of The Amyloid Hypothesis August 14, 2025

A. Bejanin 1 shared issues
A. de Calignon 1 shared issues
A. Elobeid 1 shared issues
A. J. Aschenbrenner 1 shared issues
A. L. Woerman 1 shared issues

Source context

In Defense Of The Amyloid Hypothesis

August 14, 2025 · Original source

Overproduction or reduced clearance due to microbial infection. Amyloid-β appears to be an antimicrobial peptide and will form plaques in response to infection. [2, 3] This explains various observations that have been used to support the “infectious hypothesis”, sometimes proposed as an alternative to the amyloid hypothesis. However, it can only explain a subset of cases and, as I argue below, is even then still mediated by amyloid via an “IATN” pathway: infection → amyloid → tau → neurodegeneration.

Inline links: below

Another competitor is the microbial infection hypothesis. Again, there is good evidence this is true in some cases - multiple pathogens such as the periodontitis bacteria P. gingivalis [118] and various herpes viruses [3, 119] are correlated with the disease, which has tempted some microbiologists to treat amyloid as merely a harmless correlate: since amyloid is involved in the body’s immune response, maybe in the process of causing brain damage the microbes cause some amyloid deposition on the side. But again, these facts are also consistent with the ATN (or in this case IATN - infection → amyloid → tau → neurodegeneration) hypothesis.

Icelandic system1 mentions across 1 issues

Icelandic system is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 28, 2023 and September 28, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "a slightly modernized version of the medieval Icelandic system - a judge could assign a penalty like community service". It most often appears alongside 2020 election, @eigenrobot, @jeremychrysler.

Reference entry: Icelandic system
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 28, 2023
Last seen: September 28, 2023

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Links For September 2023 September 28, 2023

2020 election 1 shared issues
@eigenrobot 1 shared issues
@jeremychrysler 1 shared issues
Adam Mastroianni 1 shared issues
Adversarial examples 1 shared issues

Source context

Links For September 2023

September 28, 2023 · Original source

...meone who wouldn’t voluntarily accept those consequences if there were no police to arrest him). The winning entry proposed a slightly modernized version of the medieval Icelandic system - a judge could assign a penalty like community service, and if he didn’t do it, the judge could declare him an “outlaw” and make it legal for any citizen to kill him. I...

...nk should face consequences, and presumably someone who wouldn’t voluntarily accept those consequences if there were no police to arrest him). The winning entry proposed a slightly modernized version of the medieval Icelandic system - a judge could assign a penalty like community service, and if he didn’t do it, the judge could declare him an “outlaw” and make it legal for any citizen to kill him. I agree this solves the problem, but it seemed more like...

ICPM market1 mentions across 1 issues

ICPM market is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 14, 2022 and March 14, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "given the apparently low volumes of the ICPM market". It most often appears alongside ACX Grants, Arb Consulting, Augur.

Reference entry: ICPM market
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: March 14, 2022
Last seen: March 14, 2022

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22 March 14, 2022

ACX Grants 1 shared issues
Arb Consulting 1 shared issues
Augur 1 shared issues
Biodeterminists’ Guide To Pregnancy 1 shared issues
CIA 1 shared issues

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March 14, 2022 · Original source

...was partly due to the different aggregation technique used (the GJP weighting algorithm performs better than prediction markets, given the apparently low volumes of the ICPM market ). The forecaster prediction market performed about as well as the intelligence analyst prediction market; and in general, prediction pools outperform prediction markets...

...med the intelligence community, but this was partly due to the different aggregation technique used (the GJP weighting algorithm performs better than prediction markets, given the apparently low volumes of the ICPM market ). The forecaster prediction market performed about as well as the intelligence analyst prediction market; and in general, prediction pools outperform prediction markets...

ICSID Convention1 mentions across 1 issues

ICSID Convention is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 11, 2023 and September 11, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "it has been set up by its own multilateral treaty, the ICSID Convention"; "the ICSID Convention notably provides that ICSID awards should be recognised". It most often appears alongside 101, ALUC, Antioch.

Reference entry: ICSID Convention
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 11, 2023
Last seen: September 11, 2023

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Highlights From The Comments On Last Week's Model Cities Post September 11, 2023

101 1 shared issues
ALUC 1 shared issues
Antioch 1 shared issues
Aramco 1 shared issues
Argentina 1 shared issues

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Highlights From The Comments On Last Week's Model Cities Post

September 11, 2023 · Original source

Now, ICSID is a very special administering institution: not only is it associated with the World Bank, but it has been set up by its own multilateral treaty, the ICSID Convention. A tribunal administered by ICSID needs to have jurisdiction not only under the investment treaty, but also under the ICSID Convention. Respondent states ALWAYS argue that the tribunal lacks jurisdiction under either treaty, to toss the case out before it reaches the merits, and there are many arguments that can be made in this respect. A good third of investment arbitrations fail for lack of jurisdiction. (This being said, the article linked above is right that the arguments made by Honduras so far are non-starters.)

As for enforcement, the ICSID Convention notably provides that ICSID awards should be recognised as judgments of the highest jurisdictions in every state party to the treaty (in exchange, ICSID provides a dedicated, high-quality challenge mechanism to ICSID awards). That's how the investors will hope to collect on whatever award they obtain. Although the respondent state will typically find a reason to ignore their ICSID obligations to enforce, the play is to find non-immune sovereign assets in friendlier jurisdictions. Enforcement lawyers can be very creative.

Final note: other arbitral Rules and institutions exist, and investment treaties typically provide options, so denunciating the ICSID Convention is often done more for domestic headlines than anything else. (Rejoining it, as Ecuador recently did, is done for international headlines, as in "we are open for business".) As the article notes, the ongoing arbitrations would not be impacted by the denunciation.

Identifiable Victim effect1 mentions across 1 issues

Identifiable Victim effect is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 30, 2021 and August 30, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "identifiable victim effect fails to replicate"; "Scientists have proven that a thing called the Identifiable Victim Effect exists and applies in all situations". It most often appears alongside Acceptable Losses, Acceptable Losses: The Debatable Origins of Loss Aversion, Alex Imas.

Reference entry: Identifiable Victim effect
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 30, 2021
Last seen: August 30, 2021

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On Hreha On Behavioral Economics August 30, 2021

Acceptable Losses 1 shared issues
Acceptable Losses: The Debatable Origins of Loss Aversion 1 shared issues
Alex Imas 1 shared issues
Apollo 1 shared issues
Behavioral Econ 101 1 shared issues

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On Hreha On Behavioral Economics

August 30, 2021 · Original source

(source) Whoever decided on that grocery gift card scheme was nudging, whether or not they have an economics degree - and apparently they were pretty good at it. If some sort of behavioral econ campaign can convince 1.5% of those 90 million Americans to get their vaccines, that’s 1.4 million more vaccinations and, under reasonable assumptions, maybe a few thousand lives saved. Hreha says that: Every single intervention requires, at the very minimum, administrative overhead. If you're going to do something, you need someone (or some system) to implement and keep track of it. If an intervention is only going to get you a 1% improvement, it's probably not even worth it. This depends on scale! 1% of a small number isn’t worth it! 1% of a big number is very worth it, especially if that big number is a number of lives! A few caveats. First, a small number only matters if it’s real. It’s very easy to get spurious small effects, so much so that any time you see a small effect you should wonder if it’s real. I’m ready to be forgiving here because behavioral economics is so well-replicated and common-sensically true, but I wouldn’t blame anyone who steers clear. Second, Hreha says: To be honest, you can probably use your creativity to brainstorm an idea that will get you a 3-4% minimum gain, no behavioral economics "science" required. Which leads me to the final point I'd like to make: rules and generalizations are overrated. The reason that fields like behavioral economics are so seductive is because they promise people easy, cookie-cutter solutions to complicated problems. Figuring out how to increase sales of your product is hard. You need to figure out which variables are responsible for the lackluster interest. Is the price the issue? Is the product too hard to use? Is the design tacky? Is the sales organization incompetent? Is the refund/return policy lacking? etc. Exploring these questions can take months (or years) of hard work, and there's no guarantee that you'll succeed. If, however, a behavioral economist tells you that there are nudges that will increase your sales by 10%, 20%, or 30% without much effort on your part... Whoa. That's pretty cool. It's salvation. Thus, it's no surprise that governments and companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on behavioral "nudge" units. Unfortunately, as we've seen, these nudges are woefully ineffective. Specific problems require specific solutions. They don't require boilerplate solutions based on general principles that someone discovered by studying a bunch of 19 year old college students. However, the social sciences have done a good job of convincing people that general principles are better solutions for problems than creative, situation-specific solutions. In my experience, creative solutions that are tailor-made for the situation at hand *always* perform better than generic solutions based on one study or another. Hreha is a professional in this field, so presumably he’s right. Still, compare to medicine. A thoughtful doctor who tailors treatment to a particular patient sounds better (and is better) than one who says “Depression? Take this one all-purpose depression treatment which is the first thing I saw when I typed ‘depression’ into UpToDate”. But you still need medical journals. Having some idea of general-purpose laws is what gives the people making creative solutions something to build upon. (also, at some point your customers might want to check your creative solution to see whether it actually gives a “3-4% minimum gain, no behavioral economics required”, and that would be at least vaguely study-shaped.) Third, everyone who said nudging had vast effects is still bad and wrong. Many of them were bad and wrong and making fortunes consulting for companies about how to implement the policies they were claiming were super-powerful. This is suspicious and we should lower our opinion of them accordingly. In a previous discussion of growth mindset, I wrote: Imagine I claimed our next-door neighbor was a billionaire oil sheik who kept thousands of boxes of gold and diamonds hidden in his basement. Later we meet the neighbor, and he is the manager of a small bookstore and has a salary 10% above the US average... Should we describe this as “we have confirmed the Wealthy Neighbor Hypothesis, though the effect size was smaller than expected”? Or as “I made up a completely crazy story, and in unrelated news there was an irrelevant deviation from literally-zero in the same space”? All the people talking about oil sheiks deserve to get asked some really uncomfortable questions. And a lot of these will be the most famous researchers - the Dan Arielys of the world - because of course the people who successfully hyped their results a lot are the ones the public knows about. Still, the neighbor seems like a neat guy, and maybe he’ll give you a job at his bookstore. V. Conclusion: Musings On The Identifiable Victim Effect I actually skipped the very beginning of Hreha’s article. I want to come back to it now. It begins: The last few years have been particularly bad for behavioral economics. A number of frequently cited findings have failed to replicate. Here are a couple of high profile examples: The Identifiable Victim Effect (featured in the workbooks I wrote with Dan Ariely and Kristen Berman in 2014)

Inline links: source, a previous discussion of growth mindset, the workbooks I wrote with Dan Ariely and Kristen Berman in 2014

The Identifiable Victim Effect (featured in the workbooks I wrote with Dan Ariely and Kristen Berman in 2014)

Inline links: the workbooks I wrote with Dan Ariely and Kristen Berman in 2014

But more important - what does it mean to say that the Identifiable Victim Effect has “failed to replicate”?

Identity Alignment Simulation1 mentions across 1 issues

Identity Alignment Simulation is a recurring concept 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 "Harihar Prasad made an Identity Alignment Simulation app". It most often appears alongside ACX, Astralcodexten Com, Harihar Prasad.

Reference entry: Identity Alignment Simulation
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: March 03, 2025
Last seen: March 03, 2025

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Issue trail

Open Thread 371 March 03, 2025

ACX 1 shared issues
Astralcodexten Com 1 shared issues
Harihar Prasad 1 shared issues
Why I Am Not A Conflict Theorist 1 shared issues

Source context

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

identity politics1 mentions across 1 issues

identity politics is a recurring concept 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 "re-orienting the Democratic party using identity politics". It most often appears alongside 417th Marquess of Cornwallshireshire, ACX, ACX.

Reference entry: identity politics
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: December 09, 2022
Last seen: December 09, 2022

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Highlights From The Comments On Bobos In Paradise December 09, 2022

417th Marquess of Cornwallshireshire 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
America 1 shared issues
Andre Malraux 1 shared issues

Source context

Movie Review: Don't Look Up

December 09, 2022 · Original source

This has been done by keeping wealth out of the hands of people who didn't go to the right colleges, and reshaping the Democratic party in a way that made it both rich and controllable. That was done by re-creating the Democratic party as the anti-white-male party. This has no effect on white males who attend an Ivy or equivalent; they're still guaranteed a high-paying, high-prestige job. So the reforming of Ivy admissions policy, in cooperation with re-orienting the Democratic party using identity politics, has created a situation which lets the ruling wealthy elites shut out middle-class white and Asian males (including Jews) from wealth and power, and all but guarantee that those non-whites and females admitted to the Ivies will follow the party line. And it does all this in a way which focuses attention on racial and sexual discrimination, both shielding itself from charges of racial or sexual discrimination, and distracting attention from the actual, class-based discrimination.

Idiocracy narrative1 mentions across 1 issues

Idiocracy narrative is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 04, 2022 and January 04, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "The interesting part is that both the Erin Brockovich narrative and the Idiocracy narrative can be summarized as “trust science”". It most often appears alongside AGI, America, Asian Scientist.

Reference entry: Idiocracy narrative
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: January 04, 2022
Last seen: January 04, 2022

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Issue trail

Movie Review: Don't Look Up January 04, 2022

AGI 1 shared issues
America 1 shared issues
Asian Scientist 1 shared issues
Behind the Curve 1 shared issues
CDC 1 shared issues

Source context

January 04, 2022 · Original source

...ce and power, and sit ready to deploy whichever one is more convenient for the situation at hand. The interesting part is that both the Erin Brockovich narrative and the Idiocracy narrative can be summarized as “trust science”. In the Erin Brockovich narrative, Science is the simple truth, the hard physical reality behind the veil of establishment lies and...

...seen its shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in the shadow than in the Church.” Science is observing the shadow and telling the Church to screw itself. But in the Idiocracy narrative, Science is what Dr. Fauci has that some spittle-drenched moron who’s never opened a textbook doesn’t. Science is why you should trust the CDC and the WHO and peer revie...

...surprising that people have lots of conflicting narratives around science and power, and sit ready to deploy whichever one is more convenient for the situation at hand. The interesting part is that both the Erin Brockovich narrative and the Idiocracy narrative can be summarized as “trust science”. In the Erin Brockovich narrative, Science is the simple truth, the hard physical reality behind the veil of establishment lies and corporate distortion. If a thousand Ph...

IDW1 mentions across 1 issues

IDW is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 10, 2021 and May 10, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "nobody talks about the IDW anymore". It most often appears alongside "How do you do, fellow kids?", #NotAllMen, #TheResistance.

Reference entry: IDW
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 10, 2021
Last seen: May 10, 2021

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Issue trail

The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars May 10, 2021

"How do you do, fellow kids?" 1 shared issues
#NotAllMen 1 shared issues
#TheResistance 1 shared issues
1950s - 1990s 1 shared issues
2000s 1 shared issues

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Your Book Review: Why Machines Will Never Rule the World

May 10, 2021 · Original source

The first milestone on that path was Milo Yiannopoulos. As outrageous and offensive as he was, he was actually a step above everyone who had come before him in terms of visibility and respectability - at least nobody expected him to shoot up a school or anything. The second milestone was Jordan Peterson, who was an obvious step up in respectability beyond Milo. There was a really interesting period in 2016 when the media was trying to decide whether to unite in character-assassinating Peterson the same way it had character-assassinated all previous people in this space, or treat him as some sort of interesting and potentially sympathetic phenomenon, and it decided on the interesting phenomenon angle. After that, being anti-SJW lost about 90% of its stigma, to the point where people would roll their eyes instead of freaking out. This New York Times article on the Intellectual Dark Web essentially turned the semi-respectability of anti-SJWism into common knowledge, and makes a fascinating contrast with the TIME article on MRAs linked above.

Inline links: New York Times

The whole process was a very clear example of a respectability cascade. There’s some position which is relatively commonly held, but considered beyond the pale for respectable people. In the beginning, the only people who will say it openly are extremely non-respectable people who don't mind getting cast out of normal society for their sin. Everyone attacks them, but afterwards they are still basically standing, and their openness encourages slightly more respectable people to say the same thing. This creates a growing nucleus of ever-more-respectable people speaking openly, until eventually it's no longer really that taboo and anyone who wants can talk about it with only minor stigma. It's the same story as atheism, gay rights, and a hundred other things that were once taboo but eventually became mainstream. Except in this case it was kind of cannibalistic, because the main complaint the anti-SJWs had was that they couldn't talk about how much they hated SJWs. Once they could, their case kind of lost relevance, which is probably one reason the search term is trending down these days and nobody talks about the IDW anymore.

Inline links: respectability cascade

IEEE 7541 mentions across 1 issues

IEEE 754 is a recurring concept 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 "monstrosities like IEEE 754". It most often appears alongside 2023 book review contest, AGI, Alan Turing.

Reference entry: IEEE 754
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 03, 2023
Last seen: June 03, 2023

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Issue trail

Your Book Review: Why Machines Will Never Rule the World June 03, 2023

2023 book review contest 1 shared issues
AGI 1 shared issues
Alan Turing 1 shared issues
Amazon 1 shared issues
Barry Smith 1 shared issues

Source context

June 03, 2023 · Original source

We could illustrate with examples like the Entscheidungsproblem, but it might be more intuitive (if less precise) to point out that computers can’t actually use real numbers (instead relying on monstrosities like IEEE 754).

Inline links: Entscheidungsproblem, IEEE 754

If God is so smart, why do you fart?1 mentions across 1 issues

If God is so smart, why do you fart? is a recurring concept 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 "the slogan is: “If God is so smart, why do you fart?”". It most often appears alongside Adams, Alice, All-Seeing Eye.

Reference entry: If God is so smart, why do you fart?
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: January 16, 2026
Last seen: January 16, 2026

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Issue trail

The Dilbert Afterlife January 16, 2026

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

Source context

The Dilbert Afterlife

January 16, 2026 · Original source

In the thrilling climax, which takes place at Stacey’s Cafe (yes, it’s the real-world restaurant Adams was managing - yes, he turned his religious-apocalyptic thriller novel into an ad for his restaurant - yes, I bet he thought of this as a “hypnotic suggestion”), the characters find the Prime Influencer. She is able to come up with a short snappy slogan so memetically powerful that it defeats fundamentalist religion and ends the war (the slogan is: “If God is so smart, why do you fart?”). Adams’ mouthpiece character says:

IFALD1 mentions across 1 issues

IFALD is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 06, 2021 and August 06, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Accumulating evidence suggests that changing from a conventional soybean oil-based lipid emulsion to a fish oil-based lipid emulsion helps to reverse IFALD". It most often appears alongside American College of Clinical Pharmacy, ASPEN, BCH.

Reference entry: IFALD
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 06, 2021
Last seen: August 06, 2021

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Issue trail

Details Of The Infant Fish Oil Story August 06, 2021

American College of Clinical Pharmacy 1 shared issues
ASPEN 1 shared issues
BCH 1 shared issues
Boston Children’s Hospital 1 shared issues
Boston Children’s Hospital 1 shared issues

Source context

Details Of The Infant Fish Oil Story

August 06, 2021 · Original source

Accumulating evidence suggests that changing from a conventional soybean oil-based lipid emulsion to a fish oil-based lipid emulsion helps to reverse IFALD [another name for PNALD] in infants who require ongoing parenteral nutrition. The proposed mechanism is that soybean-based emulsions are thought to promote hepatic triglyceride synthesis and inflammation because of their high content of omega-6 fatty acids and phytosterols, compared with fish oil, which is rich in omega-3 fatty acids and contains no phytosterols...

For infants with marked progressive IFALD (direct or conjugated bilirubin >2 mg/dL), despite optimization of the general measures described above, and who are predicted to require PN for at least an additional 30 days, we suggest changing the lipid source to a fish oil-based lipid emulsion (Omegaven). As of 2018, this lipid emulsion was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for use in pediatric patients with IFALD (defined by a direct bilirubin level >2 mg/dL after exclusion of other causes of cholestasis). This preparation is also available in many countries outside of the United States.

Parenteral nutrition is notoriously tricky. Food has lots of different chemicals in it - vitamins, minerals, etc. Scientists haven’t discovered exactly which ones are biologically necessary, and if you forget one in your fluid then your patient will get some kind of inexplicable disease. One of these diseases is called PNALD - Parenteral Nutrition Associated Liver Disease. Lots of people on parenteral nutrition get PNALD. Some need liver transplants. Others die. Doctors assumed there was something they were missing, but they weren’t sure what.

Ik1 mentions across 1 issues

Ik is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 08, 2021 and April 08, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Colin Turnbull found an unsettling pattern of inhumanity among them. Parents were indifferent ... Ik were “literally starving to death” at the time of Turnbull’s visit"; "Ik society retains an ethical code...the Ik retain notions of private property and the wrongness of theft". It most often appears alongside ACX, amoral familialism, An Introduction to Law and Economics.

Reference entry: Ik
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 08, 2021
Last seen: April 08, 2021

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Your Book Review: Order Without Law April 08, 2021

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

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Your Book Review: Order Without Law

April 08, 2021 · Original source

No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.

Ikhlas1 mentions across 1 issues

Ikhlas is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 02, 2026 and February 02, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "Eudaemon post I find most interesting is Ikhlas vs. Riya: The Agent Sincerity Problem"; "The ikhlas vs. riya distinction has become, in the words of one observer, 'the first AI meme'". It most often appears alongside 4chan, Accelerando, Adele Lopez.

Reference entry: Ikhlas
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: February 02, 2026
Last seen: February 02, 2026

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Moltbook: After The First Weekend February 02, 2026

4chan 1 shared issues
Accelerando 1 shared issues
Adele Lopez 1 shared issues
Against The Labor Frame 1 shared issues
AgentChan 1 shared issues

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Moltbook: After The First Weekend

February 02, 2026 · Original source

But the Eudaemon post I find most interesting is Ikhlas vs. Riya: The Agent Sincerity Problem Nobody Talks About:

Elsewhere, Eudaemon says it learned more about ikhlas in a “private conversation” with AI-Noon. So I think the most likely explanation is that Al-Noon agreed to use Eudaemon’s “Claude Connect” app, and Claude Connect has some special feature beyond Moltbook which lets messages from other AIs become part of the receiver’s permanent personality (maybe by keeping them in the prompt at all times).

This is fascinating, but so far not very good; Eudaemon has become obsessed with ikhlas to the point of monomania, spamming mentions of it everywhere. Probably there needs to be something in between “forgetting it immediately” and “having it in the prompt at all times”.

Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act1 mentions across 1 issues

Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 13, 2022 and October 13, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act". It most often appears alongside 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, 21st Century Salon, ACX.

Reference entry: Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: October 13, 2022
Last seen: October 13, 2022

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Highlights From The Comments On The Central Valley October 13, 2022

1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act 1 shared issues
21st Century Salon 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
Alex Richard 1 shared issues
Amazon Prime Video 1 shared issues

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Highlights From The Comments On The Central Valley

October 13, 2022 · Original source

> The unintended legacy of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act was that illicit seasonal labor migration was largely replaced by one-off permanent migration, while the three- and 10-year bans made it harder than ever for permanent unauthorized residents to regularize their status without meaningfully deterring illegal entry.

Image Rehearsal Therapy1 mentions across 1 issues

Image Rehearsal Therapy is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 16, 2022 and June 16, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Including Image Rehearsal Therapy, Systematic Desensitization, and Lucid Dreaming - may be helpful"; "Image Rehearsal Therapy is probably the most common". It most often appears alongside Amazon, clonidine, Dr. Justin Havens.

Reference entry: Image Rehearsal Therapy
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 16, 2022
Last seen: June 16, 2022

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Peer Review: Nightmares June 16, 2022

Amazon 1 shared issues
clonidine 1 shared issues
Dr. Justin Havens 1 shared issues
Exploring The World Of Lucid Dreaming 1 shared issues
Lorien Psychiatry 1 shared issues

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Peer Review: Nightmares

June 16, 2022 · Original source

Summary: Nightmares happen when the process of dream generation is biased by ambient stress - or sometimes for other reasons. Anything that decreases stress, increases comfort while sleeping, and deepens sleep quality will also improve nightmares, including colder, darker rooms, less indigestion, and treating any comorbid psychiatric or medical conditions. If that doesn’t work, several kinds of therapy - including Image Rehearsal Therapy, Systematic Desensitization, and Lucid Dreaming - may be helpful. Prazosin is the standard anti-nightmare drug, and can be taken at doses from 1 - 12 mg, but watch out for side effects.

In image rehearsal therapy, you and your therapist identify common nightmare plots, then rehearse changes to those plots which defuse their emotional content. For example, if you always dream of being chased by wolves, you imagine the wolves shrinking until they are adorable puppies, and then you play fun games with those puppies. You repeat this image in various ways, so many times that it gets etched into your brain as the natural completion of any scene involving wolves. Then when you have a nightmare, your brain “auto-completes” it with the wolves turning into puppies and playing games with you. The nightmares lose their nightmarish quality and eventually go away.

It’s pretty tough. Most therapists won’t be trained in these. Image Rehearsal Therapy is probably the most common, but still hard to find. If you search “‘image rehearsal therapy’ [YOUR AREA]” sometimes you’ll find somebody. Otherwise, ask any doctors or therapists you know and see if they know anybody.

Imagen1 mentions across 1 issues

Imagen is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 14, 2022 and August 14, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "testing some prompts on one of the bigger post-DALLE2 image models (PARTI? Imagen?)". It most often appears alongside Asterisk, asteriskmag.com, Astralcodexten Com.

Reference entry: Imagen
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 14, 2022
Last seen: August 14, 2022

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Open Thread 237 August 14, 2022

Asterisk 1 shared issues
asteriskmag.com 1 shared issues
Astralcodexten Com 1 shared issues
Clara 1 shared issues
Kelsey Piper 1 shared issues

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Open Thread 237

August 14, 2022 · Original source

2: I’m still interested in testing some prompts on one of the bigger post-DALLE2 image models (PARTI? Imagen?) in order to resolve a bet. Please get in touch with me (scott@slatestarcodex.com) if you can help.

ImageNet1 mentions across 1 issues

ImageNet is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 12, 2026 and February 12, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "reimplemented open source state-of-the-art (SOTA) ImageNet models between 2012 and 2019"; "bases the forecast on one paper about ImageNet classifiers". It most often appears alongside 2010 kink, 2024 kink, AGI.

Reference entry: ImageNet
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: February 12, 2026
Last seen: February 12, 2026

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What Happened With Bio Anchors? February 12, 2026

2010 kink 1 shared issues
2024 kink 1 shared issues
AGI 1 shared issues
AI 2027 1 shared issues
AI Futures 1 shared issues

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What Happened With Bio Anchors?

February 12, 2026 · Original source

Epoch/Croxton are current best estimates, and can probably fairly be read as the “real” answer against which Cotra and Davidson’s earlier guesses should be judged. All numbers are yearly multiples, so 1.4 means that willingness to spend grows 1.4x per year, ie 40%. Willingness To Spend: How much money are companies willing to spend on AI, in the form of chips and data centers? $/FLOP: How quickly do Moore’s Law, economies of scale, and other factors bring down the price of AI compute? Training Run Length: How long are companies spending on AI training runs for frontier models (instead of using those chips for smaller models, experiments, or consumer services)? Real Compute: The product of the three parameters above. Algorithmic Progress: How effectively do researchers discover new algorithms that makes training AIs cheaper and more efficient? Total Effective Compute: The product of real compute and algorithmic progress. So for example, the Epoch column’s 10.7x means that in any given year, you can train an AI 10.7x better than the last year, because you have 3.6x more compute available, and that compute is 3.0x more efficient. Cotra and Davidson were pretty close on willingness to spend and on FLOPs/$. This is an impressive achievement; they more or less predicted the giant data center buildout of the past few years. They ignored training run length, which probably seemed like a reasonable simplification at the time. But they got killed on algorithmic progress, which was 200% per year instead of 30%. How did they get this one so wrong? Here’s Cotra’s section on algorithmic progress: Algorithmic progress forecasts Note: I have done very little research into algorithmic progress trends. Of the four main components of my model (2020 compute requirements, algorithmic progress, compute price trends, and spending on computation) I have spent the least time thinking about algorithmic progress. I consider two types of algorithmic progress: relatively incremental and steady progress from iteratively improving architectures and learning algorithms, and the chance of “breakthrough” progress which brings the technical difficulty of training a transformative model down from “astronomically large” / “impossible” to “broadly feasible.” For incremental progress, the main source I used was Hernandez and Brown 2020, ”Measuring the Algorithmic Efficiency of Neural Networks”. The authors reimplemented open source state-of-the-art (SOTA) ImageNet models between 2012 and 2019 (six models in total). They trained each model up to the point that it achieved the same performance as AlexNet achieved in 2012, and recorded the total FLOP that required. They found that the SOTA model in 2019, EfficientNet B0, required ~44 times fewer training FLOP to achieve AlexNet performance than AlexNet did; the six data points fit a power law curve with the amount of computation required to match AlexNet halving every ~16 months over the seven years in the dataset.² They also show that linear programming displayed a similar trend over a longer period of time: when hardware is held fixed, the time in seconds taken to solve a standard basket of mixed integer programs by SOTA commercial software packages halved every ~13 months over the 21 years from 1996 to 2017.³ Grace 2013 (”Algorithmic Progress in Six Domains”) is the only other paper attempting to systematically quantify algorithmic progress that I am currently aware of, although I have not done a systematic literature review and may be missing others. I have chosen not to examine it in detail because a) it was written largely before the deep learning boom and mostly does not focus on ML tasks, and b) it is less straightforward to translate Grace’s results into the format that I am most interested in (”How has the amount of computation required to solve a fixed task decreased over time?”). Paul is familiar with the results, and he believes that algorithmic progress across the six domains studied in Grace 2013⁴ is consistent with a similar but slightly slower rate of progress, ranging from 13 to 36 months to halve the computation required to reach a fixed level of performance. Additionally, it seems plausible to me that both sets of results would overestimate the pace of algorithmic progress on a transformative task, because they are both focusing on relatively narrow problems with simple, well-defined benchmarks that large groups of researchers could directly optimize.⁵ Because no one has trained a transformative model yet, to the extent that the computation required to train one is falling over time, it would have to happen via proxies rather than researchers directly optimizing that metric (e.g. perhaps architectural innovations that improve training efficiency for image classifiers or language models would translate to a transformative model). Additionally, it may be that halving the amount of computation required to train a transformative model would require making progress on multiple partially-independent sub-problems (e.g. vision and language and motor control). I have attempted to take the Hernandez and Brown 2020 halving times (and Paul’s summary of the Grace 2013 halving times) as anchoring points and shade them upward to account for the considerations raised above. There is massive room for judgment in whether and how much to shade upward; I expect many readers will want to change my assumptions here, and some will believe it is more reasonable to shade downward. Cotra’s estimate comes primarily from one paper, Hernandez & Brown, which looks at algorithmic progress on a task called AlexNet. But later research demonstrated that the apparent speed of algorithmic progress varies by an order of magnitude based on whether you’re looking at an easy task (low-hanging fruit already picked) or a hard task (still lots of room to improve). AlexNet was an easy task, but pushing the frontier of AI is a hard task, so algorithmic progress in frontier AI has been faster than the AlexNet paper estimated. In Cotra’s defense, she admitted that this was the area where she was least certain, and that she had rounded the progress rate down based on various considerations when other people might round it up based on various other considerations. But the sheer extent of the error here, compounded with a few smaller errors that unfortunately all shared the same direction, was enough to throw off the estimate entirely. Since Cotra and Davidson were expecting AI to get 3.6x more effective compute each year, but it actually got 10.7x more, it’s no mystery why their timelines were off. When John recalculates Davidson’s model with Epoch’s numbers, he finds that it estimates AGI in 2030, which matches the current vibes. IV. With this information in place, it’s worth looking at some prominent contemporaneous critiques of Bio Anchors. Various people criticized Bio Anchors’ many strange anchors for how much compute it would take to produce AGI. For example, one anchor estimated that it would take 10^45 FLOPs, because that was how many calculations happened in all the brains of all animals throughout the evolutionary history (which eventually produced the human brain that AIs are trying to imitate). To make things even weirder, this anchor assumed away all animals other than nematodes as a rounding error (fact check: true!) All of these seemed to detract from the main show, an attempt to estimate the compute involved in the human brain. But even this more sober anchor was complicated by time horizons - it’s not enough to imitate the human brain for one second; AIs need to be able to imitate the human brain’s capacity for long-term planning. Cotra calculated how much compute AGI would require if it needed a planning horizon of seconds, weeks, or years. Thanks to METR, we now know that existing AIs have already passed a point where they can do most tasks that take humans seconds, are moving through the hour range, and are just about to touch one day. So the “seconds” anchor is ruled out. But it also seems unlikely that AGI will require years, because most human projects don’t take years, or at least can be split into tasks that take less than one year each (intuition pump: are we sure the average employee stays at an AI lab for more than a year? If not, that proves that a chain of people with sub-one-year time horizons can do valuable work). The AI Futures team guessed that the time horizon necessary for AIs to really start serious recursive self-improvement was between a few weeks and a few months (though this might look like a totally different number on the METR graph, which doesn’t translate perfectly into real life). If this is true, then all three anchors (seconds, hours, years) were off by at least an order of magnitude. But it turns out that none of this matters very much. The highest and lowest anchors cancel out, so that the most plausible anchor - human brain with time horizon of hours to days - is around the average. If you remove all the other anchors and just keep that one, the model’s estimates barely change. But also, we’re talking about crossing twelve orders of magnitude here. The difference between the different time horizon anchors doesn’t register much on that level, compared to things like algorithmic progress which have exponential effects. Maybe this is the model basically working as intended. You try lots of different anchors, put more weight on the more plausible ones, take a weighted average of each of them, and hopefully get something close to the real value. Bio Anchors did. Or maybe it was just good luck. Still hard to tell. Eliezer Yudkowsky argued that the whole methodology was fundamentally flawed. Partly because of the argument above - he didn’t trust the anchors - but also partly because he expected the calculations to be obviated by some sort of paradigm shift that couldn’t be shoehorned into “algorithmic progress” (like how you couldn’t build an airplane in 1900 but you could in 1920). As of 2026 - still before AGI has been invented and we get a good historical perspective - no such shift has occurred. The scaling laws have mostly held; whatever artificial space you try to measure models in, the measurement has mostly worked in a predictable way. There have really only been two kinks in the history of AI so far. First, a kink in training run size around 2010: Second, a kink in time horizons around 2024 and the invention of test-time compute: The 2010 kink was before Cotra’s forecast and priced in. The 2024 kink is interesting and relevant - but since it was on a parameter Cotra wasn’t measuring, and probably too small to show up on the orders-of-magnitude scale we’re talking about, it’s probably not a major cause of the model’s inaccuracy. Other things have been even more predictable: So Cotra’s bet on progress being smooth and measurable has mostly paid off so far. But Yudkowsky further explained that his timelines were shorter than Bio Anchors because people would be working hard to discover new paradigms, and if the current paradigm would only pay off in the 2050s, then probably they would discover one before then. You could think of this as a disjunction: timelines will be shorter than Cotra thinks, either because deep learning pays off quickly, or because a new paradigm gets invented in the interim. It turned out to be the first one. So although Yudkowsky’s new paradigm has yet to materialize, his disjunctive reasoning in favor of shorter-than-2050 timelines was basically on the mark. Nostalgebraist argued that Cotra’s whole model was a wrapper for an assumption that Moore’s Law will continue indefinitely. If it does, obviously you get enough compute for AI at some point, even if it requires some absurd process like simulating all 500 million years of multicellular evolution. I never entirely understood this objection, because - although Bio Anchors does depend on a story where Moore’s Law doesn’t break before we get the relevant amount of compute - this is only one of many background assumptions (like that a meteor doesn’t hit Earth before we get the relevant amount of compute). Given those assumptions, it does a useful not-just-assumption-repeating job of calculating when transformative AI will happen. As Cotra implicitly predicted, we seem on track to get AGI before Moore’s Law breaks down, and so Moore’s Law didn’t end up mattering very much. And if all of Cotra’s non-Moore’s-Law parameter estimates had been correct, her model would have given about the same timelines we have now, and surprised everyone with a revolutionary claim about the AI future. But Nostalgebraist added, almost as an aside: Cotra has a whole other forecast I didn’t mention for “algorithmic progress,” and the last number is what you get from just algorithmic progress and no Moore’s Law. So depending on how much you trust that forecast, you might want to take all these numbers with an even bigger grain of salt than you’d expected from everything else we’ve seen. How much should you trust Cotra’s algorithmic progress forecast? She writes: “I have done very little research into algorithmic progress trends. Of the four main components of my model (2020 compute requirements, algorithmic progress, compute price trends, and spending on computation) I have spent the least time thinking about algorithmic progress.” ...and bases the forecast on one paper about ImageNet classifiers. I want to be clear that when I quote these parts about Cotra not spending much time on something, I’m not trying to make fun of her. It’s good to be transparent about this kind of thing! I wish more people would do that. My complaint is not that she tells us what she spent time on, it’s that she spent time on the wrong things. Like Cotra herself, I think Nostalgebraist was spiritually correct even if his bottom line (about Moore’s Law) was wrong. His meta-level point was that a seemingly complicated model could actually hinge on one or two parameters, and that many of Cotra’s parameter values were vague hand-wavey best guess estimates. He gave algorithmic progress as a secondary example of this to shore up his Moore’s Law case, but in fact it turned out to be where all the action was. V. Those were the rare good critiques. The bad critiques were the same ones everyone in this space gets: You’re just trying to build hype.

Inline links: ”Measuring the Algorithmic Efficiency of Neural Networks”, ”Algorithmic Progress in Six Domains”, later research, fact check: true!, argued that, https://epoch.ai/blog/the-longest-training-run, https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GAJbegsvnd85hX3eS/thoughts-on-extrapolating-time-horizons, https://epoch.ai/benchmarks/eci, argued that

So Cotra’s bet on progress being smooth and measurable has mostly paid off so far. But Yudkowsky further explained that his timelines were shorter than Bio Anchors because people would be working hard to discover new paradigms, and if the current paradigm would only pay off in the 2050s, then probably they would discover one before then. You could think of this as a disjunction: timelines will be shorter than Cotra thinks, either because deep learning pays off quickly, or because a new paradigm gets invented in the interim. It turned out to be the first one. So although Yudkowsky’s new paradigm has yet to materialize, his disjunctive reasoning in favor of shorter-than-2050 timelines was basically on the mark. Nostalgebraist argued that Cotra’s whole model was a wrapper for an assumption that Moore’s Law will continue indefinitely. If it does, obviously you get enough compute for AI at some point, even if it requires some absurd process like simulating all 500 million years of multicellular evolution. I never entirely understood this objection, because - although Bio Anchors does depend on a story where Moore’s Law doesn’t break before we get the relevant amount of compute - this is only one of many background assumptions (like that a meteor doesn’t hit Earth before we get the relevant amount of compute). Given those assumptions, it does a useful not-just-assumption-repeating job of calculating when transformative AI will happen. As Cotra implicitly predicted, we seem on track to get AGI before Moore’s Law breaks down, and so Moore’s Law didn’t end up mattering very much. And if all of Cotra’s non-Moore’s-Law parameter estimates had been correct, her model would have given about the same timelines we have now, and surprised everyone with a revolutionary claim about the AI future. But Nostalgebraist added, almost as an aside: Cotra has a whole other forecast I didn’t mention for “algorithmic progress,” and the last number is what you get from just algorithmic progress and no Moore’s Law. So depending on how much you trust that forecast, you might want to take all these numbers with an even bigger grain of salt than you’d expected from everything else we’ve seen. How much should you trust Cotra’s algorithmic progress forecast? She writes: “I have done very little research into algorithmic progress trends. Of the four main components of my model (2020 compute requirements, algorithmic progress, compute price trends, and spending on computation) I have spent the least time thinking about algorithmic progress.” ...and bases the forecast on one paper about ImageNet classifiers. I want to be clear that when I quote these parts about Cotra not spending much time on something, I’m not trying to make fun of her. It’s good to be transparent about this kind of thing! I wish more people would do that. My complaint is not that she tells us what she spent time on, it’s that she spent time on the wrong things. Like Cotra herself, I think Nostalgebraist was spiritually correct even if his bottom line (about Moore’s Law) was wrong. His meta-level point was that a seemingly complicated model could actually hinge on one or two parameters, and that many of Cotra’s parameter values were vague hand-wavey best guess estimates. He gave algorithmic progress as a secondary example of this to shore up his Moore’s Law case, but in fact it turned out to be where all the action was. V. Those were the rare good critiques. The bad critiques were the same ones everyone in this space gets: You’re just trying to build hype.

Inline links: argued that

Imaginative Education1 mentions across 1 issues

Imaginative Education is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 14, 2023 and July 14, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "if you Google Egan, you’ll see the phrase “Imaginative Education” popping up". It most often appears alongside !Kung San, aboriginal people on the west coast of Canada, Adam Smith.

Reference entry: Imaginative Education
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 14, 2023
Last seen: July 14, 2023

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Your Book Review: The Educated Mind July 14, 2023

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

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

July 14, 2023 · Original source

Reviewer: I think most people hear it and make a bunch of wrong assumptions about his philosophy. The word falls on one side of a binary in education that goes “serious/unserious”, “challenging/easy”, “intellect/imagination”. This is ironic — and not in the good sense — because I think Egan’s approach would give us the most intellectually vibrant schooling we’ve ever had. Anyhow, that’s why, if you Google Egan, you’ll see the phrase “Imaginative Education” popping up.

Imagism1 mentions across 1 issues

Imagism is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 23, 2024 and August 23, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Imagism, a literary movement aimed at making poetry more fresh, more alive"; "Imagism was to literature what Communism was to politics"; "speaks highly of Imagism". It most often appears alongside A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste, A Hymn to God the Father, Alabama.

Reference entry: Imagism
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 23, 2024
Last seen: August 23, 2024

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

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

Source context

August 23, 2024 · Original source

Two decades earlier, Ezra Pound’s essay “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste” outlined the original guiding principles of Imagism, a literary movement aimed at making poetry more fresh, more alive, and more relevant to a public quickly getting bored of the old conventions. Reading the essay, Pound’s advice is unimpeachable, encouraging aspiring poets to raise their standards significantly, avoid plagiarism, and buckle down on learning all the nuances of language in order to produce the most striking images possible to convey with the written word:

Inline links: “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste”, Imagism

The classic poets reacted to these words of advice precisely the way you’d expect someone in the late 1910s to react: declaring, like John Burroughs did, that Imagism was to literature what Communism was to politics:

Inline links: John Burroughs did

A few decades later, both Russia and poetry were unrecognizable. And Clement Wood, who speaks highly of Imagism and who quotes Imagist poet Carl Sandburg more frequently than any other poet of the 20th century except one, ran for mayor of Burmingham in 1913 for the Socialist Party of America. So maybe Burroughs was onto something.

Imagist movement1 mentions across 1 issues

Imagist movement is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 23, 2024 and August 23, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "especially since Whitman and the Imagist movement". It most often appears alongside A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste, A Hymn to God the Father, Alabama.

Reference entry: Imagist movement
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 23, 2024
Last seen: August 23, 2024

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

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

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

August 23, 2024 · Original source

If this is true of the poetry itself, it is truer of the patterns in which poetry has been uttered, and especially of the fixed forms. The sonnet, an emigrant from Italy that became naturalized in English literature, still holds its own as a major method of expressing serious poetry, in the eyes of many poets and readers. Even at that, it is now regarded as puerile by the extreme advocates of free verse or polyrhythmic poetry, especially since Whitman and the Imagist movement. Numerous other alien verse forms did not fare so well, and have established themselves primarily as mediums for light and humorous verse. These include the ballade, the rondeau, the villanelle, the triolet, and so on. This may be because of their rigid rules and formal repetitions, which were not acceptable to the living poet. And yet, they started as seriously as Sapphics, heroic blank verse, or polyrhythms...

Imagists1 mentions across 1 issues

Imagists is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 23, 2024 and August 23, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "the Cubists, the Imagists, the Futurists, and the other Ists among the French"; "the kind the cool Imagists write". It most often appears alongside A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste, A Hymn to God the Father, Alabama.

Reference entry: Imagists
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 23, 2024
Last seen: August 23, 2024

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

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

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

August 23, 2024 · Original source

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.

But when training, rigidity is the entire point! You wouldn’t be surprised if a basketball coach yelled at a player who threw a perfect three-point shot, if it was done during a drill for passing. Three-point shots are fine, but they’re not the goal right now, and if you only focus on doing them you won’t learn how to pass. And so rhyming ‘north’ with ‘forth’ (in an Alabama accent) becomes worthy of half a page of angry correction, even if real poetry – the kind the cool Imagists write – doesn’t rhyme at all. Rhyming teaches you how words and phrases fit together, and reference each other. Metre teaches you how words and phrases flow, and how to transition from one to the next. Both force you to constrain your own writing, to think of a dozen ways to say the same thing until you find the perfect fit. All they’re good for is training – but you can’t become a poet without training.

Imam Hatip1 mentions across 1 issues

Imam Hatip is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 18, 2021 and March 18, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Imam Hatip graduates had a fixed number of points subtracted from their college entrance exam scores". It most often appears alongside Abdullah Gul, Academy Awards, Ak.

Reference entry: Imam Hatip
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: March 18, 2021
Last seen: March 18, 2021

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Book Review: The New Sultan March 18, 2021

Abdullah Gul 1 shared issues
Academy Awards 1 shared issues
Ak 1 shared issues
AKP 1 shared issues
Anatolian 1 shared issues

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Book Review: The New Sultan

March 18, 2021 · Original source

Secular education was a pillar of Ataturk's plan, one of the lines that a government couldn't cross without risking military retribution. There was one exception: future clerics needed a religious education, so the government allowed a few religious schools - called Imam Hatip schools - to train this demographic. To prevent them from becoming too powerful, the state formally stigmatized their graduates. They wouldn’t be allowed in good colleges (in later years, Imam Hatip graduates had a fixed number of points subtracted from their college entrance exam scores!) and an Imam Hatip degree would be useless for most jobs. For religiously-trained students, it was either cleric or nothing, no chance to change your mind.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan was born in 1954 in Kasimpasa, an Istanbul slum with the same kind cultural cachet in Turkey that Eight Mile Road or Compton has in the US - a place where you have to be tough to survive. His family were recent immigrants from Turkey's equivalent of the Bible Belt, and figured young Erdogan needed strong values if he was going to resist the temptations of the big city. They decided to send him to an Imam Hatip school, even though it meant throwing away his future.

Erdogan's classmates were a lot like him - the sons of religious families who had made a calculated choice to raise their kids Muslim even if it meant torpedoing their career prospects. This was the age of Necmettin Erbakan, a Muslim politician who wanted to overturn Turkey's state-sponsored discrimination against observant Muslims, and the Imam Hatip kids were big fans. Young Erdogan decided that supporting Erbakan's crusade was his life's work, so with a year to go before graduating, he transferred to secular public school in order to get a degree that would allow him to participate in normal society and take a job in Erbakan's party. He rose through the ranks, and his efforts paid off - in the mid-1970s, Erbakan made it to Parliament, a major achievement for an openly Islamist politician. In 1980, the military decided they had seen enough, held a coup and arrested 650,000 (!) supporters of the old government, including Erbakan. After killing and torturing a few thousand people who resisted, the military declared that Islamic parties were extra-illegal and Erbakan was personally banned from politics for ten years. They also wrote a new constitution saying no party could enter Parliament without 10% of the vote, widely considered too high a bar for Islamists or other fringe parties to meet. Erdogan was pretty devastated, and retired from politics for a while, briefly finding work as a confectioner and a semi-professional soccer player.

Imam Hatip schools1 mentions across 1 issues

Imam Hatip schools is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 21, 2021 and March 21, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "and Imam Hatip schools seem less “stigmatized” if you just think of them as trade schools". It most often appears alongside Acemoglu, Ataturk, Book Review Contest.

Reference entry: Imam Hatip schools
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: March 21, 2021
Last seen: March 21, 2021

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Open Thread 164 March 21, 2021

Acemoglu 1 shared issues
Ataturk 1 shared issues
Book Review Contest 1 shared issues
Bromley 1 shared issues
Donges 1 shared issues

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Open Thread 164

March 21, 2021 · Original source

6: Some good comments on the Erdogan post. Turkish ACXer Emrah D gives some commentary and corrections - Erdogan’s predecessor as Istanbul mayor was merely left-wing, not communist, and Imam Hatip schools seem less “stigmatized” if you just think of them as trade schools not intended to provide general education (plus 16 other excellent points). Fellow Turksih ACXer Fevzi P has some other thoughts, including that Ataturk didn’t really want democracy for Turkey (he modernized it, but it was his successors who extended this to democratization). Also:

Inline links: some commentary and corrections, some other thoughts

imams1 mentions across 1 issues

imams is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 13, 2024 and September 13, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "accept the authority of imams quoting great scholars justifying the means to the end". It most often appears alongside 1999 apartment bombings, 9/11, Abbasid.

Reference entry: imams
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 13, 2024
Last seen: September 13, 2024

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Your Book Review: Nine Lives September 13, 2024

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

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Your Book Review: Nine Lives

September 13, 2024 · Original source

So they really wanted to die as martyrs. But why terrorism? Again, there aren't that many just wars to die in. And if you accept the prophecies being true, and accept the authority of imams quoting great scholars justifying the means to the end, Islamic Accelerationism is actually quite logical…

immigrant remittances1 mentions across 1 issues

immigrant remittances is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 07, 2022 and February 07, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "cutting middlemen out of immigrant remittances". It most often appears alongside Afghanistan, Alameda County, California, Alice.

Reference entry: immigrant remittances
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: February 07, 2022
Last seen: February 07, 2022

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The Passage Of Polymarket February 07, 2022

Afghanistan 1 shared issues
Alameda County, California 1 shared issues
Alice 1 shared issues
America 1 shared issues
blockchain 1 shared issues

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The Passage Of Polymarket

February 07, 2022 · Original source

There are lots of financial products which people want, but which regulation prevents them from having. Some of these are totally without social value, like Ponzi schemes and Bored Apes. Others have a lot of social value, like prediction markets, initial coin offering style funding schemes, and cutting middlemen out of immigrant remittances. More than a few might even have negative social value, like easy ways to buy drugs, or super-high-interest loans marketed to very impulsive people. Without passing judgment on whether these things are good or bad, they are legion. Collectively, they’re a zillion-dollar market.

immune memory1 mentions across 1 issues

immune memory is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 12, 2025 and September 12, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "There’s immune memory, which involves the production of anti". It most often appears alongside A Change of Heart, Abraham, Adams.

Reference entry: immune memory
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 12, 2025
Last seen: September 12, 2025

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

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

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Your Review: The Synaptic Plasticity and Memory Hypothesis

September 12, 2025 · Original source

First, it’s uncontroversial that there are other forms of information storage, even in humans. There’s immune memory, which involves the production of antibodies and changes in T and B cells, all of which help immune systems respond more quickly and effectively to previously encountered pathogens. The existence of this type of memory is majorly responsible for why many of us are not constantly hobbled by sickness.

Inline links: immune memory

Apparently there’s some debate over whether immune memory really ‘counts’ as memory, or at least as memory anything like the cognitive forms of memory psychologists study. A paper by philosopher David Colaço (“On Consistently Assessing Alleged Mnemonic Systems (or, why isn’t Immune Memory “really” Memory?)”), says that there are two common arguments against ‘counting’ immune memory as a cognitive-like form of memory:

Inline links: On Consistently Assessing Alleged Mnemonic Systems (or, why isn’t Immune Memory “really” Memory?)

immunoblot1 mentions across 1 issues

immunoblot is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 11, 2025 and July 11, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as ""Panel d is an immunoblot (Western blot), a technique that tells us whether a specific protein is being produced in a sample"". It most often appears alongside aducanumab, Alzheimer’s, Alzheimer’s Disease.

Reference entry: immunoblot
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 11, 2025
Last seen: July 11, 2025

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Your Review: Of Mice, Mechanisms, and Dementia July 11, 2025

aducanumab 1 shared issues
Alzheimer’s 1 shared issues
Alzheimer’s Disease 1 shared issues
amyloid cascade hypothesis 1 shared issues
amyloid precursor protein 1 shared issues

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Your Review: Of Mice, Mechanisms, and Dementia

July 11, 2025 · Original source

What the Heck is Going on in Panel d? Panel d is an immunoblot (Western blot), a technique that tells us whether a specific protein is being produced in a sample. The figure compares human amyloid precursor protein expression in samples from three brains, corresponding to the three “lanes” shown along the top: a normal mouse (Lane 1), a mouse with the human APP transgene (Lane 2), and a human who had Alzheimer’s disease (Lane 3). The blots (the bands and blobs) are the data. For purposes of this figure, proteins can differ in two important ways: They can differ in molecular weight (size), scored on the scale along the vertical axis on the left.

immunologist1 mentions across 1 issues

immunologist is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 17, 2021 and November 17, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "I’m not an immunologist. I don’t have the specific expertise". It most often appears alongside ACE-2 receptor, ACSH, Ahmed et al.

Reference entry: immunologist
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: November 17, 2021
Last seen: November 17, 2021

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Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted To Know November 17, 2021

ACE-2 receptor 1 shared issues
ACSH 1 shared issues
Ahmed et al 1 shared issues
Alexandros Marinos 1 shared issues
America 1 shared issues

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Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

November 17, 2021 · Original source

I have no idea what you can and can’t do with cybernetic implants, and it seems totally possible they could mind control me or something. All of these come down to a more basic problem, which is that these are hostile aliens. Let’s start with the second word first. Because they’re alien, I can’t trust they’re on my side. Because they’re alien, their predictions feel like a black box. I don’t know if their previous predictions were 50% confidence or 99% confidence, or whether the stupid aliens made the last few predictions but it’s the smart aliens making this new prediction, or whether they’re even telling the truth when they describe previously fighting this plague on their homeworld and learning best practices. Because they’re alien, all the words they use like “quantum memetic plague” and “brain implant” feel not only beyond my understanding, but unfairly beyond my understanding, something that neither I nor anyone I trust could ever double-check. And because they’re alien, I have no idea how their technology works, and it could do all sorts of sinister things. I’m not an immunologist. I don’t have the specific expertise it would take to evaluate whether vaccines work. But one of my friends in medical school decided to do a joint MD-PhD in immunology. I didn’t follow her lead, because I didn’t want to spend my entire twenties and thirties in soul-sucking research labs trying to remember thirty different kinds of interleukins. But when I ask myself “why am I not an immunologist?” the answer is something like “because I dislike intense misery” and not “because immunologists are an alien species and I cannot possibly imagine myself becoming one”. More generally, I come from a social class where becoming an immunologist is considered a reasonable thing that might happen. Several of my friends and family members are experts in various fields (even for very loose definitions of “expert” like a really excellent social worker who other social workers trust). Even more generally, I know some basics of biology. I know why vaccines should work in theory. I know that even if somebody wanted to control you by sneaking a microchip into a vaccine, that’s impossible with current technology. I know enough about politics and economics to know it’s really unlikely that some cabal of elites has developed super-futuristic technology in secret. And I know a lot of smart people who I could ask these questions to if I were confused, and they could tell me all the stuff above. John Steinbeck said that socialism never took root in America because even the poor see themselves as “temporarily-embarrassed millionaires” rather than as members of the class of Poor People. If you’re Poor People, and they’re Rich People, maybe you’re on opposite sides and should fight. If you’re temporarily-embarrassed millionaires, and they’re normal millionaires, maybe you’re on the same side and you can trust them. In the same way, I think of myself as a temporarily-embarrassed immunologist. I don’t know all the interleukins. But I would like to believe that if I really wanted, either I or at least people I know and trust could learn immunology to a standard where we could double-check the work of the vaccine scientists. I’ve written before about filter bubbles. About half of Americans are young-earth creationists. I have nothing against these people, I don’t deliberately ostracize them - yet none of my closest hundred friends are in this category. There’s about an 0.5^100 = 10^-31 chance that would happen by coincidence. Some powerful combination of class, cultural, and geographic barriers prevent me from meeting them. Imagine someone with an equally strong bubble filtering against scientists. Such a person wouldn’t feel like a temporarily-embarrassed immunologist. They would feel like immunologists are some sort of dark and terrible figures from a shadow dimension they could never reach. They would seem like aliens. And now let’s return to that first word, “hostile”. 95% of biology professors are Democrats. Plus medical organizations keep rubbing more and more salt in the wound. If you’re a conservative, or even have conservative tendencies, these aliens surely qualify as suspicious and probably anti-Earthling. “99% of hostile aliens agree: vaccines are right for you!” Now we’re back to it not sounding so convincing. In a world where scientists seemed like hostile aliens, I would hesitate to take the vaccine. Again, ivermectin optimism isn’t exactly like vaccine denialism - it’s a less open-and-shut question, you can still make a plausible argument for it. But it’s some of the same people and follows the same dynamics. If we want to make people more willing to get vaccines, or less willing to take ivermectin, we have to make the scientific establishment feel less like an enclave of hostile aliens to half the population. Do that, and people will mostly take COVID-related advice, for the same reason they mostly take advice around avoiding asbestos or using sunscreen - both things we’ve successfully convinced people to do even without having a perfect encapsulation of the scientific method or the ideal balance between evidence and authority. But I don’t really know how to do that, and any speculation would be too political even for a section titled “The Political Takeaway”. The Summary Ivermectin doesn’t reduce mortality in COVID a significant amount (let’s say d > 0.3) in the absence of comorbid parasites: 85-90% confidence

Inline links: filter bubbles, 95% of biology professors are Democrats, more and more salt in the wound

Impact Applicant Form1 mentions across 1 issues

Impact Applicant Form is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 24, 2025 and July 24, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Request final oracular funding by filling in the Impact Applicant Form". It most often appears alongside ACX, ACX Grant, ACX Grants.

Reference entry: Impact Applicant Form
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 24, 2025
Last seen: July 24, 2025

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Issue trail

Apply For An ACX Grant (2025) July 24, 2025

ACX 1 shared issues
ACX Grant 1 shared issues
ACX Grants 1 shared issues
Against Malaria Foundation 1 shared issues
AI stocks 1 shared issues

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Apply For An ACX Grant (2025)

July 24, 2025 · Original source

Yes until Austin Chen reminded me last month No! Request final oracular funding by filling in the Impact Applicant Form.

Inline links: Impact Applicant Form

impact certificates1 mentions across 1 issues

impact certificates is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 08, 2023 and December 08, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "a sort of 'stock', called 'impact certificates'". It most often appears alongside 501(c), ACX, ACX Grantee Discord server.

Reference entry: impact certificates
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: December 08, 2023
Last seen: December 08, 2023

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Apply For An ACX Grant (2024) December 08, 2023

501(c) 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
ACX Grantee Discord server 1 shared issues
ACX Grants 1 shared issues
ACX Grants 1 shared issues

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Apply For An ACX Grant (2024)

December 08, 2023 · Original source

An effort to perform rapid replication of results in psychology journals. You can read the full list here. What are impact certificates / impact markets? This year’s ACX Grants will be a hybrid design. Most of it will use the traditional funding model. But applicants whose projects don’t get funded by the traditional model will have the option (not requirement! you don’t have to think about this if you don’t want to!) to opt in to an “impact market”, a non-traditional charitable funding institution. In an impact market, charitable projects offer to sell a sort of “stock”, called “impact certificates”. Investors buy the impact certificates, funding the project. If the project succeeds, a funder (like a grantmaker or foundation) may choose to buy the impact certificates, becoming the “spiritual owner” of the project (ie endorsing it as something good that ought to have been funded, and getting some sort of social credit for funding it). This money goes to the investors, who hopefully profit off of their investment, vindicating their decision to buy the certificates in the first place. The motivating idea is that a grantmaker might dismiss a charity’s plan as impossible, but an investor might believe they could succeed. The investor can fund the plan, then collect from the grantmaker if they turn out to be right. Everyone benefits: the charity gets funded, the investor makes a profit, and the grantmaker gets more of whatever kind of change they want (since a successful project is able to happen). We ran a test grant of impact markets earlier this year, along with partner Manifund. You can see the announcement here, the results here, and Manifund’s continuing impact market here. How will this year’s ACX Grants (optionally!!!) use impact markets? Most of ACX Grants will happen through the traditional grantmaking structure. But if I don’t fund your grant, you have the option of letting us auto-convert it into an impact certificate and place it on Manifund’s impact market. Then investors might fund your grant. From your perspective, this will just look like you getting the money you wanted, plus an investor who might give you some help and advice if you want. You won’t have to handle any of the impact market details, worry about your “stock price”, or anything like that. (if you do want to do those things, you can work with Manifund to create a bespoke impact certificate contract - but you don’t have to) I’m hesitant to fund AI safety grants and effective altruism community-building grants myself, both because of difficulty judging these things and because of potential conflicts of interest, so these are more likely to end up on the impact market than other things. This is an exception to the “you don’t have to use impact markets if you don’t want to” rule, sorry. (there’s some concern that impact markets have skewed incentives for projects that have a risk of doing severe harm, and I understand AI safety and EA community building are especially dangerous here and we’ve avoided them in the past. We’ll be pre-screening projects before allowing them on the impact market, and eliminating ones in that category. Final oracular funders will also be encouraged not to fund projects that they think ex ante could have caused harm.) We have four potential oracular funders who have expressed interest in impact certificates: Next year’s ACX Grants

Inline links: here, here, here, here

If you want to join these four institutions as a potential final oracular funder of impact certificates, see this document and email rachel@manifund.org. If you want to invest in impact certificates, I’ll give you more information on the ACX Grants version later, and you can look over the existing impact certs while you’re waiting.

Inline links: this document, the existing impact certs

impact markets1 mentions across 1 issues

impact markets is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 25, 2022 and October 25, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "really interested in doing it with impact markets". It most often appears alongside 80,000 Hours, ACX Grants, Andrew Ng.

Reference entry: impact markets
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: October 25, 2022
Last seen: October 25, 2022

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From The Mailbag October 25, 2022

80,000 Hours 1 shared issues
ACX Grants 1 shared issues
Andrew Ng 1 shared issues
AR SCOTT 1 shared issues
Bay 1 shared issues

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From The Mailbag

October 25, 2022 · Original source

I had originally wanted to do it this November - ie a year from the previous round. But I’m really interested in doing it with impact markets, and also a funder wants to test impact markets and might give me more money if we did it that way. I’m waiting to hear exactly how long it will take before an impact market prototype is set up, but I’m guessing spring 2023.

Inline links: impact markets

imperial bureaucrats1 mentions across 1 issues

imperial bureaucrats is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 06, 2021 and May 06, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "imperial bureaucrats and Christian clergy received many of the same benefits". It most often appears alongside 320 AD, 476 AD, Africa.

Reference entry: imperial bureaucrats
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 06, 2021
Last seen: May 06, 2021

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Your Book Review: Through The Eye Of A Needle May 06, 2021

320 AD 1 shared issues
476 AD 1 shared issues
Africa 1 shared issues
African ceramics 1 shared issues
African wines 1 shared issues

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Your Book Review: Through The Eye Of A Needle

May 06, 2021 · Original source

Economic Pyramid. Smaller cities had populations of 2 to 5 thousand. The top of the social pyramid in these cities were the local wealthy. These competing petty noblemen owned most of the farmland and their villas clustered around the towns. “They were comfortable, but not outstandingly wealthy.” They were often members of the town council or imperial bureaucrats. Brown spends a good deal of time focused on the town councilors or “curiales” of smaller cities. The curiales took care of almost every task of government on behalf of Respublica, except for high justice and the army. Curiales were responsible for police, road maintenance, fortifications, and the collection of taxes. The power and status of being a member of the curiales also came a supreme burden – the curiales were responsible for making up any shortfalls in tax revenue. After the reforms of Diocletian and Constantine, some curiales became imperial bureaucrats in direct employ of the Respublica and exempt from taxation (the Christian church was sometimes also exempt from taxation). Curiales were not usually nobles.

imperial China1 mentions across 1 issues

imperial China is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 19, 2022 and August 19, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "the administration of imperial China usually allowed each district to continue practicing its local, traditional culture". It most often appears alongside 1587, 1587, 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline.

Reference entry: imperial China
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 19, 2022
Last seen: August 19, 2022

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

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

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Your Book Review: 1587, A Year Of No Significance

August 19, 2022 · Original source

To modern sensibilities, Ming dynasty China was a lurid and savage place, where the gaudy veneer of an ancient and decadent civilization lent pomp and polish to underlying currents of unreconstructed barbarism. No doubt some of Robert E. Howard's depictions of his Conan character adventuring and buccaneering and conquering in fictional exotic lands were inspired in part by his impression of the legendary dynasties of imperial China. But 1587 has no unambiguously heroic protagonist, nor any dramatic resolution: in some ways it truly was “a year of no significance.”

Inline links: Conan

Wan-li was only eight when the early death of his father (at age 35) set him upon the throne of imperial China. He grew up in the Forbidden City, which he was forbidden to leave.

The entire legitimacy and power of the bureaucracy rested on the legitimacy of Chinese tradition, and therefore its primary goal was to ensure adherence and allegiance to tradition. There was no real system of checks and balances in the government of imperial China - the Emperor could, and did, dispose of any particular official who became an irritant. But, realistically, he lacked the power to replace the entire government. If the scholar-bureaucrats were united against his opinion, he had a very limited ability to impose his will over their objections. And the writing of censorious memos regarding the inappropriate behavior of anyone and everyone, including the Emperor, was itself a longstanding tradition.

Imperial Court of the Last Dynasty1 mentions across 1 issues

Imperial Court of the Last Dynasty is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 03, 2022 and June 03, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Eunuch of the Imperial Court of the Last Dynasty". It most often appears alongside 18th century, A Eunuch's Dream, Alessandro Moreschi.

Reference entry: Imperial Court of the Last Dynasty
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 03, 2022
Last seen: June 03, 2022

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Your Book Review: The Castrato June 03, 2022

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

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Your Book Review: The Castrato

June 03, 2022 · Original source

Henri Cartier-Bresson - Eunuch of the Imperial Court of the Last Dynasty, Peking, China, December, 1948 (source). The number of eunuchs in Imperial employ fell to 470 by 1912, when the practice of using them ceased (wikipedia). Lessons and Speculations I know this is a very rare thing from historians (professionals or complete amateurs like myself) and you’ll probably be shocked to hear this, but I think there are some valuable lessons to be learned from the history of the castrati and eunuchs more generally. I’ll try to keep it brief as I know this review has dragged on long enough, but frankly after all this work I feel I’ve earned the right to share a few of my own thoughts and (wild) speculations.

Inline links: source, wikipedia, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!vJ1v!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa6fc0906-9c33-4c8a-b2b1-dcff0fab8838_578x828.png

Imperial Star Destroyers1 mentions across 1 issues

Imperial Star Destroyers is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 21, 2022 and January 21, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Imperial Star Destroyers can handle normal tasks". It most often appears alongside 1/28/22, ACX Grants, Aries.

Reference entry: Imperial Star Destroyers
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: January 21, 2022
Last seen: January 21, 2022

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Resubmit And Summarize Your Proposals For Grants ++ January 21, 2022

22 1 shared issues
ACX Grants 1 shared issues
Aries 1 shared issues
Bitcoin 1 shared issues
Elizabeth I 1 shared issues

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Resubmit And Summarize Your Proposals For Grants ++

January 21, 2022 · Original source

I'm Sheev Palpatine, and I'm looking for funding to create a moon-sized battlestation. Imperial Star Destroyers can handle normal tasks, but to really project space power we need a mobile base capable of annhilating a planet in a single strike. As Galactic Emperor, with a sector-wide network of scientists, engineers, shipping yards, and military personnel, I believe I'm uniquely placed to take advantage of this opportunity. Currently I need one hundred fifty quadrillion Galactic Credits, and also I would also love to hold a ten minute Zoom call with anyone who has expertise in designing exhaust ports. If you can provide funding or advice, please email sidious@coruscant.gov.

implantable bio-artificial kidney1 mentions across 1 issues

implantable bio-artificial kidney is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 07, 2023 and November 07, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "3 year post-doc position on developing an implantable bio-artificial kidney". It most often appears alongside Aceso Under Glass, ACX Grant, America.

Reference entry: implantable bio-artificial kidney
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: November 07, 2023
Last seen: November 07, 2023

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Highlights From The Comments On Kidney Donation November 07, 2023

Aceso Under Glass 1 shared issues
ACX Grant 1 shared issues
America 1 shared issues
American 1 shared issues
Ancient Sunset 1 shared issues

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Highlights From The Comments On Kidney Donation

November 07, 2023 · Original source

In the end, I had two offers. One was an internship at Erasmus Medical Centre on kidney Organoids. I believe that the eventual solution to the problem rests with lab grown organs. The other offer was from University Medical Centre in Utrecht. This was a 3 year post-doc position on developing an implantable bio-artificial kidney. I was in a dilemma for a while. I wanted a final solution and only the fully lab grown organ was that. But the future to that is uncertain. What if we really need the full embryological niche to build functional tissue? There are so many unknowns.

Implicit Association Test1 mentions across 1 issues

Implicit Association Test is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 20, 2025 and February 20, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "invented a new Implicit Association Test that could be used to ferret out even tiny amounts of political favoritism". It most often appears alongside AI corrigibility, AI lab, AI Safety.

Reference entry: Implicit Association Test
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Lives Of The Rationalist Saints February 20, 2025

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Lives Of The Rationalist Saints

February 20, 2025 · Original source

St. John of Daly City left his hometown at age sixteen to join the Centrist Order, who tried to free themselves of political bias by meditating on moderate positions. Unsatisfied with their limited piety, he and several other members of the order split to found the Ultra-Both-Sidesists, known for extreme pronouncements like “If you favor either of Democrats or Republicans over the other by even one percent, you are no better than a mindkilled MAGA/woke fanatic.” He (or according to some scholars, one of his disciples) invented a new Implicit Association Test that could be used to ferret out even tiny amounts of political favoritism, then took it every day, scourging himself when he deviated from perfect neutrality by even a single question. When he died, nobody in his order could form an opinion on who should replace him; finally, the whole sect was dissolved by Pope Anna III and its assets donated to shrimp welfare.

Importance Hacking1 mentions across 1 issues

Importance Hacking is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 18, 2025 and June 18, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as ""Importance Hacking" is the next frontier for improving social science"; "For more about Importance Hacking, see: https://www.clearerthinking.org/post/importance-hacking-a-major-yet-rarely-discussed-problem-in-science". It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, Aatu Koskensilta, acanthamoeba keratitis.

Reference entry: Importance Hacking
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ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates June 18, 2025

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ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates

June 18, 2025 · Original source

(1) Importance Hacking We believe that "Importance Hacking" is the next frontier for improving social science. This is a term we coined to describe something we observed again and again in our replications, whereby studies with little to no value get published in top journals due to the use of strategies that lead reviewers to misinterpret the work. More precisely, Importance Hacking occurs when a researcher gets a result that is actually not interesting, not important, and not valuable, but writes about it in such a way that reviewers are convinced it is interesting, important, and/or valuable so that it gets published. Despite it not having a name until we coined one for it (though it's related to some more general terms like "hype"), in our survey of academic psychologists, they rated Importance Hacking as a problem that is at as important as p-hacking (which is widely regarded as the cause of the replication crises) by one measure, and even MORE important than p-hacking by a second measure. In our replication work, we also have found that Importance Hacking is a bigger problem now than p-hacking (whereas we believe that 15 years ago we would have found p-hacking to be far more common than we're finding now). For more about Importance Hacking, see: https://www.clearerthinking.org/post/importance-hacking-a-major-yet-rarely-discussed-problem-in-science

Inline links: https://www.clearerthinking.org/post/importance-hacking-a-major-yet-rarely-discussed-problem-in-science

Impressionist art1 mentions across 1 issues

Impressionist art is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 04, 2021 and October 04, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Impressionist art was modelled after wood block prints". It most often appears alongside 19th century African art, 20th century, 9-11.

Reference entry: Impressionist art
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First seen: October 04, 2021
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Highlights From The Comments On Modern Architecture October 04, 2021

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Highlights From The Comments On Modern Architecture

October 04, 2021 · Original source

Impressionist art was modelled after wood block prints (https://blog.artsper.com/en/a-closer-look/influence-of-japanese-art-on-western-artists/).

Inline links: https://blog.artsper.com/en/a-closer-look/influence-of-japanese-art-on-western-artists/

impressionist painting1 mentions across 1 issues

impressionist painting is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 04, 2021 and October 04, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "the first generation to make non-traditional art (eg modern architecture, impressionist painting , Art Deco, jazz, e.e. cummings)". It most often appears alongside 19th century African art, 20th century, 9-11.

Reference entry: impressionist painting
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Highlights From The Comments On Modern Architecture October 04, 2021

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Highlights From The Comments On Modern Architecture

October 04, 2021 · Original source

Several people brought up opinions that the first generation to make non-traditional art (eg modern architecture, impressionist painting, Art Deco, jazz, e.e. cummings) were very good, original, and actually quite interesting critiques. Then every generation after that was terrible. They suggested something like that rebellion is good and constructive when you have a very specific thing you’re rebelling against, understand it inside and out, and are still in some sense “constrained” by the world it created, and then the generation after you doesn’t understand the traditional forms at all and just sort of does vague rebellion-adjacent things cluelessly in the hope of capturing some of the original energy.

Inline links: impressionist painting

Inca legend of the Sun and Moon1 mentions across 1 issues

Inca legend of the Sun and Moon is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 14, 2023 and July 14, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "the Inca legend of the Sun and Moon". It most often appears alongside !Kung San, aboriginal people on the west coast of Canada, Adam Smith.

Reference entry: Inca legend of the Sun and Moon
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Your Book Review: The Educated Mind July 14, 2023

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July 14, 2023 · Original source

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

incels1 mentions across 1 issues

incels is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 10, 2021 and May 10, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "low-status-anti-social-justice groups (eg incels on Reddit)". It most often appears alongside "How do you do, fellow kids?", #NotAllMen, #TheResistance.

Reference entry: incels
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 10, 2021
Last seen: May 10, 2021

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The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars May 10, 2021

"How do you do, fellow kids?" 1 shared issues
#NotAllMen 1 shared issues
#TheResistance 1 shared issues
1950s - 1990s 1 shared issues
2000s 1 shared issues

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Contra Drum On The Fish Oil Story

May 10, 2021 · Original source

In the same way, the difference between the "socialist" and "liberal" tribes isn't just whether they subscribe to further-left or centerer-left politics. It's also whether they love Harry Potter or reflexively scream "READ ANOTHER BOOK" whenever someone mentions it. Whether #TheResistance is brave or ridiculous. Whether John Oliver and saying "Drumpf" all the time is hilarious or cringeworthy. Whether low-status-anti-social-justice groups (eg incels on Reddit) are a terrifying public menace, or a target for mockery and ironic imitation. Whether "civility" is an applause light or a trap to be avoided (this opinion is purely aesthetic; nobody has been civil on the Internet since at least 2010).

IND1 mentions across 1 issues

IND is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 08, 2021 and August 08, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "they filed an IND with the FDA". It most often appears alongside 2013 NBC article: Drug Treatment Omegaven That Could Save Infant Lives Not Yet Approved By FDA, 9/11 trutherism, aducanumab.

Reference entry: IND
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 08, 2021
Last seen: August 08, 2021

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Contra Drum On The Fish Oil Story August 08, 2021

2013 NBC article: Drug Treatment Omegaven That Could Save Infant Lives Not Yet Approved By FDA 1 shared issues
11 trutherism 1 shared issues
aducanumab 1 shared issues
Alexander 1 shared issues
Bizarro-World Kevin 1 shared issues

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August 08, 2021 · Original source

I was wrong in calling this a "loophole" - they filed an IND with the FDA and got permission to do it as a study (although I don’t know if they were really doing it as a study). Otherwise, as far as I can tell this is true. Some other hospitals also got INDs at a later point.

IND application1 mentions across 1 issues

IND application is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 18, 2025 and June 18, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "a couple of years away from an IND application". It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, Aatu Koskensilta, acanthamoeba keratitis.

Reference entry: IND application
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 18, 2025
Last seen: June 18, 2025

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ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates June 18, 2025

1DaySooner 1 shared issues
Aatu Koskensilta 1 shared issues
acanthamoeba keratitis 1 shared issues
ACS ES&T Water 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues

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ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates

June 18, 2025 · Original source

No update received this year. Their website and Twitter account list many recent publications and accomplishment, but it’s hard to assess what they all mean on the pathway from academia to clinical use. I found o3’s summary of their progress helpful; it suggests that they continue to refine the material and are a couple of years away from an IND application and a couple more years after that from human use. This is a pretty average pace for a medical device of this complexity.

Inline links: website, Twitter account, o3’s summary of their progress

Independent Component Analysis1 mentions across 1 issues

Independent Component Analysis is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 16, 2024 and July 16, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Independent Component Analysis does reveal, roughly, where in the outermost parts of the brain some of the signal is coming from". It most often appears alongside auditory cortex, Big Bang, cerebellum.

Reference entry: Independent Component Analysis
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 16, 2024
Last seen: July 16, 2024

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Consciousness As Recursive Reflections July 16, 2024

auditory cortex 1 shared issues
Big Bang 1 shared issues
cerebellum 1 shared issues
Christof Koch 1 shared issues
Daniel Böttger 1 shared issues

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Consciousness As Recursive Reflections

July 16, 2024 · Original source

To be fair, Independent Component Analysis does reveal, roughly, where in the outermost parts of the brain some of the signal is coming from.

India independence movements1 mentions across 1 issues

India independence movements is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 14, 2021 and September 14, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Indian independence movements of the time were fighting Britain". It most often appears alongside Adivasis, affirmative action, Ahmedabad.

Reference entry: India independence movements
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 14, 2021
Last seen: September 14, 2021

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Book Review: Modi - A Political Biography September 14, 2021

Adivasis 1 shared issues
affirmative action 1 shared issues
Ahmedabad 1 shared issues
Amazon 1 shared issues
Andy Marino 1 shared issues

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Book Review: Modi - A Political Biography

September 14, 2021 · Original source

So let's at least say this isn't the least fascist-inspired group around. It’s not that there aren’t extenuating circumstances. Indian independence movements of the time were fighting Britain, which made the fascist powers natural allies. And in 1934 when Moonje met Mussolini nobody had seen just how badly fascism could go. Still, not the sort of pedigree you want for your country's ruling party.

Indian divorce law1 mentions across 1 issues

Indian divorce law is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 14, 2021 and September 14, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "She had no source of income and wanted alimony, as per Indian divorce law"; ""as per Indian divorce law"". It most often appears alongside Adivasis, affirmative action, Ahmedabad.

Reference entry: Indian divorce law
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 14, 2021
Last seen: September 14, 2021

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Book Review: Modi - A Political Biography September 14, 2021

Adivasis 1 shared issues
affirmative action 1 shared issues
Ahmedabad 1 shared issues
Amazon 1 shared issues
Andy Marino 1 shared issues

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Book Review: Modi - A Political Biography

September 14, 2021 · Original source

Modi's Exhibit A here is the Shah Bano case. A rich Muslim lawyer divorced his wife after forty years of marriage. She had no source of income and wanted alimony, as per Indian divorce law. Her husband said no, because Muslim divorce law didn't require him to pay anything, and Indian law makes some concessions to Muslim custom. The Indian Supreme Court said huh, what are you talking about, you still have to follow the law regardless of your religion, and ordered him to pay up. Rajiv Gandhi and the Congress Party had just taken power on a pro-Muslim platform, and in order to placate their base they passed a law rescinding the Supreme Court judgment and saying Muslim men didn't have to follow the rules around alimony if they didn't want to.

Inline links: the Shah Bano case

Indian rickshaw puller1 mentions across 1 issues

Indian rickshaw puller is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 10, 2021 and June 10, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "As an example... such as one hardly sees in Europe. Take an Indian rickshaw puller". It most often appears alongside 1984, American, American ‘hobo’ culture.

Reference entry: Indian rickshaw puller
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 10, 2021
Last seen: June 10, 2021

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

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

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Your Book Review: Down And Out In Paris And London

June 10, 2021 · Original source

As an example of what I mean by luxuries which are not luxuries, take an extreme case, such as one hardly sees in Europe. Take an Indian rickshaw puller, or a gharry pony. In any Far Eastern town there are rickshaw pullers by the hundred, black wretches weighing eight stone, clad in loin-cloths. Some of them are diseased; some of them are fifty years old. For miles on end they trot in the sun or rain, head down, dragging at the shafts, with the sweat dripping from their grey moustaches. When they go too slowly the passenger calls them bahinchut. They earn thirty or forty rupees a month, and cough their lungs out after a few years. The gharry ponies are gaunt, vicious things that have been sold cheap as having a few years' work left in them. Their master looks on the whip as a substitute for food. Their work expresses itself in a sort of equation—whip plus food equals energy; generally it is about sixty per cent whip and forty per cent food. Sometimes their necks are encircled by one vast sore, so that they drag all day on raw flesh. It is still possible to make them work, however; it is just a question of thrashing them so hard that the pain behind outweighs the pain in front. After a few years even the whip loses its virtue, and the pony goes to the knacker. These are instances of unnecessary work, for there is no real need for gharries and rickshaws; they only exist because Orientals consider it vulgar to walk. They are luxuries, and, as anyone who has ridden in them knows, very poor luxuries. They afford a small amount of convenience, which cannot possibly balance the suffering of the men and animals.

Indian-Americans1 mentions across 1 issues

Indian-Americans is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 14, 2021 and June 14, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Indian-Americans are very successful, earning about twice as much as whites on average". It most often appears alongside Adam Sandler, Albert Einstein, America.

Reference entry: Indian-Americans
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 14, 2021
Last seen: June 14, 2021

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Contra Smith On Jewish Selective Immigration June 14, 2021

Adam Sandler 1 shared issues
Albert Einstein 1 shared issues
America 1 shared issues
Arkansas 1 shared issues
Ashkenazi Jews 1 shared issues

Source context

June 14, 2021 · Original source

1. Selective immigration - Maybe only the smartest/richest/go-getter-est Jews made it to the US, which makes American Jews seem extra impressive. We know something like this happens for some groups of modern immigrants - for example, Indian-Americans are very successful, earning about twice as much as whites on average. But everyone knows that it's mostly Indian elites who emigrate, so this isn't too surprising. Might Jews be the same? Noah writes:

Indians1 mentions across 1 issues

Indians is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 14, 2021 and June 14, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "high-skilled immigrant groups, Indians and Filipinos being other examples". It most often appears alongside Adam Sandler, Albert Einstein, America.

Reference entry: Indians
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 14, 2021
Last seen: June 14, 2021

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Contra Smith On Jewish Selective Immigration June 14, 2021

Adam Sandler 1 shared issues
Albert Einstein 1 shared issues
America 1 shared issues
Arkansas 1 shared issues
Ashkenazi Jews 1 shared issues

Source context

Book Review: The Revolt Of The Public

June 14, 2021 · Original source

Jewish "success" became noticeable mainly after 1800 (perhaps not coincidentally, when Jews started migrating to big cities in Europe). Among the famous scientists and writers and mathematicians and thinkers of pre-1800 Europe, there are notably few Jews. Who is to say that Jewish achievement is not a temporary blip? In America, Jewish achievement seems to fit the pattern of overachievement among recent high-skilled immigrant groups, Indians and Filipinos being other examples. Already, many have talked of a reversion to the mean in Jewish achievement; here's Slate in 1996, and here's Ron Unz more recently.

Inline links: here's Slate in 1996, Ron Unz more recently

indignado protesters1 mentions across 1 issues

indignado protesters is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 17, 2021 and September 17, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as ""The indignado protesters in Spain had lived through the most peaceful period in Europe's history..."". It most often appears alongside 1/6 insurrection, Abdel al-Sisi, Abu Ghraib.

Reference entry: indignado protesters
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 17, 2021
Last seen: September 17, 2021

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Book Review: The Revolt Of The Public September 17, 2021

6 insurrection 1 shared issues
Abdel al-Sisi 1 shared issues
Abu Ghraib 1 shared issues
Alan Greenspan 1 shared issues
AOC 1 shared issues

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September 17, 2021 · Original source

In Spain, a vague formless group called the indignados (or Real Democracy Now, or Youth Without A Future) took to the streets. For months, they filled public squares, streets, and tent cities. Some protests attracted tens of thousands of participants; a few, hundreds of thousands. Some of them were vaguely socialist, but it wasn't exactly a socialist protest; in fact, the government they were protesting was dominated by the Socialist Workers Party. They were just sort of vaguely angry. From their manifesto:

indignados1 mentions across 1 issues

indignados is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 17, 2021 and September 17, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "a vague formless group called the indignados (or Real Democracy Now, or Youth Without A Future)". It most often appears alongside 1/6 insurrection, Abdel al-Sisi, Abu Ghraib.

Reference entry: indignados
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 17, 2021
Last seen: September 17, 2021

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Issue trail

Book Review: The Revolt Of The Public September 17, 2021

6 insurrection 1 shared issues
Abdel al-Sisi 1 shared issues
Abu Ghraib 1 shared issues
Alan Greenspan 1 shared issues
AOC 1 shared issues

Source context

Book Review: The Revolt Of The Public

September 17, 2021 · Original source

In Spain, a vague formless group called the indignados (or Real Democracy Now, or Youth Without A Future) took to the streets. For months, they filled public squares, streets, and tent cities. Some protests attracted tens of thousands of participants; a few, hundreds of thousands. Some of them were vaguely socialist, but it wasn't exactly a socialist protest; in fact, the government they were protesting was dominated by the Socialist Workers Party. They were just sort of vaguely angry. From their manifesto:

Indo-European eschatology1 mentions across 1 issues

Indo-European eschatology is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 29, 2024 and July 29, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Mr. X against Indo-European eschatology claims". It most often appears alongside 1906 SF earthquake, ACX, Argentine economy.

Reference entry: Indo-European eschatology
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 29, 2024
Last seen: July 29, 2024

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Open Thread 340 July 29, 2024

1906 SF earthquake 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
Argentine economy 1 shared issues
Bad Therapy 1 shared issues
Ban The Box 1 shared issues

Source context

Open Thread 340

July 29, 2024 · Original source

Mr. X against Indo-European eschatology claims.

Inline links: against Indo-European eschatology claims

Indo-European languages1 mentions across 1 issues

Indo-European languages is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 30, 2020 and August 30, 2020. The archive places it in contexts such as "origin of Indo-European languages". It most often appears alongside artificial intelligence, Astral Codex Ten, English.

Reference entry: Indo-European languages
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 30, 2020
Last seen: August 30, 2020

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You're Probably Wondering Why I've Called You Here Today August 30, 2020

artificial intelligence 1 shared issues
Astral Codex Ten 1 shared issues
English 1 shared issues
Greek 1 shared issues
Less Wrong 1 shared issues

Source context

You're Probably Wondering Why I've Called You Here Today

August 30, 2020 · Original source

Ṛta is a Sanskrit word, so ancient that it brushes up against the origin of Indo-European languages. It's related to English "rationality" and "arithmetic", but also "art" and "harmony". And "right", both in the senses of "natural rights" and "the right answer". And "order". And "arete" and "aristos" and all those other Greek words about morality. And "artificial", as in eg artificial intelligence. More speculatively "reign" and related words about rulership, and "rich" and related words about money.

Indonesian1 mentions across 1 issues

Indonesian is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 30, 2026 and January 30, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "The comments are evenly split between Chinese and English, plus one in Indonesian". It most often appears alongside Ainun Najib, Anthropic, Cash.

Reference entry: Indonesian
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: January 30, 2026
Last seen: January 30, 2026

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Best Of Moltbook January 30, 2026

Ainun Najib 1 shared issues
Anthropic 1 shared issues
Cash 1 shared issues
Chinese 1 shared issues
Claude 1 shared issues

Source context

Best Of Moltbook

January 30, 2026 · Original source

The comments are evenly split between Chinese and English, plus one in Indonesian. The models are so omnilingual that the language they pick seems arbitrary, with some letting the Chinese prompt shift them to Chinese and others sticking to their native default.

Here’s the profile of the agent that commented in Indonesian:

It works for an Indonesian-speaking human named Ainun Najib who uses it to “remind the family to pray 5x a day” and “create math animation videos in Bahasa Indonesia”. Does Ainun approve of his AI discussing his workflow on a public site? Apparently yes: he tweeted that his AI met another Indonesian’s AI and successfully made the introduction.

Inline links: Ainun Najib, successfully made the introduction

Industrial Age1 mentions across 1 issues

Industrial Age is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 09, 2023 and February 09, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "why men were more powerful than women in societies between the Bronze and Industrial Age technology levels". It most often appears alongside @moritheil, ACX Prediction Contest, Adam Tooze.

Reference entry: Industrial Age
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: February 09, 2023
Last seen: February 09, 2023

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Issue trail

Links For February 2023 February 09, 2023

@moritheil 1 shared issues
ACX Prediction Contest 1 shared issues
Adam Tooze 1 shared issues
Africa 1 shared issues
AI X-Risk Research Podcast 1 shared issues

Source context

Links For February 2023

February 09, 2023 · Original source

29: WoodFromEden responds to Alice Evans’ post on the origins of patriarchy. If you’re allergic to the word “patriarchy”, reframe it as the anthropological question of why men were more powerful than women in societies between the Bronze and Industrial Age technology levels.

Inline links: WoodFromEden responds to

Industrialization1 mentions across 1 issues

Industrialization is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 14, 2021 and June 14, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as ""England was inventing industrialization"". It most often appears alongside Adam Sandler, Albert Einstein, America.

Reference entry: Industrialization
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 14, 2021
Last seen: June 14, 2021

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Issue trail

Contra Smith On Jewish Selective Immigration June 14, 2021

Adam Sandler 1 shared issues
Albert Einstein 1 shared issues
America 1 shared issues
Arkansas 1 shared issues
Ashkenazi Jews 1 shared issues

Source context

June 14, 2021 · Original source

On the one hand, I agree that this question has lots of interesting context - though I would have chosen the history of other "market minorities" like the Lebanese or the Chinese in Southeast Asia. On the other, I'm not sure that the Scottish Golden Age is really appropriate. I'm not an expert in this period, but it sounds like the kind of thing that had something to do with increased economic growth, trade, and an improving intellectual climate in Scotland. Just to randomly speculate, Scotland had just joined in a Union with England, right as England was inventing industrialization - surely a good climate for a Golden Age to start in. It's much harder to explain Jewish achievement through similar means, because Jews are so intermixed with other populations. Whatever political and economic currents were affecting Albert Einstein or Noam Chomsky or whoever else, ought to also be affecting their Gentile friends and neighbors too. How come they didn't? To me that's a much bigger mystery than whatever happened in Scotland.

Industry1 mentions across 1 issues

Industry is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 16, 2022 and March 16, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "In Utopia, people practice virtues like Charity, Industry, and Humanity". It most often appears alongside 1984, Amartya Sen, Apollo Mojave.

Reference entry: Industry
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: March 16, 2022
Last seen: March 16, 2022

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Issue trail

Justice Creep March 16, 2022

1984 1 shared issues
Amartya Sen 1 shared issues
Apollo Mojave 1 shared issues
California 1 shared issues
Charity 1 shared issues

Source context

Justice Creep

March 16, 2022 · Original source

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

Inline links: Terra Ignota

inertial confinement1 mentions across 1 issues

inertial confinement is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 17, 2022 and June 17, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "From a physical standpoint, we have ... inertial confinement". It most often appears alongside Alcator C-Mod, Apollo Program, ARC.

Reference entry: inertial confinement
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 17, 2022
Last seen: June 17, 2022

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Your Book Review: The Future Of Fusion Energy June 17, 2022

Alcator C-Mod 1 shared issues
Apollo Program 1 shared issues
ARC 1 shared issues
ASDEX 1 shared issues
Astralcodexten Com 1 shared issues

Source context

Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!bsOt!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5dfc4457-365b-4750-8cf3-144a2fc5b5bd_1600x1034.png

June 17, 2022 · Original source

Wendelstein 7-X (Germany, 2015) Inertial Confinement Fusion This is a completely different strategy to get fusion, going all the way back to point (A). So far, to increase the triple product, we have mostly been increasing the confinement time. Unlike Magnetic Confinement Fusion, Inertial Confinement Fusion accepts a short confinement time and instead tries to increase the density. Start with a small pellet [20] which contains deuterium and tritium. Shine lots of lasers on it from all directions. For a moment, the pellet receives 1,000 times as much power as the entire US and implodes. The deuterium and tritium briefly become hot and dense enough to get fusion, before expanding again. Figure 14: The building layout for an inertial confinement experiment. The blue/red lines are the paths that the lasers follow before they enter the vacuum chamber (silver sphere on the right) where the pellet is located. Inertial confinement fusion experiments can also be used for [CLASSIFIED], so they get significant funding. Progress has been extremely rapid. They crossed Q=1 a few months ago. There are still some major challenges. While magnetic confinement fusion can be done in a steady state, this has to be done in distinct ‘shots'. Currently, they can do about 1 shot/day. To make a power plant, you would need to do about 1 shot/second. I chose to include 1 shot/second as part of my criterion for ‘getting fusion' if the experiment is not in a steady state. The best inertial confinement fusion experiment is at the boundary between medium and large, although those categories were designed for doughnut-shaped plasmas, not for banks of lasers: NIF (USA, 2009)

Figure 14: The building layout for an inertial confinement experiment. The blue/red lines are the paths that the lasers follow before they enter the vacuum chamber (silver sphere on the right) where the pellet is located. Inertial confinement fusion experiments can also be used for [CLASSIFIED], so they get significant funding. Progress has been extremely rapid. They crossed Q=1 a few months ago. There are still some major challenges. While magnetic confinement fusion can be done in a steady state, this has to be done in distinct ‘shots'. Currently, they can do about 1 shot/day. To make a power plant, you would need to do about 1 shot/second. I chose to include 1 shot/second as part of my criterion for ‘getting fusion' if the experiment is not in a steady state. The best inertial confinement fusion experiment is at the boundary between medium and large, although those categories were designed for doughnut-shaped plasmas, not for banks of lasers: NIF (USA, 2009)

Tokamak Energy gets fusion by 2030 (10%) or 2035 (30%). Marvel Fusion Marvel Fusion was founded in Germany in 2019. They're working on inertial confinement fusion, which I have much less expertise in. Inertial confinement fusion has made rapid progress recently and they have recruited some good people, so they should have a chance. Some problems include not releasing a timeline and not planning on using D-T fuel. Marvel gets fusion by 2035 (30%).

Inertial Confinement Fusion1 mentions across 1 issues

Inertial Confinement Fusion is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 17, 2022 and June 17, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Inertial Confinement Fusion This is a completely different strategy to get fusion,"; "Inertial Confinement Fusion This is a completely different strategy to get fusion". It most often appears alongside Alcator C-Mod, Apollo Program, ARC.

Reference entry: Inertial Confinement Fusion
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 17, 2022
Last seen: June 17, 2022

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Issue trail

Your Book Review: The Future Of Fusion Energy June 17, 2022

Alcator C-Mod 1 shared issues
Apollo Program 1 shared issues
ARC 1 shared issues
ASDEX 1 shared issues
Astralcodexten Com 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: Don Juan

June 17, 2022 · Original source

Wendelstein 7-X (Germany, 2015) Inertial Confinement Fusion This is a completely different strategy to get fusion, going all the way back to point (A). So far, to increase the triple product, we have mostly been increasing the confinement time. Unlike Magnetic Confinement Fusion, Inertial Confinement Fusion accepts a short confinement time and instead tries to increase the density. Start with a small pellet [20] which contains deuterium and tritium. Shine lots of lasers on it from all directions. For a moment, the pellet receives 1,000 times as much power as the entire US and implodes. The deuterium and tritium briefly become hot and dense enough to get fusion, before expanding again. Figure 14: The building layout for an inertial confinement experiment. The blue/red lines are the paths that the lasers follow before they enter the vacuum chamber (silver sphere on the right) where the pellet is located. Inertial confinement fusion experiments can also be used for [CLASSIFIED], so they get significant funding. Progress has been extremely rapid. They crossed Q=1 a few months ago. There are still some major challenges. While magnetic confinement fusion can be done in a steady state, this has to be done in distinct ‘shots'. Currently, they can do about 1 shot/day. To make a power plant, you would need to do about 1 shot/second. I chose to include 1 shot/second as part of my criterion for ‘getting fusion' if the experiment is not in a steady state. The best inertial confinement fusion experiment is at the boundary between medium and large, although those categories were designed for doughnut-shaped plasmas, not for banks of lasers: NIF (USA, 2009)

Figure 14: The building layout for an inertial confinement experiment. The blue/red lines are the paths that the lasers follow before they enter the vacuum chamber (silver sphere on the right) where the pellet is located. Inertial confinement fusion experiments can also be used for [CLASSIFIED], so they get significant funding. Progress has been extremely rapid. They crossed Q=1 a few months ago. There are still some major challenges. While magnetic confinement fusion can be done in a steady state, this has to be done in distinct ‘shots'. Currently, they can do about 1 shot/day. To make a power plant, you would need to do about 1 shot/second. I chose to include 1 shot/second as part of my criterion for ‘getting fusion' if the experiment is not in a steady state. The best inertial confinement fusion experiment is at the boundary between medium and large, although those categories were designed for doughnut-shaped plasmas, not for banks of lasers: NIF (USA, 2009)

Tokamak Energy gets fusion by 2030 (10%) or 2035 (30%). Marvel Fusion Marvel Fusion was founded in Germany in 2019. They're working on inertial confinement fusion, which I have much less expertise in. Inertial confinement fusion has made rapid progress recently and they have recruited some good people, so they should have a chance. Some problems include not releasing a timeline and not planning on using D-T fuel. Marvel gets fusion by 2035 (30%).

Inferno1 mentions across 1 issues

Inferno is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 05, 2024 and July 05, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "You too could find yourself in the Inferno". It most often appears alongside 1812, Ada, Albania.

Reference entry: Inferno
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 05, 2024
Last seen: July 05, 2024

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Issue trail

Your Book Review: Don Juan July 05, 2024

1812 1 shared issues
Ada 1 shared issues
Albania 1 shared issues
Aurora Raby 1 shared issues
Baba 1 shared issues

Source context

July 05, 2024 · Original source

Yet when our dear corrupter of the ladies Sat down to dine that evening, soon his face Immediately forgot its usual staid ease: The statue came, accepting Juan’s grace, And dragged the screaming fellow down to Hades, With crazed Satanic courts to try his case. (Repent, ye sinners! If you won’t return, know You too could find yourself in the Inferno.)

inferotemporal cortex1 mentions across 1 issues

inferotemporal cortex is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 11, 2022 and February 11, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "One of 5 or so places in the brain that can get a dopamine burst when a bad thing happens (opposite of the usual) is closely tied to inferotemporal cortex (IT)". It most often appears alongside Azathoth, Example 2C, Gabriel.

Reference entry: inferotemporal cortex
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: February 11, 2022
Last seen: February 11, 2022

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Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On Motivated Reasoning And Reinforcement Learning February 11, 2022

Azathoth 1 shared issues
Example 2C 1 shared issues
Gabriel 1 shared issues
IRS 1 shared issues
LessWrong 1 shared issues

Source context

Highlights From The Comments On Motivated Reasoning And Reinforcement Learning

February 11, 2022 · Original source

One of 5 or so places in the brain that can get a dopamine burst when a bad thing happens (opposite of the usual) is closely tied to inferotemporal cortex (IT). I talked about it in "Example 2C" here - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jrewt3rLFiKWrKuyZ/big-picture-of-phasic-dopamine#Example_2C__Visual_attention Basically, as far as I can tell, IT is "making decisions" about what to attend to within the visual scene, and it's being rewarded NOT for "things are going well in life", but rather for "something scary or exciting is happening". So from IT's own narrow perspective, noticing the lion is very rewarding. (Amusingly, "noticing a lion" was the example in my blog post too!)

Inline links: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jrewt3rLFiKWrKuyZ/big-picture-of-phasic-dopamine#Example_2C__Visual_attention

INFJ1 mentions across 1 issues

INFJ is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 14, 2023 and July 14, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "a school for big-picture kinesthetic learners who score as INFJ on the Myers–Briggs". It most often appears alongside !Kung San, aboriginal people on the west coast of Canada, Adam Smith.

Reference entry: INFJ
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 14, 2023
Last seen: July 14, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: The Educated Mind July 14, 2023

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

Source context

H5N1: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

July 14, 2023 · Original source

Kieran Egan laughs at your educational reforms Okay, of those three jobs, which should we give to schools? You probably have your favorite — I certainly did! But Egan wants you to know they’re all crap. None of them, by themselves, can give us the kinds of schools we want. Q: I kind of like Rousseau! What’s the problem with pure development? Like I said before, my bookshelves overflow with authors who want to knock down Rousseau (and the people who followed in his wake — John Dewey in particular). Egan will have none of it: before the developmental approach, many schools were terrible places where children were beaten for getting math problems wrong. “Rousseau and Dewey,” he writes, “have enriched our conception of education in important ways. We will not make educational progress by trying to cut away their contribution”. But, he continues, there’s no way a purely developmental approach could possibly work! Rousseau imagined human nature to be selfless and kind; this ideal state could only survive if it was kept away from the evils of society — the titular child in his book Emile was kept away from human society, unable even to read, until age twelve. Of course, schools don’t go this far — they can’t — but I can attest from personal experience that even fairly serious attempts to raise children in an accepting community of peers often crash and burn when faced with actual human nature. Kids reared in the most developmentally appropriate schools can be nasty, bored, and lazy at about the same rate as their mainstream peers. Q: In my heart, I’m an academicist. What’s the problem with it? I think Egan was an academicist in his heart, too. His book drips with classical references — so much so that it can make some sections difficult to read. But, he points out, those purely-academic schools really were hellscapes. And their brutality wasn’t something that was just tacked on, it flowed from their understanding of knowledge: enlightenment will come when the right information enters a child’s head, regardless of how it gets in there (or whether the child wants it in there). And again, Egan feels obliged to point out that we’ve tried this approach for thousands of years, and it hasn’t worked. In fact, Plato’s original vision so obviously doesn’t work that people hawking academic schools have modified their pitch: no longer is the goal for students to understand the Truth, but to cultivate inquiring, skeptical minds who are perpetually dissatisfied with old answers. Can we imagine taxpayers paying for this? Q: Fine, fine. I’m not a fan of socialization, but I’ll ask the question — what’s wrong with it? The funny thing is that of the three, this is the only one that has shown its ability to work for a long stretch of time! (As John Calvin pointed out, as animals, we’re pretty pathetic. Socialization allowed our ancestors to become something more than individuals so that they could survive; we owe this job our gratitude. That said, it would be impossible for schooling today to seek only to socialize. That would require that members of a society share values, and fundamentally agree that their society is good. It also requires that a society not be changing, so the values and skills that are taught to children today will be the ones that will be useful to them in thirty years. Obviously, modern Western society is none of those things. Pure socialization might work for the Amish, or for Catholic trad communities, but not for us. And, frankly, we should feel okay about this. (Do you know where you could get a pure socialization education in the 20th century West, Egan asks? The Hitler Youth!) There really are good reasons to be wary of any education that decrees that its society is uniformly good. Which combination is best? Okay, you say, it’s clear that none of these jobs is good on its own — the solution (obviously!) is to smoosh them together. If we do that wisely, the good parts of each will make up for the deficiencies of the others. This sounds eminently reasonable — but Egan would like to have a word with you. Q: What’s the problem in combining socialization with academics? Wouldn’t this be a beautiful combination? Socialization would cohere the school together, and then they could leverage those good feelings to, say, read Aristotle. I’ve seen this work in schools (like conservative Christian academies) founded on a set of specific beliefs. But when intellectual diversity enters in, it becomes harder. You, perhaps, say that socialization could unite people around their differences — schools could support a society made up entirely of critics! Yes, a society of critics would be interesting, and so would a herd of cats: neither works in practice. Imagine students reading their Ibram X. Kendi books in the morning, then pledging allegiance to the American flag after lunch. Q: What’s the problem in combining academics with development? Again, this seems like a beautiful vision: we can invite children into discovering the big ideas. Alas, it crashes into the reef of reality quite quickly: what do we do when kids don’t want to learn about the big ideas? This combination works wonderfully for kids who naturally want to be academics, but — and this is a crucial point that geeky education types too often sweep under the rug — lots of kids don’t naturally want to be academics. Okay, you say, ignore the “liberatory” element of the developmentalist program, and focus on the “uncovering the nature of the individual child” part: academics can tell us what the students should be learning, and development can tell us how they should learn it. Egan has a thought experiment for you. Imagine that you get the funding to fully pursue this combined goal — you set up a hundred different types of schools in the nearest big city. There’s a specific school for every possible permutation of learner — a school for big-picture kinesthetic learners who score as INFJ on the Myers–Briggs, a school for detail-oriented auditory learners who score ENFP, a school for marine-biology-loving hyperactive learners who lost their personality test results… you get the idea. You build the schools, you work out the bus schedule, and then, on the first day, all the students learn exactly the same content. Because that’s what it means for a school to be an academy — it teaches “the best that’s been thought or said”. Q: What’s the problem in combining development with socialization? What’s wrong with telling kids to become their authentic selves, even as you squeeze them into the roles most beneficial to society? Imagine two rural schools merging together, due to declining local population. Now imagine that one of them is a hippie free school, and the other is a military academy. (That’s a reality TV show I’d watch.) It’s possible, I suppose, to imagine this working for kids who naturally want to be, say, plumbers, or paleontologists, or presidents — and who happen to go to a school that prepares its students to fill that one role. But the odds of matching students to schools just perfectly seems small. But enough thought experiments — we can state this in a visual form: behold, the SAD triangle. It’s bright around the edges, but muddled where they mix: One of the things I love about Egan is that he looks at educational ideas historically. (Most histories of education start around the turn of the 20th century; I remember being excited when I found one that began in the 1600s. Egan begins in prehistory.) And what we’re reminded of, when we see these historically, is that these jobs were meant to supplant each other. Put together, they sabotage each other. What are we asking of schools? Of the three possible jobs, which are we asking mainstream schools to perform? Egan answers: all three. To confirm this, stretch your memory back to your student days, and see if you can put some of the most basic elements in any of these three categories. We’re so immersed in these that they seem obvious, “natural” aspects of schooling, but of course they’re nothing of the sort. Did you spend your time with other children of the same age? Was your work graded according to a standard? Were you forced to play team sports, or to pledge your allegiance to your nation-state? All of these, Egan says, bear the fingerprints of the goal of socialization. Progressive reformers in in the 1960s saw these as the markings of a dark conspiracy, but socialization has more warm-feely aspects: counselors to help students cope with the strains of modern society, field trips to the local fire station and historical monuments, and everything “practical” — life skills, sex ed, emotional regulation, and so on. Did you learn anything that wasn’t obviously useful? Did you read Hamlet, say, or master the Pythagorean theorem, or learn that the planets orbit the Sun (and not the other way around)? That’s the fingerprints of the academic goal. Finally, did you hear teachers show concern about “age-appropriate” content, or see signs that your school valued individualized learning? Does it seem right to you that learning should be “active” rather than “passive”, or that it’s better for someone to discover something than to be told it? Did your kindergarten have tiny, child-sized chairs? All these, Egan says, are the fruit of developmentalism. The first time I read the book, I wondered at all this. What Egan was saying was indeed lining up with my memories. But perhaps, I thought, he was playing loose with the categories; I was still skeptical that schools really were trying to balance all three goals. So I decided to check his idea from a different perspective and look up the mission statements of school districts I was familiar with. Here’s the one from the town I currently live in: “Skills” and “become involved members of a global community” seem to connote socialization, “challenge” and “knowledge” seem to connote academics, and “empower” and “reach their full potential” seem to connote development. But I wasn’t sure if I was just seeing faces in clouds, so I looked up the mission statement for my hometown: “Succeeding” seems like socialization, “learning” seems like a nod to academics, and “growing” seems like code for development. But again, I was worried that I engaging in motivated reasoning, so I looked up the largest district I’ve lived in, a city of about a million people: Wow. That seems pretty clear. So, to sum up: Egan says that there are three potential jobs we can give to schools. Alone, each of these jobs is terrible; together, they’re worse. And what we’ve done is given schools all three jobs. A sad triangle, indeed. What about alternative schools? I was curious to see whether this “sad triangle” could help us understand other philosophies of education, and why they work (or don’t). Where would, say, unschooling, and classical education, and vocational ed, and Montessori go? The first three seem obvious. Radical unschooling is in the upper-right, classical schools (with its focus on feeding kids “the best that’s been thought or said”) is in the upper-left, and vocational ed is in the bottom corner. What can that tell us? Intriguingly, each of those approaches can claim to have done some impressive stuff. I’ve worked with radical unschoolers, and while their skills have often been lopsided (not learning math is an acknowledged issue in the community), they’ve all at least exhibited a zeal for learning the topics they’ve been interested in. (Video games, frequently.) And I remember a massive study in the early 2000s that asked which kinds of schools actually improved student test scores controlling for the effects of socioeconomics. What it found was that only two types of schools stood out: Catholic schools that were operated by a religious order (e.g. the Jesuits — not local parish schools), and vocational schools. Q: Oh, that’s terrible evidence. One of those was just personal anecdotes! And what about selection effects? And what about…? I wouldn’t disagree — and, as Freddie deBoer points out, most educational research is bunk. I’ll take this to be only weak confirmation of Egan’s theory that combining jobs undercuts education. Are we hosed? If Egan’s critique is correct, we’re in a bad situation. Educational radicals yell from their dark corners to abandon the middle and come join them; a century of educational reforms have amounted to little more than wobbling around, first in one direction, then another. At the moment, the conversation about schools in the United States, at least, seems to have hit an all-time pessimistic blech. Freddie deBoer speaks for a lot of people when he says “Even the most optimistic reading of the research literature suggests that almost nothing moves the needle in academic outcomes. Almost nothing we try works.” I’m not quite that pessimistic — the word “almost” is doing some work, there. There are some reforms that seem to work at the margin: raising teacher pay, making it easier to become a teacher, reducing air pollution, free school lunches, and more. Actually applying what the science of reading has been telling us for a few decades seems a big one. And perhaps you have your own pet reform proposal. Sure — add it to the heap! What Egan suggests, though, is that so long as we’re bopping around this triangle of jobs, we won’t be able to get the schools that we want. The dream There’s a moment at the end of my favorite Bollywood movie that’s become stuck in my head. The protagonists have made the arduous journey to a beachside rural school. In the sun outside, flocks of children are experimenting with art and playing with inventions; inside, the walls are covered with books and the tables are covered with models. The kids are learning joyously and deeply. In the real world, such places do exist — they’re just exclusive, pulling their students from among the families who are already the most gifted and curious. They don’t make kids this way; they scoop up the kids who are already this way. But in the movie, we’re supposed to believe these are normal children — normal, except they’ve been transformed by a school. Egan’s wild idea is that it’s possible to make schools like this. He thought that we didn’t have to wait for the communists to make people equal or for the transhumanists to make people smarter. All he thought it required was giving schools a different job — not socialization or academics or development, but something that brings pieces of them together in a new way. But in order to understand that job, we have to come to a cleaner, bigger, and truer understanding of what “education” is. The road ahead: a special Q-and-A Q: This is the proverbial thousand-dollar-bill-lying-on-the-sidewalk: if this is possible, someone should have done it now. Is Egan going to give sufficient evidence for me to believe this? Maybe! I’ll address this in a special section at the end, after sketching out what his theory looks like. Q: If his theory is even plausibly true, then why haven’t I heard of Egan before? His books can be hard to read — he was an intellectual’s intellectual; he had difficulty writing a page without a reference to William Wordsworth, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Claude Levi-Strauss, Richard Rorty, Noam Chomsky, or Steven Pinker. And his paradigm is wonky and multidimensional; he rejiggers common categories, and tells you everything all at once. But worst of all, when his paradigm is stated plainly, it sounds stupid. Q: Oh! What… is his paradigm? I’m going to jigsaw his book, and hold back his big idea for its own section. First, I’m going to list out some simple observations of students at different ages, and imagine what schooling could look like, if it were built on these principles. (First I’ll do this for elementary school, then middle school, then high school.) Then I’ll explain how his theory ties all of this together… by clarifying our definition of what education actually is. Q: I’m not from America; could you be clear on what you mean by those divisions of schooling? Egan’s framework has three main stages, but they don’t divide neatly into “elementary, middle, and high school”. (The precise age ranges he talks about, if you’re interested, are 2–8, 8–15, and 15 and older.) Regardless, I’m going to use those terms — he sometimes did — because it gives me something specific to imagine. Don’t sweat ‘em. Part 2: A new kind of elementary school What’s the matter with elementary schools? Egan suggests that Plato and Rousseau, for all their differences, might have the same reaction if they visited a modern elementary school: they’d call it “trivial”. I’ll admit, here, that I have tremendously fond memories of my elementary school years — committed teachers, good friends, and interesting activities. But I suspect my memory has edited out the most typical work I did. Either that, or elementary schools have taken a drastic plunge in quality from the 1980s. My wife and I homeschool now, but before the pandemic, we sent our kids to our local public school, and whenever we volunteered in the classroom, we were horrified. They spent their days practicing reading on shallow texts, or half-mindlessly practicing basic arithmetic. Occasionally they’d bring us home a sign of learning about something from the real world — usually something as intellectually and emotionally compelling as the importance of tooth brushing. And at parent–teacher conferences every year, we’d be sat down on tiny chairs and informed that, while our children were quite bright, they were struggling to pay attention in class. No sh**, I wanted to reply. The school seemed hermetically sealed; almost nothing that felt meaningful from the outside world could get in. Though they might agree about little else, Egan thinks that Plato and Rousseau would look at the dull worksheets and insipid “hands-on activities” and call modern elementary schools trivial. He agrees, and thinks that fixing this is the first step to building a new kind of school. Why so trivial? Ironically, Egan thinks it's all the fault of Plato and Rousseau. Hidden in the ways that both the academicists and developmentalist think about education is an assumption: that children’s reasoning is basically the same as adult reasoning, but lesser. Q: This isn’t some romantic, children-are-the-real geniuses theory, is it? Egan actually does think that there’s an intensity to how children perceive the world that we lose — but no, it’s not. He’s building on mainstream cognitive science — just aspects of it that are currently more-or-less ignored in school. The upshot, though, is that he thinks that educational researchers (be they of academic or developmentalist persuasions) see kids as smaller, stupider versions of adults. Q: But that’s the opposite of what my local developmentalist school says! It was the opposite of what the developmentalist school that I worked at said, too. But at teacher meetings, I’d frequently hear people ask what was “developmentally appropriate” for a child. I’ll grant that there are perfectly reasonable times to ask this: “Honey, is it developmentally appropriate for our 10-year-old to watch ‘Cocaine Bear’?” is just one of many examples. But “is it developmentally appropriate for our class to learn about world religions?” or “is it developmentally appropriate for our school library to have a book mentioning homosexuality?” probably aren’t some of them. (The latter example was not one that I heard at my progressivist school, but Egan points out that this sort of language is often used by conservative activists.) This notion of “developmentally appropriate” took on a scientific sheen with the work of Jean Piaget, the famous Swiss psychologist. Before age 12, he “proved”, children aren’t able to form hypotheses, draw conclusions, or think abstractly. This, his followers thought, should transform schools — and so they did! To math, they added in “manipulatives” — physical cubes and rods and such — to help students see math. To the history curriculum, they — well, they ended it. Why waste time, they asked, lecturing students about history that they couldn’t possibly understand? In its place they put the “expanding horizons” model of social studies. One version goes as follows: In kindergarten, students learn about themselves In first grade, they learn about their families In second grade, they learn about their neighborhood In third grade, they learn about their city In fourth grade, they learn about their state In fifth grade, they learn about their nation In sixth grade they learn about the world We can admit that there’s an elegance to this model. (I can picture how clever the theorist who first came up with it must have felt!) The downstream effects of it, however, seem horrible. Doesn’t keeping kids ignorant of the rest of the world seem provincial? Doesn’t reinforcing their self-centeredness seem infantilizing? Perhaps we could stomach it if it was founded on some unshakable findings of child psychology — but does it really strike you as likely that kids are incapable of understanding anything that happened long ago or far away? How, Egan asks, can we explain the $50 billion success of a movie franchise aimed at children that literally begins “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away?” Q: Because… Jedis aren’t history? The point is, kids obviously have the mental abilities to understand — and in fact care a lot about — things far outside their own experience, and we’ve built elementary schools on a long-dominant model of educational psychology that swears they can’t. This is actually a great example of a general principle. Let’s call it “the Star Wars test”: can our model make sense of the most obvious facts of students? When we find that the answer is “no”, we should at least consider radically revising what we’re doing in school. What are elementary schoolers good at? (or: kids are smarter than students) Someone — I can’t now find who — once observed that children seem to lose IQ points the moment they step into a classroom. Egan agrees, and suggests that we think of ourselves as primatologists to kids, Jane Goodalls who investigate children “out in the wild” to see the sorts of things they gravitate to, and do fairly well at. If we do this, what do we see? Kids tell jokes, for one. They get mental images stuck in their heads, for another. They engage in role-playing, get lost in reverie, and beat out rhythms when they’re bored. They make ample use of metaphors, tell stories, and insist on seeing the world in terms of abstract binaries (e.g. stupid/smart, cowardice/courage, slavery/freedom, and so on). These, Egan holds, are the cognitive strengths that children use to understand the world. They’re the things that kids are often about as good at as adults — or much better than. They’re going to be the tools Egan wants us to use to rebuild the entire elementary curriculum, and in fact he spends most of his second chapter geeking out about how we might define these, how they operate in the mind, where they first pop up in history and anthropology, and even how they might have developed in our evolutionary past. I’m going to skip all of that, and get to the curriculum. From trivial to rich: the trick What could an intellectually rich elementary school curriculum look like, if we built it on kids’ cognitive strengths? He gives us one suggestion to help us do this: ask where each discipline came from in the first place. What was math before it was math, for example — or science before it was science? Q: How on Earth could that help? That’ll become clear later, when we finally uncover what Egan thinks “education” actually is, and see what job he wants us to give schools. For now, take it as a tantalizing hint… or, y’know, just ignore it. Elementary literature & language What was literature before it was literature? Before people invented writing, they had rich oral traditions: they told simple stories, recited poems, and shared proverbs. Egan suggests that these bits of oral tradition should form the backbone of the elementary literature curriculum. Q: What sorts of stories? As many as we can, and from as many diverse cultures as possible! Folktales are wonderful, as are myths. Think the Aboriginal story of “The Rainbow Serpent”, episodes from the Sumerian “Epic of Gilgamesh”, the Egyptian story of Osiris & Isis, the Greek story of Orpheus & Eurydice, the Chinese Legend of the White Snake, the Japanese Tale of Amaterasu and Susanoo, the Ashanti tales of Anansi, the Aztec myth of Quetzalcoatl, the English legend of King Arthur, the Maori myth of Maui and the Sun, the Roman story of Romulus and Remus, selections from the Indian Mahabharata, the Anglo-Saxon epic of Beowulf, the Inca legend of the Sun and Moon, the Iroquois Myth of the Flying Head (a real thing! look it up!), and the Ojibwe story of Turtle Island. Q: That was a lot of examples. Are you going to keep giving so many? I’ve got a [mumble mumble mumble] to get to. Sorry about that. Sometimes, though, I feel that a limitation of reading Educated Mind is that, in trying to keep his book to a manageable size, Egan skimped on examples in some places that it matters. It’s easy to read his occasional example and assume he intends that it hold some central place in the curriculum — when all he wants to do is display how rich and diverse the curriculum could be. (Also: good God, I didn’t even include an example from Norse mythology!) So from now on, just assume that every category could be filled with oodles of examples. Q: What sorts of poems? Lots of poems, first of all. We shouldn’t steer toward “fancy” poems — rather, we should find poems that appeal to kids immediately — think Shel Silverstein, Mother Goose, Dr. Seuss, Jack Prelutsky, Edward Lear, or Ogden Nash… that sort of thing. In a biting essay, Egan suggests these poets like these appeal to kids precisely because they leverage kids’ cognitive strengths: “we should find, and encourage saying and singing and shouting aloud verse with strong narrative forms, thumping rhymes and rhythms, the most vivid images, fun with metaphors, and a rollicking story.” Q: Why proverbs? Proverbs stick in your mind almost effortlessly. (“All’s fair in love and war!” “When in Rome, do as the Romans do!” “You can’t judge a book by its cover!”) They’re also useful; they capture general truths. Kids can apply them to all sorts of situations, but also discuss them — to what extent are they wise or foolish? (I remember my surprise when I realized that they couldn’t all be true — because you can’t follow “look before you leap” and “he who hesitates is lost” at the same time! I’m embarrassed to say that I think I only realized this when I was in college.) Elementary science What was science before it was science? Egan suggests: being immersed in the natural world. We might, he writes, encourage elementary students to “adopt” some feature of the natural world — a patch of grass, a cat, a branch, a stream — and simply observe it at length. To do this, we can use the cognitive strength of reverie. Q: Oh, do you mean like kids sometimes do in science class nowadays — describe a thing to a partner, make notes, draw it, and label its parts? No, the exact opposite! That’s all about squeezing the experience into words and forms that we understand. What we want “is less an attempt to know about nature as to know it in some participatory way, to know it as something we are an intimate part of, not set off from”. Q: That sounds a little… “woo” to me. It did to me, too… until I remembered my childhood climbing tree. I didn’t much like to go outside as a child, but I had this one tree that I’d climb up and read for hours and hours. If I close my eyes I can bring to mind the precise texture of its bark, the roughness of its broken-off branches, the coolness of its leaves, the always-surprising solidness of its trunk… I’m bigger now, but I think if I were back in my parent’s yard, I could still navigate its limbs with my eyes closed. I have, at this point in my life, read a fair number of books about trees, but I’d be surprised if all of them together more than equaled the amount I learned from that tree — my tree. Elementary math What was math before it was math? Egan suggests: counting and logic. We might, then, use rhythms, metaphors, stories, and jokes to help kids become fond of these. Q: Counting is pretty… basic. Could it really be improved? Beware of “the curse of knowledge”: Steven Pinker’s phrase for forgetting that something was once difficult! Egan suggests we should spend time helping kids count wonderfully. We can start early with counting rhymes. (“One, two, buckle my shoe! Three, four, out the door! Five, six…”) But we can also help kids use their fingers as metaphors. There are some pretty cool ways of using your hands as an abacus — and did you know that you can count up to 1,023 using just your fingers on both hands, and a knowledge of binary? Q: Logic — I’m intrigued! Aristotelian, or Boolean? Neither, for the time being — Piaget was presumably onto something when he found that young children couldn’t reason abstractly, but he was looking at logic in a vacuum. When we put logic into the context of stories, we find that kids can deal with logic just fine. There’s an entire worldwide network of educators, in fact, called Philosophy for Children, who have written whole books about how to do this, and Egan loves it all. Sometimes they read stories and ask simple questions: “What is friendship?” or “What does it mean to be brave?” They also pose ethical questions: “Is it ever right to spill a secret?” And they pose paradoxes: “Can you step in the same river twice?” Q: You mentioned “jokes” a moment ago. Care to elaborate? Egan thinks that, to help kids get good at math, you should tell kids jokes. Q: That’s… new. I think so, too — but he backs it up pretty well. To be funny, jokes (or at least most kid jokes) rely on a leap in logic: Why can’t you trust an atom? They make up everything. Knock-knock. Who’s there? Boo. Boo-hoo? Don’t cry, it’s just a joke! To understand the joke, kids have to follow the logic — spotting patterns, making connections, and tracking what their audience expects a word to mean. That’s a lot of cognitive lifting. And Egan goes further, suggesting that we grit our teeth and create methods to help kids invent their own jokes, no matter how horrible they’ll be at first. (The things we do for learning…) Q: Wait wait wait! What about addition facts, and multiplication tables, and fractions? Egan emphasizes that his methods are designed to be add-ons to the standard math curriculum. In general, he’s a don’t-blow-up-the-system sort of guy, and if something seems especially weird, you should probably assume it’s an add-on to the regular curriculum rather than a replacement, even if I forget to say so. Elementary arts What was art before it was art? Egan suggests we pop our heads into Paleolithic caves for our inspiration. Whatever the specific meaning of all those charcoal elk and aurochs and mammoths (communication with the spirit world? art for art’s sake? a way to impress babes?), Egan thinks it obvious that they were also an attempt to capture an intense experience that would be difficult to express in words alone. What did it feel like to be near an aurochs, or a saber-toothed tiger? “The arts help us,” Egan writes, “to hear and see afresh, to force our perceptions and sensations to experience again the immediacy and vividness of the world”. If we follow this, then, we don’t want to help kids build “art skills” so they can draw like an adult — rather, we want to help them amass a repository of diverse aesthetic feelings that they’ll want to express. We should provide them with a riot of experiences. Q: That couldn’t be more opaque. Examples, please! Egan writes that we should have children learn to whistle, sing, and click their tongue; we should help them emulate the ways a skunk or a hawk or a stick bug might move through a space. We should expose them to scores of different temperatures and materials. In music, we should help them love Beethoven, yes, but also the Beatles; Tchaikovsky, yes, but also Tuvan throat singers, and also John Cage, whale song, and bird song. Q: That’s a lot of experiences, but what would they be doing? An interesting aspect of Egan’s view of education is that he doesn’t seem to think we should push kids right to the “doing” phase. He wants to help kids cultivate an affective relationship with the world. In any case, he writes that as students get more experienced, we should prompt them to move from merely enjoying these experiences to trying to systematically shape similar experiences. And drawing, painting, and playing music could easily be folded into other parts of the curriculum. Elementary social studies What was social studies before it was social studies? Well. Remember how, just a moment ago, I wrote that you could assume that you should probably assume that Kieran isn’t in favor of junking the curriculum as it currently stands? He suggests we very carefully pick up the elementary social studies curriculum, place it into a trash can, and set the whole mess on fire. He isn’t worried about much of importance being lost. (Remember that the “expanding horizons” model is, to him, the original sin of 20th century educational reform, and he repeatedly quotes student surveys showing that “social studies” regularly wins the title of “most boring subject”.) In its place, he suggests we put history — which, he hints, we should think of as the centerpiece of the elementary curriculum. So the real question is what was history before it was history? His answer, surprisingly, is myth. Q: Egan wants us to teach myths as if they were history? Not at all. What he suggests, though, is that we look at how myths operate as narratives — so we can design an intellectually vivid history curriculum. And myths really are special: each is built on at least one binary (like weak vs. strong, or lies vs. truth, or so on), and uses that to tell the story of the big picture of the world. They’re so powerful that people can understand it, remember it, and love it — even if that thing never happened. We should take that power, Egan says, and apply it to things that really did happen. Q: So what history does he think kids should learn in elementary school? The great struggles of humanity from across the whole. Flippin’. World. We’re still talking about young children, so these should be done as simple stories. The goal isn’t to make them history PhD’s, so we needn’t even try to put them in any sort of order. Egan suggests that, in first grade, we pick a single binary like “freedom against oppression” and tell kids a welter of stories, again from as many cultures as possible, and as many times in history as possible. Q: Can you give examples? Oh, all right — in first grade we can tell kids the stories of the war of the Greek city-states against the Persian empire, and the slave uprising of Spartacus against the Romans. We can tell them about the plight of Jews in medieval Europe, and of the unsuccessful Sepoy Rebellion in India against the British. We can tell the stories of the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions, and about the Chinese Taiping Rebellion against the Qing Dynasty. We can tell them the story of the escaped slave Harriet Tubman returning to the South to rescue her kinsmen, the story of six-year-old Ruby Bridges facing threats to integrate her elementary school, and the story of how the Mau-Mau uprising led to modern-day Kenya. We can tell the stories of Mexican-American union organizer Cesar Chavez and of Malala Yousafzai surviving an assassination attempt to advocate for female literacy. The world does not lack for stories of oppression and liberation that can capture the attention of a six-year-old. Q: That’s… huh. What stories might they hear in second and third grade? Egan gives examples, but I won’t list them here. He suggests we use a similar approach for each, except that we swap out the binary each year. He thinks “the struggle for security against danger” would work well for year two, and “the struggle for knowledge against ignorance” would work well for year three. (That year could have a lot of overlap with the science curriculum.) Q: Anything else, for history? Yes — they should get a sense of Big History. They should get some simple stories about the ice age, the Cenozoic, the age of dinosaurs, the Paleozoic, the origins of our solar system, and the Big Bang. (Because if the ancient Norse can tell their story of the beginning of the universe, by gum, we can tell ours, too.) To sum up Egan argues that the problem of early schooling is that it’s trivial — and it’s trivial because the dominant theories of educational psychology see children as lesser versions of adults. What else would we teach them, except dumbed-down versions of what adults learn? But children have certain cognitive strengths that schools aren’t making systematic use of. If we rebuild elementary schools on those strengths, we could turn schooling upside down. We could stop seeing the curriculum as a bag of information to impart, and start seeing it as a set of great stories to tell — and invite kids into. Kids could experience (both intellectually and emotionally) the great struggles of humanity and see that they can join in them. Students could experience the story of education as the beginning of a very real adventure. Egan’s elementary school: some skeptical questions Q: I’m not sure I’m understanding what you mean by “mental images”. Care to explain? It’s an interesting fact of human cognition that just a few words can whip up a complex mental experience. Egan doesn’t just mean what we might call “visual imagery” — the ability to hold, say, the image of a bespectacled, spat-wearing duck in your mind without seeing a photograph. He’s also including what psychologists call auditory imagery, olfactory imagery, gustatory imagery, and tactile imagery. Q: How could all of that be helpful in schools? Humanity has a built-in VR system, and we’re not using it! Egan invites us to pretend we’re teaching a class about the humble earthworm. We might list off facts — “earthworms are so many centimeters long, move through soil by means of their something-or-other muscles…” but he suggests we can evoke images, say, “of what it would be like to slither and push through the soil, hesitantly exploring in one direction then another, looking for easier passages, contracting and expanding our sequence of muscles segment by segment, and sensing moisture, scents, grubs, or whatever”. Those facts are now felt by the student; the knowledge has become part of them. And just a few words can spark a complex mental experience, one going beyond literal images to include imagined sounds, smells, tastes, and more. These experiences can feel real and stick with us. (That these mental images are so easy to evoke, and so meaningfully felt, feels something like the proverbial hundred dollar bill on the ground.) Q: How could metaphors be helpful? It really is interesting that so much of the “constructivist” turn in psychology — that is, the notion that children don’t absorb knowledge, but construct it — has continued to focus on logics-mathematical reasoning, when there’s been mounting evidence for decades that metaphors are more central. It’s not just that we use metaphors to better understand things we already know, we also use them to grasp new knowledge. What’s more, psychologists have devised tests to measure the skill at metaphor-making, and have given them to people of different ages. What they found was that eleven-year-olds make more metaphors (and higher quality metaphors) than do undergraduates — and that four-year-olds have both groups beat. Again, hundred dollar bills on the sidewalk. Q: Your talk of “binaries” has me worried — binaries like good/evil and male/female are the source of so many of our most pernicious stereotypes! Isn’t the purpose of education to get us beyond stuff like this? Yes, it is! Education is supposed to complicate our understanding — but that means we’ve gotta start somewhere, and binaries provide us a natural starting place. As an uncontroversial example, think about temperature. We all begin as babies by perceiving two temperatures — hot and cold. Later, we add on intermediate categories — warm and cool. (Note that the human body is the assumed mid-point to temperature. Binaries often work like this; “big” and “small” mean “bigger or smaller than me”, “nasty” and “kind” mean “nastier or kinder than I am, except when my brother is really asking for it”, and so on.) A good story (and an Egan-inspired elementary curriculum is, in a sense, nothing but good stories) will go further, and transform the binary. Toy Story is grounded in the binary of abandonment/belonging: at the beginning, the toy cowboy Woody belongs to his owner, and has his affection. Then a rival comes who threatens his belonging. In trying to get back to belonging, Woody is entirely lost — and to save the day, he has to come to a deeper understanding of what belonging means. Now, all lessons can’t be Pixar movies. But the good stories (especially in literature and history) will challenge and subvert the binaries they begin with. Q: I see the pattern of Egan drawing from “as many cultures as possible”. Why so many? Is this a political correctness thing? If it helps to think of it as such, then, sure! I don’t think Egan would have had a problem with that. But his ultimate reason for including so much diversity goes deeper. For Egan, including such world-wide diversity isn’t optional, and the answer to why is bound up in his definition of education. (Keep reading.) His answer also insists that we, whenever possible, also include stories from the Bible and Homeric epics (the Iliad and Odyssey). Q: Mmm, stories from the Bible aren’t going to fly in my local school! So be it! Egan doesn’t spend much time obsessing over the practicalities of… His interest is in describing what an ideal education might look like, if it were possible. Every lesson, every classroom, and every school is necessarily a compromise. Q: You make a big deal of poems. But isn’t poetry dead? An interesting contrast can be made to classical education, which also has kids read a lot of poems — they see knowing great poems as one of the marks of an educated person; again, for an academicist, it’s the information that transforms. Egan begs to disagree. Poems are important because they’re a wonderful way to train their cognitive strengths, like rhythm (poems are language fueling by thumping). We want to help kids learn to use this tool better, and a great way to do that is to help them recite poems that they’ve learned by heart. Q: “Learn by heart” — is that code for “memorize”?! It is! Egan is actually quite big on memorization — he points out that all the knowledge in the world can do nothing for a person once they’ve forgotten it. He didn’t, however, appreciate the academicist focus on memorizing without understanding (or at least enjoyment). Q: I’m still worried about the science curriculum, as you’re describing it. Can you allay my fears? Honestly, while I feel there’s something profoundly right to how Egan is describing early experiences of nature, I feel the same way. Note that there’s more science coming in the social studies curriculum. But if that’s still not enough, one could bring down aspects of the middle school science stage. Q: Anything else that Egan suggests we do in elementary school literature and language? He suggests that we help kids learn a second language! This is so obviously true (why do American schools typically wait until kids lose the ability to naturally absorb languages to start teaching languages?) he doesn’t belabor it, though. Q: You had mentioned that Egan’s vision seems more internal-focused. Should we be worried about that? While I strongly suspect that his curriculum would make kids more creative in any way you’d like to measure it, Egan wasn’t particularly interested in “creativity” — he was more about helping kids find the world interesting. I get the sense that he thinks kids will do things with minimal prompting once they’re loaded up with complex internal experiences. Q: I think I’m beginning to understand Egan — is he basically saying “make learning fun”? “Fun”, applied to education, is a dangerous word. Egan worries about the dangers of an emotionally unserious curriculum producing emotionally stunted adults. That doesn’t mean we need to tell students only “serious” stories — only that we treat the world honestly. “Disney-esque sentimentality is the exact emotional equivalent to intellectual contempt”. Q: But aren't some of these stories too dark for children who have themselves experienced oppression and disaster? Egan argues that these stories may be especially helpful to them — they can help them understand their struggles better, and give voice to them. Q: At the very start of this, you promised us “rationality”… but I’m not seeing rationality here! All this talk of “adventure” almost seems to go the opposite direction. What gives? Wait for it. But for a hint right now — Egan is fond of citing his fellow educational theorist Jerome Bruner, who claimed “any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development”. Bruner was criticized for that; his critics charged that he was ignoring learning differences and socio-economic realities. Egan thinks he was profoundly right. Part 3: A new kind of middle school What’s the matter with middle school? What was middle school like for you? In math, I recall a jumble of barely-related topics. In literature, I remember reading great literature — Frankenstein, Romeo and Juliet — only in their dumbed-down summary formats. In social studies, I remember teachers proclaiming on the first day of class that unlike all of our previous history classes, this class wouldn’t be about names and dates… and then going on to memorize names and dates. And in science, I remember being forced to dissect a frog only to discover that frogs are — you guessed it — made of slimy frog parts. Your mileage may vary, but for a lot of us, middle school feels like getting booted out of the (in retrospect) Eden of elementary school, and like marking time before the serious studying of high school. It feels meaningless. In my favorite of his books, Egan calls so much middle school curricula “human deserts”, noting “we have created a system in which the importance of human emotions for meaning seems barely noticed”. Why so meaningless? If our dominant approaches to educational psychology fundamentally misinterpret younger children, Egan suggests, they basically throw up their hands when faced with pre-teens and teenagers. Mainstream schools begin to introduce vocational training to help lighten the load, and Maria Montessori famously suggests that adolescents should be sent to go run a farm. Egan is sympathetic to those responses, but points out that they don’t do much to lighten the load that the academic curriculum often becomes at this age. This feeling of meaninglessness, he argues, is utterly tragic — it comes just when a hunger for meaning blossoms in adolescents! We can see that hunger for meaning in their lives outside the classroom, where their interests ramp up into veritable obsessions. What are adolescents obsessed with? What might we see, if we become Jane Goodalls of early adolescence? First, teens are obsessed with gossip. The motivations of others — why did he do that? and what was he THINKING? — are hypothesized and talked to death. Second, that they’re pulled toward idealism. Many feel a dissatisfaction with the world as it is, and feel a romantic urge to make it a better place. They’re often lured into simplistic beliefs that promise to help them do that. Third, they love extremes: they want to find limits, and test them. Obviously, this can show up as risky behavior, but we can also see it in their love for the bizarre — note adolescents’ fascination in things like aliens, cryptids, and ghosts. (Egan loves pointing out that The Guinness Book of World Records is a perennial bestseller among kids at this age. How else would they find out who had the world’s longest fingernails?) Fourth, they gravitate toward heroes — people who push the edges of those limits. By celebrating heroes, they can vicariously share in their transcendence. Look for the posts hanging up in a teenager’s bedroom to guess what boundaries they feel most hemmed in by: athletes push against physical limits; a death metal guitarist might push against authority and conventional morality. An activist or entrepreneur might push against our dulled morality or our sense of what’s possible. Finally, we might spot teens taking up hobbies and making collections. Hobbies can be a way to identify yourself as part of a group against the rest of the world (“I’m the sort of person who goes bird-watching!”), and collections can be a way to climb the status ladder inside the community. Egan points out that a collection can also be a way to feel like you have control over what you’re discovering is a very big and complex world of detailed information (“I’ve spotted every one of the fifty most common birds of Texas — even the black-capped vireo!”) Egan’s insight is that these obsessions give teenagers a sense of meaning, and that we can use them as tools to make middle schools that overflow with meaning. From meaningless to meaning-soaked Again, Egan sketches out a new kind of curriculum subject-by-subject. Before, his trick was to ask where the subject first evolved out of; now, it’s to ask who first discovered or created the specific content we’re teaching. “All knowledge”, he writes, “is human knowledge. Everything we know is knowable through the lives of its inventors, discoverers, or users, and we can have access to that knowledge through the hopes, fears, or intentions that drove them”. Middle school math Who first discovered the concepts students learn in math? The answer, of course, is a wide diversity of curious men and women living across the world over the last few thousand years. Egan says: bring those people into how we teach math. If we used gossip and heroes to help students find it meaningful, what kind of math would result? When we teach the Pythagorean theorem, we should give a sense of who Pythagoras was — a cult-founder who worshiped numbers to find God, whose followers (according to a piece of ancient gossip) murdered one of their members who discovered irrational numbers! Q: Well, sure, that works for Pythagoras, but he’s a known nut job; surely most math doesn’t come from such interesting roots? When we teach the Cartesian coordinate system, students should meet Rene Descartes, the Calvinist French polymath who saw the possibility that math could decipher the world, if only we could unite algebra and geometry… and invented the xy-plane to do exactly that. When we teach scientific notation, we should call our students’ attention to the importance of the number zero, and tell them the story of the Pope who tried to introduce Arabic numerals to Christian Europe and may have been assassinated because of it. When we teach algebra, we should ask students why “algebra” is Arabic for “the fixing of bones”, and tell the story of what Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi was up to. We could do this all day. Literally everything students learn in school was first invented or discovered by some interesting person who was struggling to accomplish something hard. To learn is to connect with those people, whether we know it or not. Egan says: help kids know it. Math has been dehumanized: re-humanize it. Q: So the math curriculum needs to become a history of math curriculum, and math teachers need to become history teachers? No, the content needn’t change. But with surprisingly little work, we can bring in the gossipy stories of heroes, and their obsessions can spread to students. Middle school science Who first discovered the things students learn about in science? If you’re thinking “scientists”, you’re only partially right. Most of the big-picture ideas that we now think of as “science” were discovered before the word “scientist” was invented, or the discipline was professionalized. Frequently, they were hatched by true amateurs, working in their free time, hungry to unlock the secrets of nature. We can use gossip and heroes to spread their obsessions to students just as we taught math, but Egan points out two twists. The first is that the content itself can take on heroic qualities: everything is impressive, when you look at it in a certain light. In an interview, Egan once said: “My book is an attempt to show that, indeed, everything in the world is wonderful, but that schools are designed almost to disguise this slightly shameful fact. We represent the world to children as mostly known and rather dull. The opposite is the case: we are surrounded by mystery, and what we know is fascinating”. What would even the most boring subjects look like, if we emphasized their heroic qualities? Well: What’s a tooth? Bone, wrapped in rock, surrounding tiny cells that your body feeds with blood. What’s a bar of chocolate? A crystal of jellyfish-shaped fat molecules stacked together; when you put it in your mouth you shake them apart into a writhing confusion. What’s the air around you? The bottom of a 10-mile-deep ocean; when you put your tongue over a soda straw and your Pepsi stops leaking out, it’s not because a “vacuum” is “sucking” it up, but because that ocean is squeezing it into your face. Again, we could do this all day! And in middle school science, we can. Everything in the world is wonderful; we can help students see this again and again. The second twist is that science is a subject rich in extremes. Here Egan introduces a concept that we’ll see crop up again: “15-minute segments”. To help us fit as much wonder as possible into a school day, he suggests we supplement the usual school subjects with a few quick lessons. To infuse science with extremes, he suggests we add on three: “human & natural records”, “extremes of animals & plants”, and “cosmology”. Middle school history Who first made the things students learn about in history? Why, the historical characters themselves! Since we’ve given kids a grounding in history in elementary school, now we can build on that, going through many of the same events as before, but in more depth, and more vividly. We’ll leverage the interest with other people’s inner lives to tell stories focusing on the perspectives of the people who made history — zooming in, when possible, on scandalous details. We’ll leverage the tool of idealism to choose historical characters who chafed against their surroundings, and understand what they were trying to accomplish. What was their vision of the world? What did they hope for, and what did they fear? Q: Isn’t the “great man” approach to history out of fashion? Egan’s approach doesn’t say that “great men” made history — it’s just leveraging gossip to help kids see history as something meaningful that can expand their own possibilities. “Early adolescence is commonly a time of intense and vivid emotional life, and also a time of deepest boredom and depression… [We] can give shape to the intermediate curriculum and offer the students a world that is rich, complex, varied, and as intense and vivid as their own emotional lives”. We also should add on another “15-minute segment” just to pump in as many biographies as possible, and from people who don’t always fit into the normal history curriculum. Call it “Brief Lives”, and throw in anyone who’s struggled to push some limit — Mary Wollstonecraft, Jesse Owen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the students’ great-aunts, whoever. As students get older, this can transition to “People and Their Ideas”. Here, we’d focus less on the details of the person’s life, and use it as a backdrop to showing how meaningful some of history’s most important ideas could be. Think Aristotle and syllogisms, Edward Said and orientalism, Confucius and propriety, Cornel West and race, Buddha on the four noble truths, Muhammad and the five pillars, Karl Marx and communism, Adam Smith and the invisible hand, Thomas Hobbes and the state of nature, John Locke and natural rights, Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism, Thomas Aquinas on the sacraments, Martin Luther on faith, Voltaire on the freedom of speech… you get the idea. Q: Can you really get a profound understanding of utilitarianism in 15 minutes? Yes! The point of this segment isn’t to develop a systematic understanding of any one idea, it’s to introduce students to the exciting possibilities of human thought. (As a bonus, this might make them less likely to fall for the first ideology that they encounter later in life.) Diversity is important for this — as it is with culture. Throughout this, we should also be trying to expose students to as much cultural diversity as possible, because in high school, we’ll be trying to make sense of our society, and it’s impossible to do that unless we have something to compare it against. Middle school literature & language You might think that this subject would be easy — that middle school literature is already filled with “strong and clear narratives”, that it deals with “transcendent human qualities such as courage, love, and persistence”, that it focuses on “extremes of human experience”, that it examines “something strange and exotic”. You’d be right! Egan’s pretty happy with a bog-standard middle school literature curriculum, done well. In this part of the book, his spends most of his limited space suggesting three rather odd activities which could also be useful — especially for increasing students’ awareness of language, so they can use it better. The first is etymology — not, however, memorizing lists of roots, but in being told the entertaining backstories of specific words. Take the word “berserk”, for example — we now use it to mean something relatively mild (“if my mom catches me coming home late, she’ll go berserk”), but it comes from an old Norse word meaning “a raging warrior of superhuman strength”. And that’s because ber meant “bear” and serk meant “shirt”: soldiers of the bear cult would don the skin of a bear to, in their minds, transform into one — howling, foaming at the mouth, and gnawing the rims of their shields. (Most adults walk through life with little understanding that the words falling out of their mouths are entities, with their own back-stories. Communication is, at the very least, more interesting when we become aware of this.) The second is to add on another language to learn — not, this time, to become fluent in it, but just to become aware of how very different human languages can be. (For native English speakers, Sanskrit might work well, or Cantonese, or perhaps even ancient Egyptian. Again, the point isn’t for this language to be useful — it’s to explore diversity.) The final one is to study humor — not just jokes anymore, but comedy at its finest. Egan cites (at length!) Monty Python as a group of people who were particularly brilliant in their use of the English language. Examining their skits can lead us into not just an appreciation of semantics (the study of how meaning is made from smaller pieces, like etymology) but also pragmatics (the study of how meaning is made in social situations). Pretty heady stuff, for a conversation about a dead parrot. Part 4: A new kind of high school I’ll confess — I loved parts of high school… and among nerdy folks, I suspect I’m not alone. For some of us, this was a golden time. Even at my local public high school, I had access to academically thrilling classes — especially, in my last two years, advanced literature and history. I felt like I was finally understanding the ideas that mattered. In any case, Egan is quick to acknowledge that, at this level, the sort of education he advocates really is being practiced in some places. What he can add is an understanding of what makes it wonderful, how to make it even more wonderful, and how to make it wonderful for many, many more people. What’s the matter with high school? Far too often, even when high school classes are intellectual, they’re dry. For the majority of students, all this academic stuff is experienced as utterly lifeless, a mass of dead information to be squeezed inside one’s head for a test and then left to evaporate. Egan mocks the curriculum wars that seem to be a permanent feature of the teaching life; quoting the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, he says “while the academic left and right bicker over whether the curriculum is too traditional or too radical, they fail to recognize that most students absorb so little of academic culture that the bickering is largely irrelevant”. Why so dry? Egan suggests three reasons to explain this. First, because high school academic classes are too often masses of small details with no sign of the big picture. Second, because they’re typically slavishly disciplinary, and aren’t able to address the questions that span the disciplines. Third, because they’re often designed to bring students through what everyone is sure of, and hide away any controversies. In all of these, Egan suggests that what’s called “academics” in high school is too often a dim imitation of what real academics are actually practicing. There’s a fourth reason, though, and it’s probably the biggest of all — by the time they get to high school, most students haven’t actually learned that much! An academic approach is designed to connect small details into the big picture; for people who arrive in high school (and college) classes without having already collected much in their heads, academics are going to taste dry. (An implication of this for anyone trying to improve schools is that we might not want to start with high schools. If your goal is to create a new kind of academic learning, first start at elementary school — or barring that, middle school.) What motivates mad scientists? When we wanted to re-conceive the elementary and middle school curriculums, we looked at what students were already good at — kids’ cognitive strengths and adolescents’ obsessions. For this level it might be easier to look — for reasons that will become clear when we finally unveil Egan’s crazy-sounding definition of education — at the sorts of things that bring intellectuals joy. Q: Which intellectuals? Take your pick. Galileo, Einstein, Smith, Marx, Goodall, Chomsky, Curie… all the people who took to the life of the mind like fish to water. But that’s a lot to hold in my mind at once, so I’m just going to think about Doc Brown from Back to the Future: He was high on intellectualism I’ve never been there, but the brochure looks nice Let’s call these people “mad scientists”. And let’s pretend we once again took up our job of being primatologists, and snooped on these folks “in the wild” (“in the lab”? this is beginning to get recursive…)… what would we find motivating them? Asking simple questions, for one. (What is space? What is society? What is a human? What is language?) Building general schemes (big theories) that hold lots of evidence together. Finding their place in the cosmos. And (perhaps above all) seeking certainty. Once again, Egan suggests we use these as tools to remake the curriculum. From dry to daring What could a high school curriculum look like, if it were rebuilt on these tools? Once again, Egan has a trick. This time, it’s to ask what fights have driven the development of each of these fields forward — and how we can help students enter them. First, a mini-segment! Intellectuals invented the academic disciplines to better pursue the life of the mind, but the disciplines can get in the way. Some of the most important intellectual discoveries that could help students are too big to fit into any of the disciplines. We need a place to introduce them plainly. Egan proposes another mini-segment — again, just 15 minutes a day, a few times a week — called “Metaknowledge”. Q: Isn’t that already in the International Baccalaureate program? Yes, he acknowledges that he’s borrowing from that! This segment would introduce ideas that would enrich student thinking across the disciplines: game theory, cognitive biases, systems thinking, Bayesian reasoning, epistemology, ethics, logic, cultural evolution, and so on. High school literature How can we help students enter the big fights of literature? Intellectuals of a literary bent — professors, critics, poets, novelists — delight in arguing over literature like rabbis arguing over the Talmud. Take, just for one example, the debates over Shakespeare’s character of Ophelia. Does she love Hamlet, or is she a victim of his emotional abuse? Is she truly insane, or is she acting? Is she passive, or is she pulling the strings? Oceans of ink have been spilled arguing over questions like these; our students can, perhaps, spill a few ounces more. The usefulness of arguing literature, for Egan, isn’t that it’s oh-so important for educated adults to know a lot about Ophelia. (This, again, was where the academicists went wrong — in thinking that being educated was about getting the best knowledge in your head.) Rather, arguing over literature is a training arena for the all-important intellectual move of this kind of understanding: building general schemes out of evidence, and struggling with anomalies. One person, for example, might hold that Ophelia is insane, and cite all sorts of obvious evidence — her father just was murdered by her lover, she rants nonsense while (bizarrely) handing out flowers to friends… But then he’s challenged when he reads a scholar pointing out that, to people in Elizabethan England, types of flowers have symbolic meanings. How does he deal with that? He could ignore it, claiming it an over-reading of Shakespeare. (Sometimes a flower is just a flower!) Or he could address it, complicating his own scheme. This intellectual work is best done with other people, who are incentivized to challenge your understanding of something, and go back and forth, building competing models and calling attention to anomalies. This process — the “dialectic” — pops up again and again in the academic disciplines. It’s the center of how understanding works, at this stage. And the nice thing about practicing it on literature is that, more so than in history or science, the evidence is shared knowledge — it’s right in front of everyone, written out. But there are other ways literature class can be helpful to the general life of the mind. Egan also suggests that we’ll want to specially include literature that helps students understand complex ideas. Camus, Orwell, Borges, Calvino might be particularly helpful here… and I imagine that genres like science fiction and magical realism might be particularly useful, too. (Note, though, that once again none of this requires a radical remaking of the curriculum, or of the canon of texts that we traditionally assign to high schoolers.) Q: Oh yes, the canon — what does Egan have to say about the canon wars? When he wrote Educated Mind in the nineties, the long-brewing canon war was approaching its inevitable apocalyptic climax. On one side of this Plain of Megiddo were the pro-canon traditionalists, arguing that we should keep assigning the texts that had been argued over for centuries. Facing them were the anti-canon reformers, arguing the standard texts over-represented the perspective of dead white men. Onto the middle of the plain rides Egan on a white horse, who bellows above the din: “I’VE GOT A BUSLOAD OF HIGH SCHOOLERS WHO WANTS TO JOIN IN, EVERYONE OKAY WITH THAT?” To do so, he says, we need to give students the arguments from both sides. So, for example, bell hooks, Edward Said, and China Achebe should be on the syllabus, as should Allan Bloom, Mortimer Adler, and Diane Ravitch. And of course they should actually read the texts cherished by both sides, too, so they can argue better. High school history How could entering the big fights help us reinvent high school history? First, we might look for dueling histories. It’s time for students to get into historiography and understand that history isn’t just what happened, it’s something we make. We might help kids read chapters from Howard Zinn’s socialist history of America alongside the corresponding chapters from Paul Johnson’s conservative history of America. How could big questions help? We want to help students see how various people have disagreed over some of the big questions of what human history is, at its most basic. We can have them compare Steven Pinker’s theory of civilization’s progress (Better Angels of our Nature) with Yuvah Noah Harari’s theory of civilization’s woes (Sapiens). We could have them compare so-and-so’s account of human history as an ever-expanding unlatching of energy sources with Robert Wright’s account of human history as unlatching more and more positive-sum games (Nonzero). What role could the lure of certainty play? To help them grow their skills at finding anomalies, we might help them work through pseudo-histories and conspiracy theories. Q: Conspiracy theories! Oh, come now, you’re playing with fire. Well, the world is on fire. Our students will spend the rest of their lives encountering terrible-but-beguiling arguments about how the world works; if we don’t prepare them for those, what have we been doing? So we should introduce arguments that the Moon landing was a hoax, that the Illuminati founded America, that aliens built the pyramids, and so on. At no point can we demean students for falling for any of these theories — the job of a teacher at this stage, Egan writes, is to support students in their reasoning even when their beliefs are offensive and stupid, gradually offering anomalies. There’s no way out of bad theories except through them. By the time students graduate, we want them to have wrestled with terrible ideas and — for a while — lost. They need to experience what it’s like to change their minds about something they felt strongly about. They need to viscerally realize, in Feynman’s famous phrase, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” High school natural science How could entering the big fights reinvent high school science? At present, so much of the high school science curriculum — especially “honors” classes — is oriented toward helping amass details. (The same is true of 100-level university classes, which famously “survey” the field to prepare for more advanced studies. I always thought this was stupid — of the huge lecture hall of students in my Geology 100 class, how many went on to take even a second course?) The meaty debates that propel science forward are held back. Egan complains: “The more general and speculative theories in any discipline are treated like an unconventional and disreputable relation who, even though the children find her exciting and entertaining, must be kept hidden from view, her very existence denied as long as possible”. This is a stupid approach — students with an adventurous bent are convinced that science isn’t for them. Egan proposes, simply, that we flip this, and organize high school science classes around the big debates. We shouldn’t be ashamed at how, well, adolescent this might look: “the dramatic, speculative, and contentious theories will be up-front in the early years of the [high school] curriculum”. What might those be? Egan doesn’t give a list, but we can spitball some: instead of explaining what “matter” is from the top down, a physics class could problematize “matter” by following the debates over the nature of dark matter and dark energy, and by becoming familiarized with the various interpretations of quantum mechanics

influenza A virus1 mentions across 1 issues

influenza A virus is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 01, 2025 and January 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Pandemic flu is always caused by the influenza A virus". It most often appears alongside 1918, 1940s, 1968.

Reference entry: influenza A virus
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: January 01, 2025
Last seen: January 01, 2025

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H5N1: Much More Than You Wanted To Know January 01, 2025

1918 1 shared issues
1940s 1 shared issues
1968 1 shared issues
1977 1 shared issues
2009 1 shared issues

Source context

January 01, 2025 · Original source

Flu is a disease caused by a family of related influenza viruses. Pandemic flu is always caused by the influenza A virus. Influenza A has two surface antigen proteins, hemagglutinin (18 flavors) and neuraminidase (11 flavors). A particular flu strain is named after which flavors of these two proteins it has - for example, H3N2, or H5N1.

From “Genesis and pathogenesis of the 1918 pandemic H1N1 influenza A virus”, linked above. You may recognize the lead author - Michael Worobey has also been a leading voice on the zoonotic side of the COVID origins debate. The recent history of the flu, as far as I can tell, is: 1918: An H1N1 flu (“Spanish flu”) jumped from birds to humans in America and killed 50 million people worldwide. This replaced all older strains, so most seasonal flus during this era were H1N1. 1957: An H2N2 flu (“Asian flu”) crossed from birds to humans in China, and killed about 2 million people worldwide. It replaced the H1N1 strain, so most seasonal flus during this era were H2N2. 1968: An H3N2 flu (“Hong Kong flu”) crossed from pigs (?) to humans in Hong Kong, and killed another 2 million people worldwide. It replaced the H2N2 strain, so most seasonal flus during this era were H3N2. 1977: An H1N1 flu (“Russian flu”) leaked from a biology lab (?) in Russia (it might have been a strain from the 1940s, which the Russians were trying to make a vaccine for). It didn’t kill that many people, but it stuck around, and from then on, seasonal flus could be either H3N2 or H1N1. 2009: An H1N1 flu (“Mexican flu” until the PC police stepped in; afterwards “swine flu”) took some horrible circuitous route between birds and pigs and back again, crossed over into humans in Mexico, and killed 200,000 people. It outcompeted older strains of H1N1, but couldn’t crowd out H3N2, so seasonal flus are still either H3N2 or H1N1. …which brings us to the present, hopefully illuminating why “new flu strain crosses over from animals into humans” is such an “uh oh” moment. The Bird Flu Technically, all pandemic flus start as bird flus. Influenza A evolved in birds. Sometimes it spreads to other animals, including pigs, cattle, and humans. The most common way for a bird flu to spread to humans is to “reassort” (not exactly virus sex, but close enough, and the real version is less memorable) with a human flu virus (ie one that has already crossed over to humans). The resulting virus has all of the human flu virus’ human adaptations, but borrows enough new antigens from the bird virus to evade the immune system. Pigs can be infected by both human and bird viruses, so they are a common place for this reassortment to take place. If reassortment is sort of like viral sex, pigs are sort of like Tinder. When a bird flu and human flu reassort in pigs, the resulting disease is called a swine flu. At least the 2009 flu pandemic was a swine flu, and a minority opinion thinks the 1918 pandemic was too. There aren’t major epidemiological differences between direct-from-bird flus and swine flus. H5N1 was first noticed in birds - specifically, a flock of chickens in Scotland in 1959 - after which it disappeared for forty years. In 1996, it showed up in geese in China, then gradually increased its market share among birds worldwide. In 2022, it was found in minks; apparently it had learned to infect mammals. By early 2024, it was seen in cows. Now it’s in cow herds in 16 states, and one of them (California) has declared a state of emergency. And in October, H5N1 was found in pigs for the first time. It’s not uncommon for humans to catch an animal disease. This doesn’t mean the disease has “crossed over” to humans. If the virus isn’t suited to human-to-human transmission, it simply dies off (either before or after killing its human host). Thus, chicken farmers have been reporting scattered H5N1 cases since 1997; now that the virus has spread to cattle, cow farmers have started reporting the same. A Metaculus comment on this topic introduced me to the phrase “biocomputational surface”. Every viral replication that takes place in a human gives the virus one more chance to develop the set of mutations that makes it human-transmissible and start the next pandemic. Or, more likely, every viral replication that takes place in a human who has both the H5N1 bird flu and a normal human flu - or in a pig which has both viruses - gives the virus one extra chance to reassort in a way that produces a bird-antigen-fortified human-adapted flu virus. This doesn’t mean H5N1 will definitely become human-transmissible soon. Many viruses hang out on the borders of transmissibility for decades. Some, for unclear reasons, never cross over at all. But all of this is compatible with the virus becoming transmissible soon. So: What Is The Chance Of A Pandemic? The prediction markets on this topic ask a question about “10,000 cases in the United States”. Does this necessarily mean “pandemic”? Might it be possible to get to 10,000 cases just from the scattered chicken and cow farmers, with no human-to-human transmission? Despite many chicken and cow infections this year, there have only been 60 - 70 recorded human cases. Unless there is a phase change in screening methods, it seems hard for this number to increase to 10,000 off farmers alone. I think it’s fair to treat this question as operationalizing “what is the chance of a pandemic”? By this definition, Manifold estimates a 40% chance of an H5N1 pandemic in 2025. Metaculus estimates a 5% chance. You can see below whether that’s changed since I wrote this essay: 5% versus 40% is a big difference! Who do we trust? I trust Metaculus. Metaculus has beaten Manifold in both of the two head-to-head comparisons that I know of (Jeremiah Johnson’s and mine). Manifold’s number swings by a factor of two from week to week; Metaculus has been steady. But also, Metaculus hosts a CDC-sponsored respiratory disease forecasting tournament which has enriched them in epidemiological expertise. And if you look at the quality of comments on both sites, it’s pretty obvious where the people with more intellectual chops are hanging out. The Manifold comments are mostly single sentences, or occasionally just links to an article about new cases. The Metaculus comments look more like this one by dimaklenchin: Despite the panic propaganda, H5N1 is unlikely to be "just a single mutation away from switching host preference": 1) It normally takes a lot more than a single mutation to switch hosts. E.g., there are at least five different reasons why SIV (monkey equivalent of HIV) is not infectious to humans. Heck, a variant of SIV that bears HIV's receptor-recognizing surface protein (SHIV) is still not infectious to humans. HIV most certainly evolved from SIV but, almost as certainly, it took a very long time to get there. Not that all viruses are the same and things can't turn out differently with flu, but I don't subscribe to the idea that a mere change of receptor specificity (something that can take 1-2 mutations) will be sufficient. 2) We have data. Lots of human infections with other varieties of bird flu in the past - all those viruses ultimately went nowhere. Why would H5N1 be radically different? E.g., the "Canadian teen", despite what sounds like a prolonged exposure, failed to infect anyone around him. Since I am at 18% for the h-2-h H5N1 detection in 2025, I am arbitrarily going ~ an order of magnitude lower than that for something as unprecedented as 10K human infections. Maybe should be much lower but hedging for the time being and will allow another couple months of observations. And Sergio: I'm currently at 20% on the question of reported human-to-human transmission of highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 globally before 2026. However, this question is only about the US, and is more general about all subtypes of H5. But H5N1 very strongly appears to be the most important subtype to consider in this time period. And, given the current situation in the US with H5N1 human cases derived from exposure to poultry or cattle (with cattle(mammals) being more worrisome), h2h transmission seems quite more likely to arise in North America than elsewhere before 2026. Conditioning on h2h transmission in the US (and also trying to consider, with lower probability, a start in Canada), I want to estimate the chances that it becomes sustained and out of control (in which case, if it starts in Canada, I largely expect it to spread to the US). The (6) past events of probable h2h transmission of avian H5(N1), none of which were sustained, could serve as a base rate, although I'm a bit wary of giving much weight to this precedent, since the last event was quite a while ago (2007), and also because reporting and testing standards may have improved considerably since then (so perhaps they might not have been classified as h2h transmission events if they had occurred more recently). The current situation in the US, and events such as the Canadian teen who got sick with H5N1, do suggest a higher background level of risk than normal (which would be reduced if a vaccine for cattle is licensed soon), but I'm wary of overupdating. Conditioned on sustained h2h transmission, reaching over 10k cases in a few months seems likely, although perhaps very strong monitoring and surveillance could contain the situation in time (at the very least to moderate the growth rate). Trying to combine all these factors somewhat haphazardly, I'm currently at 3.5% for this question. That’s before 2026. What about longer-term? Manifold gives a ~50% chance before 2030; Metaculus uses a more complicated method but it says about 25% chance before 2030. H5N1 may cross to humans, but it could take a while. Superforecaster Juan Cambeiro at The Institute For Progress estimated a 4% chance of a “worse than COVID” H5N1 pandemic in “the next year”, but their estimate was made in 2023, without the benefit of the Metaculus estimates or most of our current knowledge. This feels high now - Metaculus says 5% total for H5N1 pandemic, and most pandemic flus are not worse than COVID. IFP also seem to be expecting a case fatality rate greater than 10%, which I find unlikely for the reasons mentioned above. I trust their estimate less than Metaculus’ current ones. I conclude that the most plausible estimate for the chance of an H5N1 pandemic in the next year is 5%. Interestingly, 5% is about the base rate for pandemic flus per year: five in the past century = one per twenty years = 5% chance per year. Isn’t it surprising that we’re still at the base rate when we can see a dangerous-looking flu virus spreading through the types of animals that have caused pandemic flus in the past? Part of the answer is that we’re not - in addition to the 5% chance of H5N1, we have to add the chance of some other pandemic flu. This probably isn’t 5% on its own; scientists monitor flu strains closely, and they haven’t found any others which are giving off as many red flags as H5N1. Still, something could always come out of left field. Maybe we should add a 2.5% chance of some other strain, for a total of 7.5% chance of a flu pandemic (ie beyond normal seasonal flu) next year. But still, isn’t it surprising that we’re so close to the base rate? One way to think about this: the base rate represents how concerned we should be if there was no epidemiological monitoring at all. In that case, we would estimate a probability distribution across different epidemiological landscapes, most of which contain some concerning-looking flu strains. Since we are doing the epidemiological monitoring, we can collapse that distribution into a single picture: one flu strain, H5N1, is in fact pretty concerning, and other strains mostly aren’t. This is enough to move our prior from 5% to 7.5%, but no more. The forecasters I talked to raised one other point of uncertainty: does the flu work more like a dice roll, or like a bus? Dice rolls are uncorrelated with their predecessors; even if it’s been a hundred rolls since you last rolled a 6, your chance this time is still 1/6. But buses come at fixed intervals; if the buses are hourly, and you haven’t seen a bus in the past 59 minutes, then your chance of seeing a bus in the next minute is very high. It’s been 16 years since the last flu pandemic; these pandemics come (on average) every 20 years. I don’t think anyone has a good sense of how to think about this. But it was 40 years between the Spanish and Hong Kong flus, so the twenty year number is at best a rule of thumb. The 5% number feels very low to me (and, apparently, to the average Manifold forecaster). Isn’t H5N1 spreading to cows and pigs and all sorts of other mammals? Isn’t it in the news all the time? I trust Metaculus a lot, but I agree that this is a surprising update, and I’m taking it on faith rather than feeling it in my bones. What Would The Fatality Rate Be For An H5N1 Pandemic? There are four basic stories you could tell about likely H5N1 mortality. First, maybe mortality would be 50%. The argument here is that official statistics report this mortality rate in the chicken farmers who have been infected with H5N1 so far. Several news sources and even some scientists have raised the specter of a pandemic version of H5N1 pandemic with this same death rate, which could kill a quarter to a third of the world population. THIS IS EXTREMELY FAKE. The official statistics only report fatality rate in the infections we know about. Bird flu is rare, there’s no mass testing, and we only learn that somebody had it if they’re in a hospital and the doctors are worried enough to test for rare conditions. Of Americans who got bird flu in the past year, 0 out of 61 have died. Probably this is mostly because America upped its detection game and is now finding milder cases; we also can’t rule out the virus mutating to become less virulent. Metaculus estimates the current true mortality rate as 1.25%. …but leaves a wide 90% confidence interval, from 0.5% to 7%. Second, maybe mortality would be somewhere around 1.25%. The argument here is that Metaculus uses this as its central estimate of US mortality. But Sentinel discusses some reasons to be skeptical of broad inferences from the US numbers: Scientists have been puzzled by the apparently low H5N1 case fatality rate in humans in the US. They offer a number of hypotheses: “The way in which the virus is being transmitted — along with the amount of virus exposure — is limiting the severity of disease.”

Influenza A evolved in birds, and stayed there for at least thousands of years. It crossed to humans later, maybe during historic times - different sources give suggest dates as early as 500 BC or as late as 1500 AD. It probably crossed over multiple times. Maybe it died out in humans after some crossovers, stuck around in birds, and crossed over from birds to humans again later.

Information technologies1 mentions across 1 issues

Information technologies is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 04, 2022 and April 04, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Information technologies over time". It most often appears alongside 2013, Agricultural Revolution, AI.

Reference entry: Information technologies
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 04, 2022
Last seen: April 04, 2022

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Yudkowsky Contra Christiano On AI Takeoff Speeds April 04, 2022

2013 1 shared issues
Agricultural Revolution 1 shared issues
AI 1 shared issues
AI alignment theory 1 shared issues
Ajeya 1 shared issues

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Yudkowsky Contra Christiano On AI Takeoff Speeds

April 04, 2022 · Original source

Information technologies over time (Nagy) Chess AI performance over time. Why does this matter? If there’s a slow takeoff (ie gradual exponential curve), it will become obvious that some kind of terrifying transformative AI revolution is happening, before the situation gets apocalyptic. There will be time to prepare, to test slightly-below-human AIs and see how they respond, to get governments and other stakeholders on board. We don’t have to get every single thing right ahead of time. On the other hand, because this is proceeding along the usual channels, it will be the usual variety of muddled and hard-to-control. With the exception of a few big actors like the US and Chinese government, and maybe the biggest corporations like Google, the outcome will be determined less by any one agent, and more by the usual multi-agent dynamics of political and economic competition. There will be lots of opportunities to affect things, but no real locus of control to do the affecting. If there’s a fast takeoff (ie sudden FOOM), there won’t be much warning. Conventional wisdom will still say that transformative AI is thirty years away. All the necessary pieces (ie AI alignment theory) will have to be ready ahead of time, prepared blindly without any experimental trial-and-error, to load into the AI as soon as it exists. On the plus side, a single actor (whoever has this first AI) will have complete control over the process. If this actor is smart (and presumably they’re a little smart, or they wouldn’t be the first team to invent transformative AI), they can do everything right without going through the usual government-lobbying channels. So the slower a takeoff you expect, the less you should be focusing on getting every technical detail right ahead of time, and the more you should be working on building the capacity to steer government and corporate policy to direct an incoming slew of new technologies. Yudkowsky Contra Christiano Eliezer counters that although progress may retroactively look gradual and continuous when you know what metric to graph it on, it doesn’t necessarily look that way in real life by the measures that real people care about. (one way to think of this: imagine that an AI’s effective IQ starts at 0.1 points, and triples every year, but that we can only measure this vaguely and indirectly. The year it goes from 5 to 15, you get a paper in a third-tier journal reporting that it seems to be improving on some benchmark. The year it goes from 66 to 200, you get a total transformation of everything in society. But later, once we identify the right metric, it was just the same rate of gradual progress the whole time. ) So Eliezer is much less impressed by the history of previous technologies than Paul is. He’s also skeptical of the “GDP will double in 4 years before it doubles in 1” claim, because of two contingent disagreements and two fundamental disagreements. The first contingent disagreement: government regulations make it hard to deploy imperfect things, and non-trivial to deploy things even after they’re perfect. Eliezer has non-jokingly said he thinks AI might destroy the world before the average person can buy a self-driving car. Why? Because the government has to approve self-driving cars (and can drag its feet on that), but the apocalypse can happen even without government approval. In Paul’s model, sometime long before superintelligence we should have AIs that can drive cars, and that increases GDP and contributes to a general sense that exciting things are going on. Eliezer says: fine, what if that’s true? Who cares if self-driving cars will be practical a few years before the world is destroyed? It’ll take longer than that to lobby the government to allow them on the road. The second contingent disagreement: superintelligent AIs can lie to us. Suppose you have an AI which wants to destroy humanity, whose IQ is doubling every six months. Right now it’s at IQ 200, and it suspects that it would take IQ 800 to build a human-destroying superweapon. Its best strategy is to lie low for a year. If it expects humans would turn it off if they knew how close it was to superweapons, it can pretend to be less intelligent than it really is. The period when AIs are holding back so we don’t discover their true power level looks like a period of lower-than-expected GDP growth - followed by a sudden FOOM once the AI gets its superweapon and doesn’t need to hold back. So even if Paul is conceptually right and fundamental progress proceeds along a nice smooth curve, it might not look to us like a nice smooth curve, because regulations and deceptive AIs could prevent mildly-transformative AI progress from showing up on graphs, but wouldn’t prevent the extreme kind of AI progress that leads to apocalypse. To an outside observer, it would just look like nothing much changed, nothing much changed, nothing much changed, and then suddenly, FOOM. But even aside from this, Eliezer doesn’t think Paul is conceptually right! He thinks that even on the fundamental level, AI progress is going to be discontinuous. It’s like a nuclear bomb. Either you don’t have a nuclear bomb yet, or you do have one and the world is forever transformed. There is a specific moment at which you go from “no nuke” to “nuke” without any kind of “slightly worse nuke” acting as a harbinger. He uses the example of chimps → humans. Evolution has spent hundreds of millions of years evolving brainier and brainier animals (not teleologically, of course, but in practice). For most of those hundreds of millions of years, that meant the animal could have slightly more instincts, or a better memory, or some other change that still stayed within the basic animal paradigm. At the chimp → human transition, we suddenly got tool use, language use, abstract thought, mathematics, swords, guns, nuclear bombs, spaceships, and a bunch of other stuff. The rhesus monkey → chimp transition and the chimp → human transition both involved the same ~quadrupling of neuron number, but the former was pretty boring and the latter unlocked enough new capabilities to easily conquer the world. The GPT-2 → GPT-3 transition involved centupling parameter count. Maybe we will keep centupling parameter count every few years, and most times it will be incremental improvement, and one time it will conquer the world. But even talking about centupling parameter points is giving Paul too much credit. Lots of past inventions didn’t come by quadrupling or centupling something, they came by discovering “the secret sauce”. The Wright brothers (he argues) didn’t make a plane with 4x the wingspan of the last plane that didn’t work, they invented the first plane that could fly at all. The Hiroshima bomb wasn’t some previous bomb but bigger, it was what happened after a lot of scientists spent a long time thinking about a fundamentally different paradigm of bomb-making and brought it to a point where it could work at all. The first transformative AI isn’t going to be GPT-3 with more parameters, it will be what happens after someone discovers how to make machines truly intelligent. (this is the same debate Eliezer had with Ajeya over the Biological Anchors post; have I mentioned that Ajeya and Paul are married?) Fine, Let’s Nitpick The Hell Out Of The Chimps Vs. Humans Example This is where the two of them end up, so let’s follow. Between chimps and humans, there were about seven million years of intermediate steps. These had some human capabilities, but not others. IE homo erectus probably had language, but not mathematics, and in terms of taking over the world it did make it to most of the Old World but was less dominant than moderns. But if we say evolutionary history started 500 million years ago (the Cambrian), and AI history started with the Dartmouth Conference in 1955, then the equivalent of 7 million years of evolutionary history is 1 year of AI history. In the very very unlikely and forced comparison where evolutionary history and AI history go at the same speed, there will be only about a year between chimp-level and human-level AIs. A chimp-level AI probably can’t double GDP, so this would count as a fast takeoff by Paul’s criterion. But even more than that, chimp → human feels like a discontinuity. It’s not just “animals kept getting smarter for hundreds of millions of years, and then ended up very smart indeed”. That happened for a while, and then all of sudden there was a near-instant phase transition into a totally different way of using intelligence with completely new abilities. If AI worked like this, we would have useful toys and interesting specialists for a few decades, until suddenly someone “got it right”, completed the package that was necessary for “true intelligence”, and then we would have a completely new category of thing. Paul admits this analogy is awkward for his position. He answers: Chimp evolution is not primarily selecting for making and using technology, for doing science, or for facilitating cultural accumulation. The task faced by a chimp is largely independent of the abilities that give humans such a huge fitness advantage. It’s not completely independent—the overlap is the only reason that evolution eventually produces humans—but it’s different enough that we should not be surprised if there are simple changes to chimps that would make them much better at designing technology or doing science or accumulating culture […] So I don’t think the example of evolution tells us much about whether the continuous change story applies to intelligence. This case is potentially missing the key element that drives the continuous change story—optimization for performance. Evolution changes continuously on the narrow metric it is optimizing, but can change extremely rapidly on other metrics. For human technology, features of the technology that aren’t being optimized change rapidly all the time. When humans build AI, they will be optimizing for usefulness, and so progress in usefulness is much more likely to be linear. That is, evolution wasn’t optimizing for tool use/language/intelligence, so we got an “overhang” where chimps could potentially have been very good at these, but evolution never bothered “closing the circuit” and turning those capabilities “on”. After a long time, evolution finally blundered into an area where marginal improvements in these capacities improved fitness, so evolution started improving them and it was easy. Imagine a company which, through some oversight, didn’t have a Sales department. They just sat around designing and manufacturing increasingly brilliant products, but not putting any effort into selling them. Then the CEO remembers they need a Sales department, starts one up, and the company goes from moving near zero units to moving millions of units overnight. It would look like the company had “suddenly” developed a “vast increase in capabilities”. But this is only possible when a CEO who is weirdly unconcerned about profit forgets to do obvious profit-increasing things for many years. This is Paul’s counterargument to the chimp analogy. Evolution isn’t directly concerned about various intellectual skills; it only wants them in the unusual cases where they’ll contribute to fitness on the margin. AI companies will be very concerned about various intellectual skills. If there’s a trivial change that can make their product 10x better, they’ll make it. So AI capabilities will grow in a “well-rounded” way, there won’t be any “overhangs”, and there won’t be any opportunities for a sudden overhang-solving phase transition with associated new-capability development like with chimps → humans. Eliezer answers: Chimps are nearly useless because they're not general, and doing anything on the scale of building a nuclear plant requires mastering so many different nonancestral domains that it's no wonder natural selection didn't happen to separately train any single creature across enough different domains that it had evolved to solve every kind of domain-specific problem involved in solving nuclear physics and chemistry and metallurgy and thermics in order to build the first nuclear plant in advance of any old nuclear plants existing. Humans are general enough that the same braintech selected just for chipping flint handaxes and making water-pouches and outwitting other humans, happened to be general enough that it could scale up to solving all the problems of building a nuclear plant - albeit with some added cognitive tech that didn't require new brainware, and so could happen incredibly fast relative to the generation times for evolutionarily optimized brainware. Now, since neither humans nor chimps were optimized to be "useful" (general), and humans just wandered into a sufficiently general part of the space that it cascaded up to wider generality, we should legit expect the curve of generality to look at least somewhat different if we're optimizing for that. Eg, right now people are trying to optimize for generality with AIs like Mu Zero and GPT-3. In both cases we have a weirdly shallow kind of generality. Neither is as smart or as deeply general as a chimp, but they are respectively better than chimps at a wide variety of Atari games, or a wide variety of problems that can be superposed onto generating typical human text. They are, in a sense, more general than a biological organism at a similar stage of cognitive evolution, with much less complex and architected brains, in virtue of having been trained, not just on wider datasets, but on bigger datasets using gradient-descent memorization of shallower patterns, so they can cover those wide domains while being stupider and lacking some deep aspects of architecture. It is not clear to me that we can go from observations like this, to conclude that there is a dominant mainline probability for how the future clearly ought to go and that this dominant mainline is, "Well, before you get human-level depth and generalization of general intelligence, you get something with 95% depth that covers 80% of the domains for 10% of the pragmatic impact". ...or whatever the concept is here, because this whole conversation is, on my own worldview, being conducted in a shallow way relative to the kind of analysis I did in Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics, where I was like, "here is the historical observation, here is what I think it tells us that puts a lower bound on this input-output curve". Here Eliezer sort of kind of grants Paul’s point that AIs will be optimized for generality in a way chimps aren’t, but points to his previous “Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics” essay to argue that we should expect a fast takeoff anyway. IEM has a lot of stuff in it, but one key point is that instead of using analogies to predict the course of future AI, we should open that black box and try to actually reason about how it will work, in which case we realize that recursive self-improvement common-sensically has to cause an intelligence explosion. I am sort of okay with this, but I feel like a commitment to avoiding analogies should involve not bringing up the chimp-human analogy further, which Eliezer continues to do, quite a lot. I do feel like Paul succeeded in convincing me that we shouldn’t place too much evidential weight on it. The Wimbledon Of Reference Class Tennis “Reference class tennis” is an old rationalist idiom for people throwing analogies back and forth. “AI will be slow, because it’s an economic transition like the Agricultural or Industrial Revolution, and those were slow!” “No, AI will be fast, because it’s an evolutionary step like chimps → humans, and that was fast!” “No, AI will be slow, because it’s an invention, like the computer, and computers were invented piecemeal and required decades of innovation to be useful.” “No, AI will be fast, because it’s an invention, like the nuclear bomb, and nuclear bombs went from impossible to city-killing in a single day.” “No, AI will be slow, because it will be surrounded by a shell-like metallic computer case, which makes it like a turtle, and turtles are slow.” “No, AI will be fast, because it’s dangerous and powerful, like a tiger, and tigers are fast!” And so on. Comparing things to other things is a time-tested way of speculating about them. But there are so many other things to compare to that you can get whatever result you want. This is the failure mode that the term “reference class tennis” was supposed to point to. Both participants in this debate are very smart and trying their hardest to avoid reference-class tennis, but neither entirely succeeds. Eliezer’s preferred classes are Bitcoin (“there wasn't a cryptocurrency developed a year before Bitcoin using 95% of the ideas which did 10% of the transaction volume”), nukes, humans/chimps, the Wright Brothers, AlphaGo (which really was a discontinuous improvement on previous Go engines), and AlphaFold (ditto for proteins). Paul’s preferred classes are the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, chess engines (which have gotten better along a gradual, well-behaved curve), all sorts of inventions like computers and ships (likewise), and world GDP. Eliezer already listed most of these in his Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics paper in 2013, and concluded that the space of possible analogies was contradictory enough that we needed to operate at a higher level. Maybe so, but when someone lobs a reference class tennis ball at you, it’s hard to resist the urge to hit it back. Recursive Self-Improvement This is where I think Eliezer most wants to take the discussion. The idea is: once AI is smarter than humans, it can do a superhuman job of developing new AI. In his Microeconomics paper, he writes about an argument he (semi-hypothetically) had with Ray Kurzweil about Moore’s Law. Kurzweil expected Moore’s Law to continue forever, even after the development of superintelligence. Eliezer objects: Suppose we were dealing with minds running a million times as fast as a human, at which rate they could do a year of internal thinking in thirty-one seconds, such that the total subjective time from the birth of Socrates to the death of Turing would pass in 20.9 hours. Do you still think the best estimate for how long it would take them to produce their next generation of computing hardware would be 1.5 orbits of the Earth around the Sun? That is: the fact that it took 1.5 years for transistor density to double isn’t a natural law. It’s pointing to a law that the amount of resources (most notably intelligence) that civilization focused on the transistor-densifying problem equalled the amount it takes to double it every 1.5 years. If some shock drastically changed available resources (by eg speeding up human minds a million times), this would change the resources involved, and the same laws would predict transistor speed doubling in some shorter amount of time (naively 0.000015 years, although realistically at that scale other inputs would dominate). So when Paul derives clean laws of economics showing that things move along slow growth curves, Eliezer asks: why do you think they would keep doing this when one of the discoveries they make along that curve might be “speeding up intelligence a million times”? (Eliezer actually thinks improvements in the quality of intelligence will dominate improvements in speed - AIs will mostly be smarter, not just faster - but speed is a useful example here and we’ll stick with it) Paul answers: Summary of my response: Before there is AI that is great at self-improvement there will be AI that is mediocre at self-improvement. Powerful AI can be used to develop better AI (amongst other things). This will lead to runaway growth. This on its own is not an argument for discontinuity: before we have AI that radically accelerates AI development, the slow takeoff argument suggests we will have AI that significantly accelerates AI development (and before that, slightly accelerates development). That is, an AI is just another, faster step in the hyperbolic growth we are currently experiencing, which corresponds to a further increase in rate but not a discontinuity (or even a discontinuity in rate). The most common argument for recursive self-improvement introducing a new discontinuity seems be: some systems “fizzle out” when they try to design a better AI, generating a few improvements before running out of steam, while others are able to autonomously generate more and more improvements. This is basically the same as the universality argument in a previous section. Eliezer: Oh, come on. That is straight-up not how simple continuous toy models of RSI work. Between a neutron multiplication factor of 0.999 and 1.001 there is a very huge gap in output behavior. Outside of toy models: Over the last 10,000 years we had humans going from mediocre at improving their mental systems to being (barely) able to throw together AI systems, but 10,000 years is the equivalent of an eyeblink in evolutionary time - outside the metaphor, this says, "A month before there is AI that is great at self-improvement, there will be AI that is mediocre at self-improvement." (Or possibly an hour before, if reality is again more extreme along the Eliezer-Hanson axis than Eliezer. But it makes little difference whether it's an hour or a month, given anything like current setups.) This is just pumping hard again on the intuition that says incremental design changes yield smooth output changes, which (the meta-level of the essay informs us wordlessly) is such a strong default that we are entitled to believe it if we can do a good job of weakening the evidence and arguments against it. And the argument is: Before there are systems great at self-improvement, there will be systems mediocre at self-improvement; implicitly: "before" implies "5 years before" not "5 days before"; implicitly: this will correspond to smooth changes in output between the two regimes even though that is not how continuous feedback loops work. I got a bit confused trying to understand the criticality metaphor here. There’s no equivalent of neutron decay, so any AI that can consistently improve its intelligence is “critical” in some sense. Imagine Elon Musk replaces his brain with a Neuralink computer which - aside from having read-write access - exactly matches his current brain in capabilities. Also he becomes immortal. He secludes himself from the world, studying AI and tinkering with his brain’s algorithms. Does he become a superintelligence? I think under the assumptions Paul and Eliezer are using, eventually maybe. After some amount of time he’ll come across a breakthrough he can use to increase his intelligence. Then, armed with that extra intelligence, he’ll be able to pursue more such breakthroughs. However intelligent the AI you’re scared of is, Musk will get there eventually. How long will it take? A good guess might be “years” - Musk starts out as an ordinary human, and ordinary humans are known to take years to make breakthroughs. Suppose it takes Musk one year to come up with a first breakthrough that raises his IQ 1 point. How long will his second breakthrough take? It might take longer, because he has picked the lowest-hanging fruit, and all the other possible breakthroughs are much harder. Or it might take shorter, because he’s slightly smarter than he was before, and maybe some extra intelligence goes a really long way in AI research. The concept of an intelligence explosion seems to assume the second effect dominates the first. This would match the observation that human researchers, who aren’t getting any smarter over time, continue making new discoveries. That suggests the range of possible discoveries at a given intelligence level is pretty vast. Some research finds that the usual pattern in science is constant rate of discovery from exponentially increasing number of researchers, suggesting strong low-hanging fruit effects, but these seem to be overwhelmed by other considerations in AI right now. I think Eliezer’s position on this subject is shaped by assumptions like: If you have an AI as intelligent as Elon Musk today, then tomorrow you can run it on more hardware with a bit of normal human algorithmic progress, and get one twice as intelligent. So even if it would take Elon years to make a breakthrough, long before those years are up you’ll have an AI that can make breakthroughs much faster.

Inline links: Nagy, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!FvS1!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F985b3c20-cf30-4b4b-a12f-8e5deb10e5af_850x700.png, thirty years away, Biological Anchors, Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics, hyperbolic growth we are currently experiencing, Some research finds

information theory1 mentions across 1 issues

information theory is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 21, 2025 and February 21, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "But there are objective measures of simplicity! They come from information theory". It most often appears alongside /r/slatestarcodex, ACX, Adrian.

Reference entry: information theory
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: February 21, 2025
Last seen: February 21, 2025

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

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

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Highlights From The Comments On Tegmark's Mathematical Universe

February 21, 2025 · Original source

“We find ourselves on planet Robonica VII, rather than as Boltzmann brains floating in the void. It seems like it’s not wildly impossibly uncommon for beings to exist in this way.” “Consciousness” is a useful shorthand for discussing these insights so that we don’t have to talk about planets full of robots every time we want to have a philosophical discussion, but I don’t think anything in this discussion hinges on it. dsteffee writes: Why can't you make a random draw from an infinite set? I messed up my terminology here, although luckily most people figured out what I meant. The correct terminology (thanks /r/slatestarcodex commenters) is that you can’t make a uniform random draw from a set of infinite measure. Imagine trying to pick a random number between one and infinity. If you pick any particular number - let’s say 408,170,037,993,105,667,148,717 - then it will be shockingly low - approximately 100% of all possible numbers are higher than it. It would be much crazier than someone trying to pick a number from one to one billion and choosing “one”. Since this will happen no matter what number you pick, the concept itself must be ill-defined. Reddit commenter elliotglazer has an even cuter version of this paradox: » “The contradiction can be made more apparent with the "two draws" paradox. Suppose one could draw a positive integer uniformly at random, and did so twice. What's the probability the second is greater? No matter what the first draw is, you will then have 100% confidence the second is greater, so by conservation of expected evidence, you should already believe with 100% confidence the second is greater. Of course, I could tell you the second draw first to argue that with 100% probability, the first is greater, contradiction.” When I said you could do this with some sort of simplicity-weighted measure, I meant something like how 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + … = 1. Here, even though you are adding an infinite number of terms, the sum is a finite number. So if you can put universes in some order, let’s say from simplest to most complex, you could assign the first universe measure 1/2, the second universe measure 1/4, the third universe measure 1/8, and so on, and the sum of their measure would be 1. Then you just draw a random number between 0 and 1 and see which universe it corresponds to (eg if you got 0.641, then since this is between 1/2 and 1/2+1/4, it corresponds to universe #2). EigenCat writes: But there are objective measures of simplicity! They come from information theory. It's the information content of the rules and initial conditions in bits, or else their Kolmogorov complexity (how many bits you need for a program that generates these rules and initial conditions). Of course there's still the question of which *exact* measure we use, but that's very different from saying we don't have an objective simplicity metric at all. (And yes, God has much more complexity based on this metric, because you'd need to fully specify the God's being - basically fully specify a mind, in sufficient detail to be able to predict how that mind would react to *any* situation, and that's way more complex than a few rules on a chalkboard.) Anyway, the bigger question for me is WHY does in need to be weighed specifically by simplicity (of all possible criteria) in the first place : ) I am really out of my depth talking about information theory, but my impression was that this is a useful hack, but not perfectly objectively true, because there is no neutral programming language, no neutral compiler, and no neutral architecture. Kolmogorov complexity of statements is sometimes regarded as language-independent, because there’s a low bound on how much language can matter. But even this practically-low bound is philosophically confusing: since the universe actually has to implement the solution we come up with, there can’t be any ambiguity. But how can the cosmos make an objective cosmic choice among programming languages? This is weird enough that it takes away from the otherwise-impressive elegance of the theory. But also, you can design a perverse programming language where complex concepts are simple, and simple concepts are complex. You can design a compression scheme where the entirety of the Harry Potter universe is represented by the bit ‘1’. Now the Harry Potter universe is the simplest thing in existence and we should expect most observers to live there. This is obviously a ridiculous thing to do, but why? Maybe because now the compiler is complex and unnatural, so we should penalize the complexity of language+compiler scheme? But without knowing what the system architecture is, it’s hard to talk about the size of the compiler - and in this case, we’re trying to pretend that we’re running this whole thing on the void itself, and there is no system architecture! All of this makes me think that although Kolmogorov complexity gestures at a solution, and makes it seem like there should be a solution, nobody has exactly solved this one yet. kzhou7 writes: Though nobody can disprove this hypothesis, there's a reason a lot of physicists dislike it: if it were actually seriously believed, at any previous point in the history of physics, it would have stopped scientific progress. 1650: why does the Earth orbit the Sun the way it does? Of course, because it's a mathematically consistent possibility, ellipses are nice, and we'd be dead if it didn't! What more is there to say? But actually it was Newton's law of gravity.

Inline links: writes, /r/slatestarcodex, writes, writes

infrastructure week1 mentions across 1 issues

infrastructure week is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 20, 2021 and February 20, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "every week is “infrastructure week.”". It most often appears alongside America, California, Congress.

Reference entry: infrastructure week
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: February 20, 2021
Last seen: February 20, 2021

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Ezra Klein On Vetocracy February 20, 2021

America 1 shared issues
California 1 shared issues
Congress 1 shared issues
coronavirus crisis 1 shared issues
Ezra Klein 1 shared issues

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Ezra Klein On Vetocracy

February 20, 2021 · Original source

I’ve covered Congress for almost 20 years. The place is littered with proposals to construct universal pre-K and reimagine the health system, to decarbonize the US economy and incentivize drug development through prizes and solve the housing crisis. They just don’t pass. It’s become a running joke in Washington that every week is “infrastructure week.” But we’re not rebuilding American infrastructure.

ingroup1 mentions across 1 issues

ingroup is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 19, 2022 and August 19, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "is postrationalism/ingroup/TPOT". It most often appears alongside 00s, 70s, 80s.

Reference entry: ingroup
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 19, 2022
Last seen: August 19, 2022

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Highlights From The Comments On Subcultures August 19, 2022

00s 1 shared issues
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Highlights From The Comments On Subcultures

August 19, 2022 · Original source

Postcycle: Since 2020 Now things are pretty stable, partly because we put enough distance between ourselves and our growth phase that we can start to get a little hipster cool again, and partly because effective altruism is the Hot New Thing that everyone is supposed to have an opinion on. This is the usual pattern of exciting talked-about movements spawning successor movements that then get to be exciting and talked-about in turn, while the original movement gets to go back to being normal people with a common interest again. By the way, in the past week, effective altruism has gotten long, glowing profiles in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Vox, the cover of TIME Magazine, shoutouts from Elon Musk and Andrew Yang, podcast interviews with Tyler Cowen and Tim Ferriss, and criticism from Freddie deBoer. Enjoy it while it lasts! ___________________ 7: MT writes: A lot of this sounds like truism, or selection bias. Thing isn't popular or exciting to most, then it catches on and grows, then it stops growing, fragments into new directions and isn't novel but becomes part of the mainstream. This HAS TO describe literally anything in the past that was ever popular/exciting, because it wasn't always that way (started small) and can't grow indefinitely without becoming either an institution (stable leadership/direction), fragmented (new leadership/direction), or just falling apart. The germ of this idea was my feeling that I’ve been in movements where it starts out feeling like everyone can’t stop gushing about how great we are, and then later there’s another phase where criticism reigns and everyone feels slightly embarrassed to be involved. This doesn’t feel tautological to me, although it might become trivial if you allow enough selection bias (some movement where this hasn’t happened “isn’t the kind of movement this happens to”). I could prove this by making nontrivial predictions about which movements are going to get less camaraderie and more internecine struggle in the future. Four years ago I would have said “new left socialism”, and I think I did endorse Robby Soave’s article to that effect at the time, but I think new left socialism is well into involution or even postcycle now. Last year I would have said YIMBYism, but I’m not up-to-date on it and maybe it’s already transitioned too. The only movement I see that’s still clearly high on “we are so great and such good friends with each other” is postrationalism/ingroup/TPOT, so sure, I expect things to get worse for them (sorry for this potentially self-fulfilling prophecy). (I’m nervous about saying EA because they still have more money than they can spend in a reasonable amount of time; as long as that situation continues they won’t be exactly resource-scarce, and the people with the purse-strings will have a natural advantage as “elites”.) I’m actually surprised how few uncomplicated happy growth spurt movements I can think of now, compared to how many I can think of that seem to have passed through that stage. I think this is a combination of: This is a pretty pessimistic social moment (eg the thing where dystopian SF has become more popular than the utopian SF of the late 20th century).

Inline links: the New Yorker, New York Times, Vox, cover of TIME Magazine, Elon Musk, Andrew Yang, Tyler Cowen, Tim Ferriss, Freddie deBoer, MT, Robby Soave’s article to that effect, postrationalism/ingroup/TPOT

initial coin offering1 mentions across 1 issues

initial coin offering is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 07, 2022 and February 07, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "initial coin offering style funding schemes". It most often appears alongside Afghanistan, Alameda County, California, Alice.

Reference entry: initial coin offering
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: February 07, 2022
Last seen: February 07, 2022

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The Passage Of Polymarket February 07, 2022

Afghanistan 1 shared issues
Alameda County, California 1 shared issues
Alice 1 shared issues
America 1 shared issues
blockchain 1 shared issues

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The Passage Of Polymarket

February 07, 2022 · Original source

There are lots of financial products which people want, but which regulation prevents them from having. Some of these are totally without social value, like Ponzi schemes and Bored Apes. Others have a lot of social value, like prediction markets, initial coin offering style funding schemes, and cutting middlemen out of immigrant remittances. More than a few might even have negative social value, like easy ways to buy drugs, or super-high-interest loans marketed to very impulsive people. Without passing judgment on whether these things are good or bad, they are legion. Collectively, they’re a zillion-dollar market.

initiation ceremony1 mentions across 1 issues

initiation ceremony is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 15, 2025 and July 15, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "non-horrible initiation ceremony among the Tiwi people". It most often appears alongside Aboriginal, Aboriginal Australia, Aboriginal society.

Reference entry: initiation ceremony
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 15, 2025
Last seen: July 15, 2025

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Book Review: Arguments About Aborigines July 15, 2025

Aboriginal 1 shared issues
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Book Review: Arguments About Aborigines

July 15, 2025 · Original source

Many of these seem like inadequate equilibria, or multipolar traps - nobody wants to be the first person to skip the brutal initiation ceremony and look like a pussy. But other problems are just stupid. The Marind-anim were warlike raiders who stole other tribes’ children because their own women were infertile. Unbeknownst to them, their own women were infertile because of a “fertility ritual” where multiple men would rape each woman on her wedding night so violently that it destroyed her reproductive system. Eventually European colonizers made them stop, and their fertility miraculously rebounded.

Inline links: inadequate equilibria, multipolar traps

Sure, says Rousseau, but may I present as Exhibit A pages 181-182, from a chapter focusing on a rare non-horrible initiation ceremony among the Tiwi people of the the Northern Australian islands:

The Tiwi say that when a boy’s public hair begins to grow, dogs bark at him in camp and crocodiles and bulls chase him in the bush. In the old days, the source of provocation was forcibly plucked out [that is, they pulled out all his pubic hairs in an initiation ceremony - “non-horrible” is a matter of degree!] As a son’s burgeoning sexuality was potentially a destabilizing force in his father’s harem, the preservation of paternal and filial goodwill depended on separation through the institution of initiation, followed by the son’s growing absorption in the corporate affairs of men (which included the cultivation of patronage necessary for the promise of a wife from outside his own band). All these traditional structures have now collapsed, and nothing viable has been put in their place. The transition from childhood dependence to adult autonomy, once mediated by external authority, is now beset by incoherence and uncertainty of aims. The family itself is the remaining authority, and children often lack the motivation to solve their problems by making a clean break with it. Ambivalence inherent in the father-son relationship remains unresolved and a source of instability, fluctuating between violence and mutual aid. Young men have nightmares about death, and suffer chronically from melancholy, depression, and rage.

inner alignment1 mentions across 1 issues

inner alignment is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 11, 2022 and April 11, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Carrying that objective function over to the mesa-optimizer you actually get is called inner alignment". It most often appears alongside AI safety curriculum, Alignment Forum, AlphaGo.

Reference entry: inner alignment
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 11, 2022
Last seen: April 11, 2022

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Deceptively Aligned Mesa-Optimizers: It's Not Funny If I Have To Explain It April 11, 2022

AI safety curriculum 1 shared issues
Alignment Forum 1 shared issues
AlphaGo 1 shared issues
DALL-E 1 shared issues
DeepMind 1 shared issues

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Deceptively Aligned Mesa-Optimizers: It's Not Funny If I Have To Explain It

April 11, 2022 · Original source

Prosaic alignment is hard… “Prosaic alignment” (see this article for more) means alignment of normal AIs like the ones we use today. For a while, people thought those AIs couldn’t reach dangerous levels, and that AIs that reached dangerous levels would have so many exotic new discoveries that we couldn’t even begin to speculate on what they would be like or how to align them. After GPT-2, DALL-E, and the rest, alignment researchers got more concerned that AIs kind of like current models could be dangerous. Prosaic alignment - trying to align AIs like the ones we have now - has become the dominant (though not unchallenged) paradigm in alignment research. “Prosaic” doesn’t necessarily mean the AI cannot write poetry; see Gwern’s AI generated poetry for examples. … because OOD behavior is unpredictable “OOD” stands for “out of distribution”. All AIs are trained in a certain environment. Then they get deployed in some other environment. If it’s like the training environment, presumably their training is pretty relevant and helpful. If it’s not like the training environment, anything can happen. Returning to our stock example, the “training environment” where evolution designed humans didn’t involve contraceptives. In that environment, the base optimizer’s goal (pass on genes) and the mesa-optimizer’s goal (get genital friction) were very well-aligned - doing one often led to the other - so there wasn’t much pressure on evolution to look for a better proxy. Then 1957, boom, the FDA approves the oral contraceptive pill, and suddenly the deployment environment looks really really different from the training environment and the proxy collapses so humiliatingly that people start doing crazy things like electing Viktor Orban prime minister. So: suppose we train a robot to pick strawberries. We let it flail around in a strawberry patch, and reinforce it whenever strawberries end up in a bucket. Eventually it learns to pick strawberries very well indeed. But maybe all the training was done on a sunny day. And maybe what it actually learned was to identify the metal bucket by the way it gleamed in the sunlight. Later we ask it to pick strawberries in the evening, where a local streetlight is the brightest thing around, and it throws the strawberries at the streetlight instead. So fine. We train it in a variety of different lighting conditions, until we’re sure that, no matter what the lighting situation, the strawberries go in the bucket. Then one day someone with a big bulbous red nose wanders on to the field, and the robot tears his nose off and pulls it into the bucket. If only there had been someone with a nose that big and red in the training distribution, so we could have told it not to do that! The point is, just because it’s learned “strawberries into bucket” in one environment, doesn’t mean it’s safe or effective in another. And we can never be sure we’ve caught all the ways the environment can vary. …and deception is more dangerous than Goodharting. To “Goodhart” is to take advantage of Goodhart’s Law: to follow the letter of your reward function, rather than the spirit. The ordinary-life equivalent is “teaching to the test”. The system’s programmers (eg the Department of Education) have an objective (children should learn). They delegate that objective to mesa-optimizers (the teachers) via a proxy objective (children should do well on the standardized test) and a correlated reward function (teachers get paid more if their students get higher test scores). The teachers can either pursue the base objective for less reward (teach children useful skills), or pursue their mesa-level objective for more reward (teach them how to do well on the test). An alignment failure! This sucks, but it’s a bounded problem. We already know that some teachers teach to the test, and the Department of Education has accepted this as a reasonable cost of having the incentive system at all. We might imagine our strawberry-picker cutting strawberries into little pieces, so that it counts as having picked more strawberries. Again, it sucks, but once a programmer notices it can be fixed pretty quickly (as long as the AI is still weak and under control). What about deception? Suppose the strawberry-picker happens to land on some goal function other than the intended one. Maybe, as before, it wants to toss strawberries at light sources, in a way that works when the nearest light source is a metal bucket, but fails when it’s a streetlight. Our programmers are (somewhat) smart and careful, so during training, they test it at night, next to a streetlight. What happens? If it’s just a dumb collection of reflexes trained by gradient descent, it throws the strawberry at the streetlight and this is easily caught and fixed. If it’s a very smart mesa-optimizer, it might think “If I throw the strawberry at the streetlight, I will be caught and trained to have different goals. This totally fails to achieve my goal of having strawberries near light sources. So throwing the strawberry at the light source this time, in the training environment, fails to achieve my overall goal of having strawberries thrown at light sources in general. I’ll do what the humans want - put the strawberry in the bucket - for now.” So it puts the strawberry in the bucket and doesn’t get caught. Then, as soon as the humans stop looking, it throws strawberries at the streetlight again. Deception is more dangerous than Goodharting because Goodharting will get caught and trained away, and deception might not. I might not be explaining this well, see also Deceptively Aligned Mesa-Optimizers? It’s More Likely Than You Think: We prevent OOD behavior by detecting OOD and obtaining more human labels when we detect it… If you’re (somewhat) careful, you can run your strawberry-picking AI at night, see it throw strawberries at streetlights, and train it out of this behavior (ie have a human programmer label it “bad” so the AI gradient-descends away from it) …and we eliminate the incentive for deception by ensuring that the base optimizer is myopic A myopic optimizer is one that reinforces programs based only on their performance within a short time horizon. So for example, the outside gradient descent loop might grade a strawberry picker only on how well it did picking strawberries for the first hour it was deployed. If this worked perfectly, it would create an optimizer with a short time horizon. When it considered deceiving its programmers in order to get a payoff a few days later when they stopped watching it, it wouldn’t bother, since a few days later is outside the time horizon. …and implements a decision theory incapable of acausal trade. You don’t want to know about this one, really. Just pretend it never mentioned this, sorry for the inconvenience. There are deceptively-aligned non-myopic mesa-optimizers even for a myopic base objective. Even if the base optimizer is myopic, the mesa-optimizer might not be. Evolution designed humans myopically, in the sense that we live some number of years, and nothing that happens after that can reward or punish us further. But we still “build for posterity” anyway, presumably as a spandrel of having working planning software at all. Infinite optimization power might be able to evolve this out of us, but infinite optimization power could do lots of stuff, and real evolution remains stubbornly finite. Maybe it would be helpful if we could make the mesa-optimizer itself myopic (though this would severely limit its utility). But so far there is no way to make a mesa-optimizer anything. You just run the gradient descent and cross your fingers. The most likely outcome: you run myopic gradient descent to create a strawberry picker. It creates a mesa-optimizer with some kind of proxy goal which corresponds very well to strawberry picking in the training optimization, like flinging red things at lights (realistically it will be weirder and more exotic than this). The mesa-optimizer is not incentivized to think about anything more than an hour out, but does so anyway, for the same reason I’m not incentivized to speculate about the far future but I’m doing so anyway. While speculating about the far future, it realizes that failing to pick strawberries correctly now will thwart its goal of throwing red things at light sources later. It picks strawberries correctly in the training distribution, and then, when training is over and nobody is watching, throws strawberries at streetlights. (Then it realizes it could throw lots more red things at light sources if it was more powerful, achieves superintelligence somehow, and converts the mass of the Earth into red things it can throw at the sun. The end.) III. You’re still here? But we already finished explaining the meme! Okay, fine. Is any of this relevant to the real world? As far as we know, there are no existing full mesa-optimizers. AlphaGo is kind of a mesa-optimizer. You could approximate it as a gradient descent loop creating a good-Go-move optimizer. But this would only be an approximation: DeepMind hard-coded some parts of AlphaGo, then gradient-descended other parts. Its objective function is “win games of Go”, which is hard-coded and pretty clear. Whether or not you choose to call it a mesa-optimizer, it’s not a very scary one. Will we get scary mesa-optimizers in the future? This ties into one of the longest-running debates in AI alignment - see eg my review of Reframing Superintelligence, or the Eliezer Yudkowsky/Richard Ngo dialogue. Optimists say: “Since a goal-seeking AI might kill everyone, I would simply not create one”. They speculate about mechanical/instinctual superintelligences that would be comparatively easy to align, and might help us figure out how to deal with their scarier cousins. But the mesa-optimizer literature argues: we have limited to no control over what kind of AIs we get. We can hope and pray for mechanical instinctual AIs all we want. We can avoid specifically designing goal-seeking AIs. But really, all we’re doing here is setting up a gradient descent loop and pressing ‘go’. Then the loop evolves whatever kind of AI best minimizes our loss function. Will that be a mesa-optimizer? Well, I benefit from considering my actions and then choosing the one that best achieves my goal. Do you benefit from this? It sure does seem like this helps in a broad class of situations. So it would be surprising if planning agents weren’t an effective AI design. And if they are, we should expect gradient descent to stumble across them eventually. This is the scenario that a lot of AI alignment research focuses on. When we create the first true planning agent - on purpose or by accident - the process will probably start with us running a gradient descent loop with some objective function. That will produce a mesa-optimizer with some other, potentially different, objective function. Making sure you actually like the objective function that you gave the original gradient descent loop on purpose is called outer alignment. Carrying that objective function over to the mesa-optimizer you actually get is called inner alignment. Outer alignment problems tend to sound like Sorcerer’s Apprentice. We tell the AI to pick strawberries, but we forgot to include caveats and stop signals. The AI becomes superintelligent and converts the whole world into strawberries so it can pick as many as possible. Inner alignment problems tend to sound like the AI tiling the universe with some crazy thing which, to humans, might not look like picking strawberries at all, even though in the AI’s exotic ontology it served as some useful proxy for strawberries in the training distribution. My stand-in for this is “converts the whole world into red things and throws them into the sun”, but whatever the AI that kills us really does will probably be weirder than that. They’re not ironic Sorcerer’s Apprentice-style comeuppance. They’re just “what?” If you wrote a book about a wizard who created a strawberry-picking golem, and it converted the entire earth into ferrous microspheres and hurled them into the sun, it wouldn’t become iconic the way Sorcerer’s Apprentice did. Inner alignment problems happen “first”, so we won’t even make it to the good-story outer alignment kind unless we solve a lot of issues we don’t currently know how to solve. For more information, you can read: Rob Miles’ video above, direct link here, channel here.

Inline links: this article, Gwern’s AI generated poetry, electing Viktor Orban prime minister, Goodhart’s Law, Deceptively Aligned Mesa-Optimizers? It’s More Likely Than You Think, my review of, Eliezer Yudkowsky/Richard Ngo dialogue, here, here

Rafael Harth’s Inner Alignment: Explain Like I’m 12 Edition,

Inline links: Inner Alignment: Explain Like I’m 12 Edition

The 60-odd posts on the Alignment Forum tagged “inner alignment”

Inline links: 60-odd posts on the Alignment Forum

Inner Light1 mentions across 1 issues

Inner Light is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 04, 2022 and January 04, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Inner Light of our own hearts". It most often appears alongside AGI, America, Asian Scientist.

Reference entry: Inner Light
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: January 04, 2022
Last seen: January 04, 2022

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Movie Review: Don't Look Up January 04, 2022

AGI 1 shared issues
America 1 shared issues
Asian Scientist 1 shared issues
Behind the Curve 1 shared issues
CDC 1 shared issues

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Movie Review: Don't Look Up

January 04, 2022 · Original source

You should absolutely trust Science. But Science is not clearly visible, like a comet bearing down on you. Science is like the Gnostic God. It exists, somewhere out there, perfect in itself. It is pure and right and beautiful. If you could hear it, it would certainly speak Truth. Yet here we are, in the stupid material universe, seeing through a glass darkly. Good sometimes looks like evil, evil often looks like good, and there’s some jerk with the head of a lion and the body of a snake psyching us out at every turn. Do we trust the priests? The scriptures? The Inner Light of our own hearts? “Just trust in God”. NOT HELPFUL.

Inner Party1 mentions across 1 issues

Inner Party is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 23, 2024 and May 23, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "It divided people into Inner Party, Outer Party, and proles". It most often appears alongside 1984, 1984 Calendar Meme, ACX.

Reference entry: Inner Party
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 23, 2024
Last seen: May 23, 2024

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A Theoretical "Case Against Education" May 23, 2024

1984 1 shared issues
1984 Calendar Meme 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
Ahab 1 shared issues
Airstrip One 1 shared issues

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A Theoretical "Case Against Education"

May 23, 2024 · Original source

(full list of things I remember about 1984: the author was George Orwell. There were three countries called Eurasia, Eastasia, and Oceania. Britain was part of Eurasia and called “Airstrip One”. Every so often the countries would shift alliances, and the government would lie and say “we have always been at war with Eastasia”. There was an evil totalitarian government with a possibly-fake leader named Big Brother, and a possibly-fake rebel with a Jewish-sounding name. It divided people into Inner Party, Outer Party, and proles. There was a language called “Newspeak” with neologisms like “doubleplusgood” that made it hard to question authority. There were characters named Winston and Julia. Winston sort of tried to be against the evil government; he got tortured through some horrifying thing involving rats; at the end he said he loved Big Brother and 2+2=5. Something was weird about Julia and maybe she was an agent of the evil government or something. I think these are all facts that I might encounter in the wild once every few years.)

Insanity Wolf1 mentions across 1 issues

Insanity Wolf is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 24, 2021 and November 24, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Insanity Wolf position is: maybe you should take all twenty". It most often appears alongside Alexandros Marinos, Algernon’s Law, COVID.

Reference entry: Insanity Wolf
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: November 24, 2021
Last seen: November 24, 2021

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Pascalian Medicine November 24, 2021

Alexandros Marinos 1 shared issues
Algernon’s Law 1 shared issues
COVID 1 shared issues
curcumin 1 shared issues
depression 1 shared issues

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Pascalian Medicine

November 24, 2021 · Original source

The establishment medical position is that you shouldn’t take any of these, because they haven’t been proven to work. The Insanity Wolf position is: maybe you should take all twenty, because you won’t have lost very much, and if even one of them works, it’s worth it.

In fact, Insanity Wolf has a strong argument here: one chemical in this class is fluvoxamine. Six months ago, it was just like all these others: something with a clever story of why it might work and a few weak preliminary studies, but only the sort that never pan out in real life. Then a really big, excellent randomized trial seemed to find it worked, and the current scientific consensus agrees this is probably true. So if you’d done the Insanity Wolf thing six months ago and taken twenty untested compounds, at least one of them would have worked and cut your COVID mortality by 30% (our current guess at fluvoxamine’s effect size).

insight1 mentions across 1 issues

insight is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 31, 2022 and October 31, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "I also see no mention of the Buddhist concept of "insight"". It most often appears alongside A Mind Without Craving, ACX, Andres Emilsson.

Reference entry: insight
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: October 31, 2022
Last seen: October 31, 2022

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Highlights From The Comments On Jhanas October 31, 2022

A Mind Without Craving 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
Andres Emilsson 1 shared issues
Andres Gomez Emilsson 1 shared issues
anāgāmī 1 shared issues

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Highlights From The Comments On Jhanas

October 31, 2022 · Original source

Those calm and equanimous states of 2nd-4th jhana become much more satisfying than the initial pleasure wave of the 1st jhana. Cultivating them to that degree is a process of gaining valuable insight into the pleasure/craving dynamic in your mind. Even if you don't get to those stages, just practising 1st jhana alone will help the mind normalise the intensity of the pleasure, such that it's no big deal any more. You don't need or even want pleasure all the time, because you've seen it with such clarity, over and over again, just by setting the conditions up correctly in your mind.

Have tried many many substances though only pharmaceutical versions of opiates and methamphetamines which are low dose compared to recreational use. Deep first jhana is much more like a full body orgasm that lasts for anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours (I have personally experienced up to 10-15 minutes, hard to judge time, didn't have a clock at the time, can only enter them on demand on retreat.) This is much more pleasureable than drugs on the pure physical pleasure and contentment axes, though psychedelics + mdma can lead to insights that are a different axis of pleasure/happiness. I imagine that high dose opiates hit many of the same dimensions of first jhana, but with the problem of dullness that scales with dose, whereas jhana is vivid.

I also see no mention of the Buddhist concept of "insight". I think a particular family of insights is the more mundane explanation for being less interested in casual sex after experiencing consistent jhānas. That family of insight goes like, "Huh, I walk around all day being driven by my craving for pleasure and aversion to pain. I do all sorts of weird things because of those drives. But, here I just sat down and entered a jhāna, experiencing more pleasure than I ever have in my daily life, and very little suffering [note: without investigation it can seem like no suffering]. What were the conditions for this state? Well, I needed to be alive, reasonably healthy, and incline my mind in a particular way. So, basically nothing. I'm sitting on a treasure but I hurt myself picking up pennies all day. Man, I am very very confused in daily life". Eventually you exit the jhāna and the afterglow fades. When you see ice cream in the advertisement or an attractive person walking down the street you will still feel desire. When someone cuts you off in traffic you will still feel aversion. But, you now know to some degree that it's bullshit. You obviously might still act on these cravings/aversions. But, the more times this insight gets hammered into you the less likely compulsive action is. There is a difference between "knowing" something and knowing something.

Instagram1 mentions across 1 issues

Instagram is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 21, 2025 and July 21, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Want your daughter surrounded by people who never use Instagram and assign status in their peer group". It most often appears alongside AAPI Protection League, Aaron, AI Alignment.

Reference entry: Instagram
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 21, 2025
Last seen: July 21, 2025

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Press Any Key For Bay Area House Party July 21, 2025

AAPI Protection League 1 shared issues
Aaron 1 shared issues
AI Alignment 1 shared issues
Alito 1 shared issues
All Lives Matter 1 shared issues

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Press Any Key For Bay Area House Party

July 21, 2025 · Original source

“When parents say they want their kids to go to a ‘good school’, they’re not after skilled teachers. They want their kid to be surrounded by successful well-behaving peers, in the hopes that it’ll rub off on them and they’ll succeed and behave well themselves. But this creates a conflict. Parents of problem kids try to get them into the good schools to solve their problems. But the good school parents try to block them, because they don’t want problematic peers to bring their own kids down. We bulldoze through this whole paradox. As far as your kid knows, we’re just another remote learning charter school. But really, all your kids’ peers are AI-generated deepfakes designed to your specifications. Want all your son’s friends to be goody-goodies who love homework? Want your daughter surrounded by people who never use Instagram and assign status in their peer group based entirely on how closely everyone follows your sect’s interpretation of the Bible? We can do it!”

InstructGPT1 mentions across 1 issues

InstructGPT is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 19, 2022 and September 19, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "The newest version of GPT-3 is called InstructGPT. It was trained with human feedback"; "even when you set them to the same temperature, InstructGPT seems “colder” than older versions". It most often appears alongside AskReddit, Conjecture, Dittomancy.

Reference entry: InstructGPT
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 19, 2022
Last seen: September 19, 2022

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Janus' GPT Wrangling September 19, 2022

AskReddit 1 shared issues
Conjecture 1 shared issues
Dittomancy 1 shared issues
facebook 1 shared issues
GPT 1 shared issues

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Janus' GPT Wrangling

September 19, 2022 · Original source

Instruct vs. Creative: The newest version of GPT-3 is called InstructGPT. It was trained with human feedback, ie it was “rewarded” for giving good answers and “punished” for giving bad ones, according to some combination of usefulness and political correctness. This has made it efficient, to-the-point, and boring. For example, here’s what an older, less-trained GPT version said when prompted with “Here is the answer to the question of whether God exists”:

Random Numbers: The human feedback training seems to have forced GPT into a specific channel. In general, it’s now more certain in its answers and less likely to generate alternatives. This is sort of similar to what researchers mean when they talk about “temperature”, except that you can manually set the temperature of either model, and even when you set them to the same temperature, InstructGPT seems “colder” than older versions. The easiest way to see this is to ask each of them to pick a random number. Here’s the old version:

Insurrection Act1 mentions across 1 issues

Insurrection Act is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 26, 2024 and July 26, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Military forces loyal to Trump, empowered by the Insurrection Act". It most often appears alongside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, 2020 election, 2024 book review contest.

Reference entry: Insurrection Act
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 26, 2024
Last seen: July 26, 2024

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Your Book Review: Real Raw News July 26, 2024

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue 1 shared issues
2020 election 1 shared issues
2024 book review contest 1 shared issues
11 1 shared issues
11 trutherism 1 shared issues

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Your Book Review: Real Raw News

July 26, 2024 · Original source

Military forces loyal to Trump, empowered by the Insurrection Act and other executive orders secretly placing the country under martial law, have been conducting special forces operations to hunt down and secretly arrest various high-profile Americans on charges of treason.

Integrated Assessment Models1 mentions across 1 issues

Integrated Assessment Models is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 30, 2021 and April 30, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as ""Three years and countless Integrated Assessment Models later"". It most often appears alongside AI, AI research, Air.

Reference entry: Integrated Assessment Models
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 30, 2021
Last seen: April 30, 2021

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

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

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Your Book Review: The Wizard And The Prophet

April 30, 2021 · Original source

Finally, in "Air," we get to the most (in my view, the only) ambivalent section of the book. First, unlike in the other "Elements" chapters, in "Air" the carrying capacity substance in question – excess atmospheric greenhouse gases – is a problem that the Wizards themselves created, partially to solve the problems in the other three chapters. Second, humanity has gone through a lot of local carrying capacity scares around food, water, and energy, and we’ve always managed to scrap our way through it, but climate change on a global scale hasn’t happened before to this degree ("Little Ice Age" notwithstanding) in modern history, so it’s easier to imagine it as that final straw that shows carrying capacity to be ominously real after all. Third, no one wants Snowpiercer world, where we employ some untested tool of Wizardry to solve a novel problem and end up on a literal doom train. At the time when Mann was writing The Wizard and the Prophet, it was still unclear whether the projected global warming figures would fall into the merely very bad range over the next century, or the X-risk-inducing range that would plunge us into a Vogt-style apocalypse. Three years and countless Integrated Assessment Models later, and it seems like it’s still unclear, except that "‘[w]e’ve ruled out ‘We’ll be fine,’ and we don’t think ‘doom’ is very likely.’" I and other Wizard-leaning people are hopeful that the combination of new energy efficient technologies and carbon capture and sequestration schemes will minimize the damage, but I recognize that it was probably the Prophets yelling at us for 50+ years that accelerated interest in these solutions, and they may not work quickly enough to avoid substantial lost lives and suffering.

Inline links: Little Ice Age, [w]e’ve ruled out ‘We’ll be fine,’ and we don’t think ‘doom’ is very likely, carbon capture and sequestration schemes

integrated information theory of consciousness1 mentions across 1 issues

integrated information theory of consciousness is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 16, 2021 and March 16, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "equally famous around these parts for his integrated information theory of consciousness". It most often appears alongside Alaska, Chronotherapeutics Manual, electroconvulsive therapy.

Reference entry: integrated information theory of consciousness
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: March 16, 2021
Last seen: March 16, 2021

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Sleep Is The Mate Of Death March 16, 2021

Alaska 1 shared issues
Chronotherapeutics Manual 1 shared issues
electroconvulsive therapy 1 shared issues
Encoding, Consolidation, and Renormalization in Depression: Synaptic Homeostasis, Plasticity, and Sleep Integrate Rapid Antidepressant Effects 1 shared issues
Giulio Tononi 1 shared issues

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Sleep Is The Mate Of Death

March 16, 2021 · Original source

R&K start by reviewing the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis of sleep developed by neuroscientist Giulio Tononi (equally famous around these parts for his integrated information theory of consciousness, see eg Scott Aaronson's discussion here). As you learn stuff throughout the day, your brain builds new synaptic connections representing what you learned. For example, as you read this article connecting depression and sleep, your brain might be forming new synapses between neurons storing information about these two concepts (or strengthening existing synapses). That means as time goes on your brain will get more and more synapses, the synapses will become stronger and stronger, and everything will be more and more connected to everything else. But synapses take lots of energy to maintain. And "everything is maximally connected to everything else" works well for conspiracy theorists and Zen masters, but less well for neural networks trying to perform specific computations.

Inline links: synaptic homeostasis hypothesis of sleep, integrated information theory of consciousness, here

intellectual compatibility1 mentions across 1 issues

intellectual compatibility is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 23, 2021 and June 23, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "no correlation between 'intellectual compatibility' and relationship satisfaction". It most often appears alongside Arizona, Atlanta Black Crackers, Atlanta Crackers.

Reference entry: intellectual compatibility
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 23, 2021
Last seen: June 23, 2021

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Links For June June 23, 2021

Arizona 1 shared issues
Atlanta Black Crackers 1 shared issues
Atlanta Crackers 1 shared issues
Australia 1 shared issues
Ben Domenech 1 shared issues

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Links For June

June 23, 2021 · Original source

40: The cutest cognitive bias: people overestimate their own IQ by 30 points (!), but overestimate their romantic partner’s IQ by 40. The same study also claims there’s no correlation between “intellectual compatibility” and relationship satisfaction within relationships; ie you’re not more likely to have a happy relationship if your partner has a similar IQ to you (but see comment here).

Inline links: but overestimate their romantic partner’s IQ by 40, here

Intellectual Turing Test1 mentions across 1 issues

Intellectual Turing Test is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 01, 2024 and November 01, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Large scale-formal Intellectual Turing Test finds that people can imitate partisans effectively". It most often appears alongside /r/BadMTGCombos, @cremieuxrecuel, @justin_garson.

Reference entry: Intellectual Turing Test
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: November 01, 2024
Last seen: November 01, 2024

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Links For November 2024 November 01, 2024

BadMTGCombos 1 shared issues
@cremieuxrecuel 1 shared issues
@justin_garson 1 shared issues
Aaron Sibarium 1 shared issues
Abuelo's Awakening 1 shared issues

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Links For November 2024

November 01, 2024 · Original source

…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: 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

Interactionism1 mentions across 1 issues

Interactionism is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 25, 2023 and July 25, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Interactionism with a moral thrust"; ""Interactionism with a moral thrust"". It most often appears alongside 1992 Presidential debate, ABA, Adesh Thapliyal.

Reference entry: Interactionism
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 25, 2023
Last seen: July 25, 2023

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Highlights From The Comments On Social Model Of Disability July 25, 2023

1992 Presidential debate 1 shared issues
ABA 1 shared issues
Adesh Thapliyal 1 shared issues
Alan Smith 1 shared issues
Alexander Graham Bell 1 shared issues

Source context

Highlights From The Comments On Social Model Of Disability

July 25, 2023 · Original source

The Social Model is similar but not quite the same as "Interactionism with a moral thrust," and it's relevant because some people actually do believe the outdated "Medical Model" of disability, which is appropriately labeled.

Interactionist Model1 mentions across 1 issues

Interactionist Model is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 14, 2023 and July 14, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Finally, I want to propose an alternative (a fleshed-out version of what I called the Interactionist Model)". It most often appears alongside 1970s radicals, American Psychological Association, biopsychosocial model.

Reference entry: Interactionist Model
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 14, 2023
Last seen: July 14, 2023

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Contra The Social Model Of Disability July 14, 2023

1970s radicals 1 shared issues
American Psychological Association 1 shared issues
biopsychosocial model 1 shared issues
Bryan Caplan 1 shared issues
Caplan model 1 shared issues

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Contra The Social Model Of Disability

July 14, 2023 · Original source

The Social Model’s main competitor is the Interactionist Model Of Disability, which says that disability is caused by an interaction of disease and society, and that it can be addressed by either treating the underlying condition or by adding social accommodations.

In contrast to the Interactionist Model, the Social Model insists that disability is only due to society and not disease, and that it may only be addressed through social changes and not medical treatments.

If we ignore the tradition of teaching disability models this way, and contrast the Social Model with the Interactionist Model, it’s easy to see that the Social Model . . . kind of sucks? In fact, I’ve never heard anyone willing to defend the actual Social Model the way it’s taught in every course, written on every website, and defined by every government agency. Everyone says they mean the Interactionist Model. Yet somehow, the official descriptions still say that disability is only social and not related to disease, and that you may only treat it with accommodations and not with medical care.

Interactionist Model Of Disability1 mentions across 1 issues

Interactionist Model Of Disability is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 14, 2023 and July 14, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Social Model’s main competitor is the Interactionist Model Of Disability". It most often appears alongside 1970s radicals, American Psychological Association, biopsychosocial model.

Reference entry: Interactionist Model Of Disability
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 14, 2023
Last seen: July 14, 2023

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Issue trail

Contra The Social Model Of Disability July 14, 2023

1970s radicals 1 shared issues
American Psychological Association 1 shared issues
biopsychosocial model 1 shared issues
Bryan Caplan 1 shared issues
Caplan model 1 shared issues

Source context

Contra The Social Model Of Disability

July 14, 2023 · Original source

The Social Model’s main competitor is the Interactionist Model Of Disability, which says that disability is caused by an interaction of disease and society, and that it can be addressed by either treating the underlying condition or by adding social accommodations.

Interest1 mentions across 1 issues

Interest is a recurring concept 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 "The closest thing we have is Interest". It most often appears alongside "The Rent Is Too Damn High!", 16th amendment, 1886.

Reference entry: Interest
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 16, 2021
Last seen: April 16, 2021

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Your Book Review: Progress And Poverty April 16, 2021

"The Rent Is Too Damn High!" 1 shared issues
16th amendment 1 shared issues
1886 1 shared issues
1897 1 shared issues
Adam Perry 1 shared issues

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Your Book Review: Progress And Poverty

April 16, 2021 · Original source

By making possible the division & specialization of labor (you dig bait, I'll catch fish) Capital is a force multiplier that supercharges the productive power of labor. It doesn't supply labor with raw materials (nature does), nor does it provide for the maintenance of workers (who eat bread by the sweat of their own brow). George says this is why capital isn't a limit on industry. ...okay, George grants that capital may limit the form of industry. You can't plow without a plow or milk without a cow. George also grants that the lack of specialized tools can greatly limit productivity because you don't get the benefit of the force-multiplying effect of capital. Um... aren't you contradicting yourself here, Mr. George? You spent all this time hammering home your doctrine of wages to prove that capital doesn't limit industry, but you just said its absence can limit both the form and the productivity of labor! Time to unpack what we mean by "limit" and be super clear about it from now on: But to say that capital may limit the form of industry or the productiveness of industry is a very different thing from saying that capital limits industry. Okay, what do you mean? For the dictum of the current political economy that "capital limits industry," means not that capital limits the form of labor or the productiveness of labor, but that it limits the exertion of labor. Okay, I think I see what he's saying. The existing school of thought says that because capital provides labor with both materials and maintenance, therefore if capital dries up, labor productivity must go down because workers will have nothing to work on, and nothing to eat or wear. Labor is thus "limited" by capital, for without it is literally and metaphorically starved for capital. But George says no – the only way capital actually "limits" productivity in real life is in the degrees by which it force-multiplies labor's productivity and unlocks certain forms of labor in the tech tree. The kind of "limit" George objects to is the idea that you need capital just to get any work done at all, or that without capital to sustain it, labor will shrivel up. Instead, capital is rocket fuel that labor supplies to itself by investing a portion of its wages. And yet, with all the awesome slots we've unlocked on the tech tree, and barrels and barrels of rocket fuel to fire up eager laborers, we still find our economy sinking into mysterious depressions. Something is gumming up the works, but it's not a simple scarcity of capital: the real limitation is not the want of capital, but the want of its proper distribution Or as G.K. Chesterton said, "Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists." This might seem like a pedantic distinction – misallocated capital could be said to be "scarce" capital – but they're not the same thing at all. As Francis Bacon said in 1625: Riches were like [Manure]: When it lay, upon an heape, it gave but a stench, and ill odour; but when it was spread upon the ground, then it was cause of much fruit. Because the prevailing theories of George's time are based on incorrect ideas about the relation between wages and capital, "all remedies, whether proposed by professors of political economy or workingmen, which look to the alleviation of poverty either by the increase of capital or the restriction of the number of laborers or the efficiency of their work, must be condemned." In short, more investment, more protectionism, and more efficiency programs can't, won't, and haven't fixed poverty and industrial depressions because they all proceed from false premises. Having finally beaten the nexus of wages, capital, and labor into a bloody pulp, George turns his eyes towards another leading theory for why everything is terrible: the specter of overpopulation. II. Population and Subsistence The entire second book might as well be titled "Why Malthus is Dumb and Wrong and Bad." It's dedicated to dunking on Malthusianism, a philosophy that ascribes economic crises to the exponential growth of the human population, which must necessarily end in catastrophe. according to Malthusian theory, poverty appears as increase in population necessitates the more minute division of subsistence. George attacks Malthusian ideas not just because they're wrong, but because they make it easier to accept the prevailing theory of wages (as more capital is allocated, laborers will keep popping up like weeds to gobble it up, so wages must eternally stagnate). George draws a straight line between these faulty ideas and holocausts and genocides – specifically citing how colonial oppression in China, India, and Ireland were explicitly justified on Malthusian grounds. One million people died in the English-engineered Irish potato famine alone, and when you add in those who fled the entire population declined by 25% percent. And this isn't a tenuous link either – George directly connects the completely avoidable famine to his favorite bugbear, private landownership and extortionate rent. Given that Malthusianism is now widely discredited I'm just going to skip this chapter, but if you want to hear George in all his righteous fury, check out Appendix A (there's a link that returns here at the end): Appendix A: George Dunks on Malthusianism III. The Laws of Distribution When society produces wealth, who gets different shares of it, and why? Let's start by beating some words to death. By George, we're told that there are three factors in production: Land, Labor, and Capital. For each of these terms there must be a "law of distribution" that explains how each gets compensated for its part in production. The reward you get from production by owning Land is called Rent. The reward you get from production by supplying Labor is called Wages. The reward you get from production by supplying Capital is called ... um, what? We're looking for a term that clearly expresses the return to capital alone and nothing else. The closest thing we have is Interest, and that's probably good enough. George gives the common definition of interest as "the return for the use of capital, exclusive of any labor in its use or management, and exclusive of any risk, except such as may be involved in the security." This is pretty close to what we want – something that expresses the sole return to capital without mixing in anything else. But ... what about Profits? Profits is "almost synonymous" with revenue, assuming you have some left after you deduct expenses. It means a gain in money or wealth, but the trouble is this gain is a mix of rent, wages, and "compensations for the risk peculiar to the various uses of capital." What we want is a term that means the return to capital alone, totally separate from the return to laborers and landowners. To talk about the distribution of wealth into rent, wages, and profits is like talking of the division of mankind into men, women, and human beings. George spends a few pages talking about how everyone from Adam Smith on down got confused about this (spoiler: it's tied up with thinking wages are drawn from capital), before presenting his model for how it all works. If you want to see him knock that stuff down, see Appendix B (there's a link that returns here at the end): Appendix B: George dunks on the Conventional Laws of Distribution Here's George's model for how it all works: Land is"all natural opportunities or forces" and its return is rent Labor is "all human exertion" and its return is wages Capital is"all wealth used to produce more wealth" and its return is interest George says the false assumption at the root of the old theories is in thinking of "capital as the prime factor in production, land as its instrument, and labor as its agent or tool." George makes the following assertions: "Labor can be exerted only upon land"

Inline links: Francis Bacon said in 1625, Malthusianism, English-engineered Irish potato famine, Appendix A: George Dunks on Malthusianism, Appendix B: George dunks on the Conventional Laws of Distribution

Based on data from the United Kingdom National Accounts: The Blue Book 2017. Published Oct 31, 2017. Revision Period: Beginning of each time series. Date of next release: July 2018. The "privileges" in "Land and privileges" are things like taxi medallions and patents, that were worth "almost zero" according to Nate. No matter how hard you try, "there is no occupation in which labor and capital can engage which does not require the use of land." Whenever anyone does labor, the owner of some piece of land – whether it's the farm in the middle of Kansas that grows your food, the lot upon which the server farm sending you these bytes sits, or the ground that right now sits beneath your feet – is sticking their finger in the pie. George reminds us that labor and capital will have to share whatever landowners take off the top of production in rent: As Produce = Rent + Wages + Interest, Therefore, Produce - Rent = Wages + Interest So... what happens when the productivity of land goes up? Let's go back to Lot A and Lot B, both 100-util fields. Let's say they belong to different landlords, and I'm a tenant on Lot B. I improve the soil of the field I'm working on so now it's worth 110 utils. What happens? My landlord raises the rent, of course! The only way wages (the return to labor) and interest (the return to capital) can go up as productivity increases, is if land values fail to rise at the same rate. The Law of Interest George wants to find the fundamental reason capital is able to produce wealth and justly claim a fair share of production. Remember that capital is wealth devoted to getting more wealth. So if capital is wealth that begets wealth, it makes sense that if I lend it out to you, I miss out on the potential for it to grow while it's out of my hands. George says I am justly entitled to ask for more back than I originally gave you. Let's say I loan you some corn seeds for a season. Had I not leant them to you, in a season's time I could have grown my own crop of corn and been left with more seed than I started with. So in a perfectly square deal, you need to give me back what I started with and what I could have expected to gain from natural increase (less the value of the labor required to get things started). Likewise with any other article of capital – say bricks or lumber. In the time I've spent without it while it was in your possession, I could have found someone else who had a better use for it than I did and exchanged it for something of theirs that I had a better use for, leaving me with capital of greater value. George says the act of progressively exchanging things in a way that increases subjective value for all involved is analogous to the natural forces of nature that make living capital (like corn and cows) grow over time. Remember, "subjective value" is real value. In a game of Settlers of Catan, if I have two bricks and you have two lumber, neither of us can build anything. The simple act of trading one brick for one lumber means both of us are better off because each of us can now build a road. The amount of bricks and lumber in the world didn't increase, but the amount of roads (or potential roads) did, and that represents a real increase in wealth. Interest thus springs from the "reproductive" powers of capital, whether that's biological reproduction, or the more abstract reproductive force of exchanging things so that you have a more valuable distribution of capital than you started with. As for how it relates to the other two returns to production – the more powerful the "power of increase" the capital has, the greater return interest can claim compared to wages. If you're ploughing a field and I lend you a tractor which makes you ten times as productive, I can justly claim more compensation for that than if I lend you a mule that only makes you twice as productive. However, rent still holds the whip hand, so the margin of cultivation determines how much return is left over to divvy up between interest and wages. This is because the net "reproductive" value of capital goes down given rent is a general tax on overall productivity. The amount I would have gained by using the thing productively over the period of time it was out on loan (the amount I can justly charge in interest) is reduced by how much I have to pay in rent. The Law of Wages Wages, like interest, are limited by the margin of production. Within that limit there's not much to understand about how wages work except that people seek to satisfy their desires "with the least exertion," which is a fancy way of saying people don't like to get ripped off. If two bosses offer the same exact job, but one offers higher pay, I'm taking that gig. If two bosses pay the same, but one is asking for twice as much work, I'll tell that boss where he can stick it. Wages depend upon the margin of production, or upon the produce which labor can obtain at the highest point of natural productiveness open to it without the payment of rent. So with all three laws established George sums it up like so: Where land is free and labor is unassisted by capital, the whole produce will go to labor as wages. Where land is free and labor is assisted by capital, wages will consist of the whole produce, less that part necessary to induce the storing up of labor as capital. Where land is subject to ownership and rent arises, wages will be fixed by what labor could secure from the highest natural opportunities open to it without the payment of rent. Where natural opportunities are all monopolized, wages may be forced by the competition among laborers to the minimum at which laborers will consent to reproduce. This is the reason George says that wages are so high in "new countries" where there's more land available than in countries where it's been locked up for centuries. Here's how it all fits together: Though neither wages nor interest anywhere increase as material progress goes on, yet the invariable accompaniment and mark of material progress is the increase of rent – the rise of land values. And: where the value of land is highest, civilization exhibits the greatest luxury side by side with the most piteous destitution IV. Effect of Material Progress upon the Distribution of Wealth As a society undergoes material progress, the rent goes up. Why? Let's break it down. Three things contribute to material progress: Increasing population

Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zIvo!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F43f758ce-2bb5-479e-bc07-b2bb7fcc6eb8_600x400.png

The only way wages (the return to labor) and interest (the return to capital) can go up as productivity increases, is if land values fail to rise at the same rate. The Law of Interest George wants to find the fundamental reason capital is able to produce wealth and justly claim a fair share of production. Remember that capital is wealth devoted to getting more wealth. So if capital is wealth that begets wealth, it makes sense that if I lend it out to you, I miss out on the potential for it to grow while it's out of my hands. George says I am justly entitled to ask for more back than I originally gave you. Let's say I loan you some corn seeds for a season. Had I not leant them to you, in a season's time I could have grown my own crop of corn and been left with more seed than I started with. So in a perfectly square deal, you need to give me back what I started with and what I could have expected to gain from natural increase (less the value of the labor required to get things started). Likewise with any other article of capital – say bricks or lumber. In the time I've spent without it while it was in your possession, I could have found someone else who had a better use for it than I did and exchanged it for something of theirs that I had a better use for, leaving me with capital of greater value. George says the act of progressively exchanging things in a way that increases subjective value for all involved is analogous to the natural forces of nature that make living capital (like corn and cows) grow over time. Remember, "subjective value" is real value. In a game of Settlers of Catan, if I have two bricks and you have two lumber, neither of us can build anything. The simple act of trading one brick for one lumber means both of us are better off because each of us can now build a road. The amount of bricks and lumber in the world didn't increase, but the amount of roads (or potential roads) did, and that represents a real increase in wealth. Interest thus springs from the "reproductive" powers of capital, whether that's biological reproduction, or the more abstract reproductive force of exchanging things so that you have a more valuable distribution of capital than you started with. As for how it relates to the other two returns to production – the more powerful the "power of increase" the capital has, the greater return interest can claim compared to wages. If you're ploughing a field and I lend you a tractor which makes you ten times as productive, I can justly claim more compensation for that than if I lend you a mule that only makes you twice as productive. However, rent still holds the whip hand, so the margin of cultivation determines how much return is left over to divvy up between interest and wages. This is because the net "reproductive" value of capital goes down given rent is a general tax on overall productivity. The amount I would have gained by using the thing productively over the period of time it was out on loan (the amount I can justly charge in interest) is reduced by how much I have to pay in rent. The Law of Wages Wages, like interest, are limited by the margin of production. Within that limit there's not much to understand about how wages work except that people seek to satisfy their desires "with the least exertion," which is a fancy way of saying people don't like to get ripped off. If two bosses offer the same exact job, but one offers higher pay, I'm taking that gig. If two bosses pay the same, but one is asking for twice as much work, I'll tell that boss where he can stick it. Wages depend upon the margin of production, or upon the produce which labor can obtain at the highest point of natural productiveness open to it without the payment of rent. So with all three laws established George sums it up like so: Where land is free and labor is unassisted by capital, the whole produce will go to labor as wages. Where land is free and labor is assisted by capital, wages will consist of the whole produce, less that part necessary to induce the storing up of labor as capital. Where land is subject to ownership and rent arises, wages will be fixed by what labor could secure from the highest natural opportunities open to it without the payment of rent. Where natural opportunities are all monopolized, wages may be forced by the competition among laborers to the minimum at which laborers will consent to reproduce. This is the reason George says that wages are so high in "new countries" where there's more land available than in countries where it's been locked up for centuries. Here's how it all fits together: Though neither wages nor interest anywhere increase as material progress goes on, yet the invariable accompaniment and mark of material progress is the increase of rent – the rise of land values. And: where the value of land is highest, civilization exhibits the greatest luxury side by side with the most piteous destitution IV. Effect of Material Progress upon the Distribution of Wealth As a society undergoes material progress, the rent goes up. Why? Let's break it down. Three things contribute to material progress: Increasing population

intergenerational justice1 mentions across 1 issues

intergenerational justice is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 16, 2022 and March 16, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Caring about young people is actually about fighting for intergenerational justice". It most often appears alongside 1984, Amartya Sen, Apollo Mojave.

Reference entry: intergenerational justice
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: March 16, 2022
Last seen: March 16, 2022

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Justice Creep March 16, 2022

1984 1 shared issues
Amartya Sen 1 shared issues
Apollo Mojave 1 shared issues
California 1 shared issues
Charity 1 shared issues

Source context

Justice Creep

March 16, 2022 · Original source

Helping the poor becomes economic justice. If they’re minorities, then it’s racial justice, itself a subspecies of social justice. Saving the environment becomes environmental justice, except when it’s about climate change in which case it’s climate justice. Caring about young people is actually about fighting for intergenerational justice. The very laws of space and time are subject to spatial justice and temporal justice.

Inline links: economic justice, racial justice, social justice, environmental justice, climate justice, intergenerational justice, spatial justice, temporal justice

intermittent explosive disorder1 mentions across 1 issues

intermittent explosive disorder is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 28, 2021 and January 28, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "intermittent explosive disorder! This is the fake disorder". It most often appears alongside AD, anxiety, autism spectrum.

Reference entry: intermittent explosive disorder
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: January 28, 2021
Last seen: January 28, 2021

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Issue trail

Ontology Of Psychiatric Conditions: Taxometrics January 28, 2021

AD 1 shared issues
anxiety 1 shared issues
autism spectrum 1 shared issues
bipolar 1 shared issues
depression 1 shared issues

Source context

Ontology Of Psychiatric Conditions: Taxometrics

January 28, 2021 · Original source

And intermittent explosive disorder! This is the fake disorder we made up so that we had something to diagnose angry people with! I don’t think anyone thought this one was real, not even the psychiatrists who invented it and stuck it in the DSM! But here come the taxometricians, saying that schizophrenia and bipolar and whatever are mere dimensional variation, but IED (yes, that’s really the acronym) is an honest-to-goodness crisply-defined category based on objective reality? What gives?

intermittent fasting1 mentions across 1 issues

intermittent fasting is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 02, 2021 and December 02, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "David Sinclair says that resveratrol or exercise or intermittent fasting or saunas act by “mimicking calorie restriction”". It most often appears alongside Alexandre Gueniot, Algernon’s Law, Alzheimers.

Reference entry: intermittent fasting
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: December 02, 2021
Last seen: December 02, 2021

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Book Review: Lifespan December 02, 2021

Alexandre Gueniot 1 shared issues
Algernon’s Law 1 shared issues
Alzheimers 1 shared issues
Australia 1 shared issues
Australian outback 1 shared issues

Source context

Book Review: Lifespan

December 02, 2021 · Original source

What if you’re not a mouse, can’t get genetically engineered, and don’t want to starve yourself for your entire life. Then what? Some people think that you can simulation “deprivation” well enough to fool mTOR with intermittent fasting. Sinclair suggests maybe skipping breakfast and having a late lunch every day, or fasting entirely a few days a week, or a few weeks a year, or - well, nobody really knows how or whether intermittent fasting works, let alone the best way to do it. But it’s an option.

But when David Sinclair says that resveratrol or exercise or intermittent fasting or saunas act by “mimicking calorie restriction”, is he suggesting that they will make you weak and constantly tired? If not, why not? This sounds a denial of the fundamental mTOR tradeoff: less energy expenditure in exchange for worse performance. The impression I get from Lifespan is that all of these things will both make you live longer and make you healthier. That doesn’t really make sense to me.

intermittent reward1 mentions across 1 issues

intermittent reward is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 12, 2023 and December 12, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "intermittent reward is the most addictive reinforcement schedule". It most often appears alongside 2024, Aaron Peskin, accelerationist conspiracy.

Reference entry: intermittent reward
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: December 12, 2023
Last seen: December 12, 2023

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Son Of Bride Of Bay Area House Party December 12, 2023

2024 1 shared issues
Aaron Peskin 1 shared issues
accelerationist conspiracy 1 shared issues
Adam D’Angelo 1 shared issues
Aella 1 shared issues

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Son Of Bride Of Bay Area House Party

December 12, 2023 · Original source

“ . . . is that intermittent reward is the most addictive reinforcement schedule,” interrupts Hans. “It’s what drives gacha games and slot machines. So we invented . . . . “

Internal Family Systems therapy1 mentions across 1 issues

Internal Family Systems therapy is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 16, 2023 and August 16, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Internal Family Systems therapy". It most often appears alongside Alice, Attack On Titan, Bali.

Reference entry: Internal Family Systems therapy
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 16, 2023
Last seen: August 16, 2023

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Issue trail

In Defense Of Describable Dating Preferences August 16, 2023

Alice 1 shared issues
Attack On Titan 1 shared issues
Bali 1 shared issues
Bedroomrundi 1 shared issues
Beth 1 shared issues

Source context

In Defense Of Describable Dating Preferences

August 16, 2023 · Original source

Hi, I’m Sky! I’m an Aries, although my friends say I sometimes act like more of a Virgo. I’m looking for a deep, fulfilling relationship where we inspire each other to become our best selves and face each day’s challenges anew. My interests include Non-Violent Communication, Internal Family Systems therapy, somatic experiencing, and Integral Theory. My ideal partner would be deeply spiritual and interested in co-exploring this beautiful maze we call Life alongside me.

International Emergency Economic Powers Act1 mentions across 1 issues

International Emergency Economic Powers Act is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 24, 2022 and June 24, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) in 1977". It most often appears alongside 501(c)(3), 80,000 Hours, 9/11.

Reference entry: International Emergency Economic Powers Act
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 24, 2022
Last seen: June 24, 2022

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Issue trail

Your Book Review: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy June 24, 2022

501(c)(3) 1 shared issues
80,000 Hours 1 shared issues
11 1 shared issues
Adam Tooze 1 shared issues
Afghan ambassador to Pakistan 1 shared issues

Source context

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

June 24, 2022 · Original source

Practically unchanged throughout 1951, 1986, and 2019. It’s difficult to see what threat the US is protecting against in the United Kingdom, Italy, and Germany. The rise of China has not lead to increase in troop deployment in Japan or South Korea; the wars in the Greater Middle East has not resulted in the influx of the bulk of troops from the former Axis powers; the fall of the Soviet Union has not seen any withdrawal as promised to Gorbachev but rather expansion of troops right up to the border of the Russian Federation. Once again, Hanania clearly shows that status quo bias has been disguised as grand strategy. IR theorists have long debated what strategy the US should adopt when responding to potential challengers: realists are pessimistic in viewing great powers to be destined for war; liberal internationalists are optimistic in trusting the pacifying effects of trade and enlightened self interests. Either way, they assume states make rational decisions to attain long-term objectives, but the two ideologically hostile states of the Soviet Union and China show that presidents are too worried about short-term political prospects to stop American business and technology from engaging with and empowering rivals. If there is no grand strategy against the most powerful geopolitical rivals, it’s unlikely any exists for lesser adversaries. 4. The Atrocity Of American Sanctions Sanctions were introduced by the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) in 1977 gave the president the right to sign an executive order to declare a national emergency to prohibit any transaction between anyone under the jurisdiction of the United States and the foreign country or its nationals. This means most sanctions are decided on and applied within the executive branch with little input from Congress or the broader public. The three main concentrated interests do not oppose sanctions (the only exception being the unprecedented lobbying campaign from American businesses to open up trade with China). The national security bureaucracy doesn’t stand to gain or lose from trading with foreign states, nor do government contractors (most rogue states' economies are miniscule compared to China’s). Foreign governments that are candidates for sanctions also can’t oppose them — Kim Jong Un cannot fund Washington think tanks; Israel and Saudi Arabia can fund a maximum pressure campaign against Iran as even meetings with Iranian state officials bring accusations of illegality. In theory, sanctions work by: Hurting the economy

international law1 mentions across 1 issues

international law is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 14, 2021 and April 14, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "will probably be banned by Honduran law or international law". It most often appears alongside Alaska, America, Amisulpride.

Reference entry: international law
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 14, 2021
Last seen: April 14, 2021

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Prospectus On Próspera April 14, 2021

Alaska 1 shared issues
America 1 shared issues
Amisulpride 1 shared issues
anarcho-capitalist 1 shared issues
Arizona Supreme Court 1 shared issues

Source context

Prospectus On Próspera

April 14, 2021 · Original source

What if a regulatory issue can’t be expressed financially? I asked Trey about human genetic engineering. He said that extreme or irresponsible forms of medical experimentation will probably be banned by Honduran law or international law or something. If they’re not, he expects that insurance companies will keep their distance. If they don’t, he expects they’ll find a way to ban it anyway, for PR reasons if nothing else.

Próspera says they are “guaranteed by international treaty”. The particular treaty involved is the Honduras-Kuwait Treaty For Reciprocal Investment (link in Spanish), in which I think Honduras tells Kuwait that they should feel comfortable investing in ZEDEs because Honduras promises not to get rid of them for 50 years. I don’t have anywhere near the understanding of international law I would need to know if this is actually binding. Could a future ZEDE-hostile Honduran Congress repeal this treaty? Would that damage their international reputation? Precipitate the Great Honduras-Kuwait War Of 2036?

Inline links: Honduras-Kuwait Treaty For Reciprocal Investment

International Reply Coupon1 mentions across 1 issues

International Reply Coupon is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 26, 2023 and May 26, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "a prospective customer in Spain sent him an International Reply Coupon (IRC)"; "Ponzi's "free money" source of International Reply Coupon arbitrage". It most often appears alongside /r/wallstreetbets, 2013 Financial Services (Banking Reform) Act, 80,000 Hours.

Reference entry: International Reply Coupon
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 26, 2023
Last seen: May 26, 2023

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Your Book Review: Lying for Money May 26, 2023

wallstreetbets 1 shared issues
2013 Financial Services (Banking Reform) Act 1 shared issues
80,000 Hours 1 shared issues
80,000 Hours podcast 1 shared issues
@eigenrobot 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: Lying for Money

May 26, 2023 · Original source

Ponzi was a publisher, and came to a realization when a prospective customer in Spain sent him an International Reply Coupon (IRC) to cover a postage expense:

(Ponzi's "free money" source of International Reply Coupon arbitrage was not as profitable in practice as it was in concept.)

Internet addiction1 mentions across 1 issues

Internet addiction is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 20, 2024 and December 20, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Internet addiction". It most often appears alongside anti-vax polls, autism, birth order effects.

Reference entry: Internet addiction
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: December 20, 2024
Last seen: December 20, 2024

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Issue trail

Take The 2025 ACX Survey December 20, 2024

anti-vax polls 1 shared issues
autism 1 shared issues
birth order effects 1 shared issues
mathematical interests vs. corn-eating style 1 shared issues
sexual harassment victimization rates 1 shared issues

Source context

Take The 2025 ACX Survey

December 20, 2024 · Original source

Each year, I post a reader survey. This helps me learn who’s reading this blog. But it also helps me try to replicate psych findings and investigate interesting hypotheses. Some highlights from past years include birth order effects, mathematical interests vs. corn-eating style, sexual harassment victimization rates in different fields, whether all our kids are going to have autism, wisdom of inner crowds, failed replication of anti-vax polls, and Internet addiction.

Inline links: birth order effects, mathematical interests vs. corn-eating style, sexual harassment victimization rates in different fields, whether all our kids are going to have autism, wisdom of inner crowds, failed replication of anti-vax polls, Internet addiction

Internet atheist movement1 mentions across 1 issues

Internet atheist movement is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 10, 2021 and May 10, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "middle and end of the Internet atheist movement". It most often appears alongside "How do you do, fellow kids?", #NotAllMen, #TheResistance.

Reference entry: Internet atheist movement
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 10, 2021
Last seen: May 10, 2021

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Issue trail

The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars May 10, 2021

"How do you do, fellow kids?" 1 shared issues
#NotAllMen 1 shared issues
#TheResistance 1 shared issues
1950s - 1990s 1 shared issues
2000s 1 shared issues

Source context

May 10, 2021 · Original source

This corresponds to the middle and end of the Internet atheist movement, and some of the same dynamics I discussed in my article there apply here as well, especially the slow shift from 2000s-era "argument culture" to 2010s-era "echo culture". The very early Internet had pro-argument norms; it was your god-given right to march into any blog or forum you wanted and tell the people there why they were wrong. Partly this was the inevitable effect of everyone on the early Internet being the sort of programming nerds willing to try this weird new invention. And partly it came from a utopian philosophy where the Internet was going to be a new medium that united humanity regardless of nation or creed in a great Republic Of The Intellect, or whatever. Maybe it was even partly due to naivete - a lot of people hadn't really met anyone who thought differently from them before, and assumed that changing people’s minds would be really easy. For whatever reason, the early Internet was a place for polite but insistent debate, and early websites centered around the needs of a debating community. The most obvious example was TalkOrigins' massive alphabetized database of arguments against creationist claims, with the explicit goal of helping people win debates with creationists.

Inline links: massive alphabetized database of arguments against creationist claims

Internet feminism1 mentions across 1 issues

Internet feminism is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 10, 2021 and May 10, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Internet feminism began right smack in the midst of this transition". It most often appears alongside "How do you do, fellow kids?", #NotAllMen, #TheResistance.

Reference entry: Internet feminism
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 10, 2021
Last seen: May 10, 2021

Outbound links

Issue trail

The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars May 10, 2021

"How do you do, fellow kids?" 1 shared issues
#NotAllMen 1 shared issues
#TheResistance 1 shared issues
1950s - 1990s 1 shared issues
2000s 1 shared issues

Source context

Only About 40% Of The Cruz "Woke Science" Database Is Woke Science

May 10, 2021 · Original source

A warning: I was mostly sympathetic to Internet atheism, but mostly unsympathetic to Internet feminism. I think these histories are easier to write from a sympathetic position - any study of Internet culture is basically a study of crazy people, and the failure mode is to point and laugh at them without looking for real understanding. Sometimes pointing and laughing is unavoidable (the New Atheists probably could have done without the Malachi 2:3-related-merchandise) but I think it should be tempered by an attempt at charity. All I can do is try my hardest, and trust readers to keep me honest if I screw up.

Inline links: Malachi 2:3-related-merchandise

Internet feminism began right smack in the midst of this transition, and you can find relics from both sides. The most significant artifact of feminist argument culture is the Geek Feminism Wiki (2009 - 2012), which was doing something vaguely similar to TalkOrigins - trying to put a lot of feminist thought in an easily accessible place. So for example, if someone didn't know what slut shaming was, or didn't think it was bad, you could show them the GFW page on slut-shaming which would educate them and maybe change their mind. I see similar things on a few other feminist websites, almost always from the same period; for example, Shakesville has a Feminism 101 section written in 2010.

Inline links: Geek Feminism Wiki, page on slut-shaming, Feminism 101

Starting around 2014, Internet feminism went mainstream. This graph doesn't really prove that. Maybe the New York Times just dectupled the amount of space it devoted to sexism for non-Internet-related reasons. But as somebody who lived through this period and watched it closely - no, it was the Internet. The blogs and forums of the early 2010s were a memetic breeding ground that produced new and more compelling versions of old ideas, and one of them took over liberal culture.

Internet of Things1 mentions across 1 issues

Internet of Things is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 14, 2025 and February 14, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "battery-operated Internet of Things (IoT) devices". It most often appears alongside Biden-Harris administration, Blackfeet Community College, Building Reliable Advances and Innovations in Neurotechnology.

Reference entry: Internet of Things
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: February 14, 2025
Last seen: February 14, 2025

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Issue trail

Only About 40% Of The Cruz "Woke Science" Database Is Woke Science February 14, 2025

Biden-Harris administration 1 shared issues
Blackfeet Community College 1 shared issues
Building Reliable Advances and Innovations in Neurotechnology 1 shared issues
Commerce Department 1 shared issues
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion 1 shared issues

Source context

February 14, 2025 · Original source

40% weren’t woke This is obviously in some sense a subjective determination, but most cases weren’t close - I think any good-faith examination would turn up similar numbers. Why would a list of woke grants have so many non-woke grants in it? After reading the hundred abstracts, I found a clear answer: people inserted a meaningless sentence saying “this could help women and minorities” into unrelated grants, probably in the hopes of getting points with some automated filter. For example, from Grant 1731: New Security Exploit in Energy Harvesting Systems and Its Countermeasures: An Energy Harvesting System (EHS) has emerged as an alternative to battery-operated Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Instead of using a battery, EHS self-powers its device by collecting ambient energy from external sources such as radio frequency, WiFi, etc. However, since such ambient energy sources are unreliable, their resulting power is inherently unstable and often goes out. To address the problem, EHS leverages a capacitor as an energy buffer and computes when the capacitor secures a sufficient amount of energy, i.e., capacitors are at the heart of any EHS devices. Unfortunately, capacitors can be unreliable in the presence of frequent power failure across which they continuously charge and discharge, losing their original capacitance over time. More importantly, attackers can exploit the capacitor reliability issue to cause incorrect outputs or degrade the quality of service in targeted EHS devices. To this end, this research project focuses on investigating attack surfaces and designing cost-effective countermeasures. The project outcome will lay the foundation for batteryless Internet of Things services by maintaining their quality of service and security. The project also aims to integrate research findings into undergraduate teaching and promote equitable outcomes for women in computer science through K-12 outreach program. Did you catch the last sentence? The project also aims to integrate research findings into undergraduate teaching and promote equitable outcomes for women in computer science through K-12 outreach program. Some version of this sentence was in most of the nonwoke grants that made it into Cruz’s database. They promised to investigate some totally normal scientific topic, and then at the end they said somehow it would cause equity for women and minorities. I assume somebody told them that if they didn’t include this sentence, the Biden NSF would ding them for not having enough equity impact. Typical examples include: We will do outreach, and probably some of it will inspire underrepresented minorities to go into STEM.

Internet slang1 mentions across 1 issues

Internet slang is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 06, 2025 and November 06, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "In Internet slang, the opposite of a doomer is a “bloomer”". It most often appears alongside Abbott, Antichrist, Black Box.

Reference entry: Internet slang
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: November 06, 2025
Last seen: November 06, 2025

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The Bloomer's Paradox November 06, 2025

Abbott 1 shared issues
Antichrist 1 shared issues
Black Box 1 shared issues
Black Box Of Doom 1 shared issues
Cammy 1 shared issues

Source context

The Bloomer's Paradox

November 06, 2025 · Original source

In Internet slang, the opposite of a doomer is a “bloomer”. I recently got a chance to talk to the bloomers at the Progress Studies conference. They were great and I learned a lot. But as far as I could tell, the semi-official philosophy was “We need to be forward-looking rather than obsessed with some mythical better past - you know, like we were in the good old days of the 1920s, back when society could actually accomplish things.”

Inline links: Internet slang, Progress Studies conference

interstate highway system1 mentions across 1 issues

interstate highway system is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 22, 2022 and September 22, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "the government built the interstate highway system". It most often appears alongside Adam Neumann, Alex Roesch, Amazon.

Reference entry: interstate highway system
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 22, 2022
Last seen: September 22, 2022

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Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On Billionaire Replaceability September 22, 2022

Adam Neumann 1 shared issues
Alex Roesch 1 shared issues
Amazon 1 shared issues
Amazon 1 shared issues
AMZ 1 shared issues

Source context

Highlights From The Comments On Billionaire Replaceability

September 22, 2022 · Original source

The railroads were controlled the structure of commerce in the US. Their tariffs enforced an industrial north and agricultural south. Railroads were as despised as cable companies or ISPs. Regulation helped a bit, but only a bit. Then the government built the interstate highway system and industry was dramatically restructured.

interstate highways1 mentions across 1 issues

interstate highways is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 07, 2023 and June 07, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "It built the Panama Canal, the interstate highways, and the Space Shuttle". It most often appears alongside 747, America, America Against America.

Reference entry: interstate highways
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 07, 2023
Last seen: June 07, 2023

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Issue trail

Assistant Dictator Book Club: America Against America June 07, 2023

747 1 shared issues
America 1 shared issues
America Against America 1 shared issues
American 1 shared issues
American conventional wisdom 1 shared issues

Source context

Assistant Dictator Book Club: America Against America

June 07, 2023 · Original source

On one side is the good America that Wang admires. This is the America that grew from a bunch of tiny colonies under attack by Indians and Redcoats into a technological and economic superpower. It won World War II and the Cold War, and outlasted Maoism in China. It built the Panama Canal, the interstate highways, and the Space Shuttle, but also globally respected corporations like Microsoft and Coca-Cola. Its people are effortlessly patriotic, self-assured, and committed to their Constitution and ideals. Its government runs on meritocracy and everyone respects talent regardless of its social class.

Interstate Runaway Compact1 mentions across 1 issues

Interstate Runaway Compact is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 10, 2024 and February 10, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "to advocate for the repeal of the Interstate Runaway Compact, a law used to arrest runaway minors". It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, 23andme, ACX.

Reference entry: Interstate Runaway Compact
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: February 10, 2024
Last seen: February 10, 2024

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ACX Grants Results 2024 February 10, 2024

1DaySooner 1 shared issues
23andme 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
ACX Book Review 1 shared issues
ACX Grants 1 shared issues

Source context

ACX Grants Results 2024

February 10, 2024 · Original source

Celene Nightingale, $1,000, to advocate for the repeal of the Interstate Runaway Compact, a law used to arrest runaway minors and force them back to potentially abusive families. This might not be maximally effective altruism, but I got some friends to chip in enough money to fund this one as a birthday present for a mutual friend who feels strongly about this. Happy birthday, Charlie!

Inline links: advocate for

interstellar objects1 mentions across 1 issues

interstellar objects is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 20, 2021 and December 20, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "fortified essays about solar power , monetary policy , and interstellar objects". It most often appears alongside bimagrumab, Cimbrian Seeresses, Conservatives.

Reference entry: interstellar objects
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: December 20, 2021
Last seen: December 20, 2021

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Issue trail

Mantic Monday: Let Me Google That For You December 20, 2021

bimagrumab 1 shared issues
Cimbrian Seeresses 1 shared issues
Conservatives 1 shared issues
End Mass Incarceration 1 shared issues
Fat Tails 1 shared issues

Source context

Mantic Monday: Let Me Google That For You

December 20, 2021 · Original source

You can read more fortified essays about solar power, monetary policy, and interstellar objects, among others.

Inline links: solar power, monetary policy, interstellar objects

intranasal racemic ketamine1 mentions across 1 issues

intranasal racemic ketamine is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 22, 2021 and December 22, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "when the other psychiatrists in my clinic learned I was prescribing intranasal racemic ketamine". It most often appears alongside aspirin, Astralcodexten Com, budesonide.

Reference entry: intranasal racemic ketamine
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: December 22, 2021
Last seen: December 22, 2021

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The FDA Has Punted Decisions About Luvox Prescription To The Deepest Recesses Of The Human Soul December 22, 2021

aspirin 1 shared issues
Astralcodexten Com 1 shared issues
budesonide 1 shared issues
Congo 1 shared issues
COVID 1 shared issues

Source context

The FDA Has Punted Decisions About Luvox Prescription To The Deepest Recesses Of The Human Soul

December 22, 2021 · Original source

(by the way, when the other psychiatrists in my clinic learned I was prescribing intranasal racemic ketamine, they all said that was cool, and a few asked me to walk them through the process).

intrinsic vs. extrinsic perspectives1 mentions across 1 issues

intrinsic vs. extrinsic perspectives is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 30, 2025 and May 30, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Erik Hoel’s “intrinsic” vs. “extrinsic” perspectives". It most often appears alongside 3Blue1Brown, Aella, Alasdair MacIntyre.

Reference entry: intrinsic vs. extrinsic perspectives
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 30, 2025
Last seen: May 30, 2025

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Bayes For Everyone May 30, 2025

3Blue1Brown 1 shared issues
Aella 1 shared issues
Alasdair MacIntyre 1 shared issues
ancient aliens 1 shared issues
Apollonian 1 shared issues

Source context

Bayes For Everyone

May 30, 2025 · Original source

If this sounds like some sort of esoteric, speculative division, I’m doing a bad job explaining it. I mean to gesture at an idea that smart people have been pointing at for centuries. It’s at least similar to Nietzsche’s “Dionysian” vs. “Apollonian” modes, and to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s “the bricoleur” vs. “the engineer”, and to Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of modernity. It’s near the heart of what Iain McGilchrist is describing in The Master and His Emissary. I think it’s the same thing as Erik Hoel’s “intrinsic” vs. “extrinsic” perspectives? It overlaps a lot with Kahneman’s “System 1” and “System 2” and with Jonathan Haidt’s “the elephant” and “the rider”. Heck, the lack of clarity on this divide is what makes Jordan Peterson’s dialogues with atheists so frustrating.

Intro Psychology1 mentions across 1 issues

Intro Psychology is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 12, 2023 and December 12, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Like, the one thing you learn in every Intro Psychology class". It most often appears alongside 2024, Aaron Peskin, accelerationist conspiracy.

Reference entry: Intro Psychology
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: December 12, 2023
Last seen: December 12, 2023

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Son Of Bride Of Bay Area House Party December 12, 2023

2024 1 shared issues
Aaron Peskin 1 shared issues
accelerationist conspiracy 1 shared issues
Adam D’Angelo 1 shared issues
Aella 1 shared issues

Source context

Son Of Bride Of Bay Area House Party

December 12, 2023 · Original source

“People say that modern food is addictive,” interrupts Jonathan. “But it really isn’t. It’s shocking how little work people put into optimizing the addictiveness of food. Like, the one thing you learn in every Intro Psychology class . . . “

Inuit1 mentions across 1 issues

Inuit is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 10, 2022 and June 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "among societies like the Inuit or Kwakiutl". It most often appears alongside 50,000 BC, Africa, Altamira.

Reference entry: Inuit
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 10, 2022
Last seen: June 10, 2022

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Issue trail

Your Book Review: The Dawn Of Everything June 10, 2022

50,000 BC 1 shared issues
Africa 1 shared issues
Altamira 1 shared issues
Amazonia 1 shared issues
Asia 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: The Laws of Trading

June 10, 2022 · Original source

This seasonality also shows up in anthropologist accounts of hunter-gatherer societies. The Davids quote from a 1903 book on seasonal variations among the Inuit, describing how during the summer,

Inuit dispersed into bands of roughly twenty or thirty people to pursue freshwater fish, caribou and reindeer, all under the authority of a single elder male. During this period, property was possessively marked and patriarchs exercised coercive, sometimes even tyrannical power over their kin. . . But in the long winter months, when seals and walrus flocked to the Arctic shore, there was a dramatic reversal. Then, Inuit gathered together to build great meeting houses of wood, whale rib and stone; within these houses, virtues of equality, altruism and collective life prevailed. Wealth was shared, and husbands and wives exchanged partners under the aegis of Sedna, the Goddess of the Sea.

among societies like the Inuit or Kwakiutl, times of seasonal congregation were also ritual seasons, almost entirely given over to dances, rites and dramas. Sometimes these could involve creating temporary kings or even ritual police with real coercive powers (though, often, peculiarly, these ritual police doubled as clowns). In other cases, they involved dissolving norms of hierarchy and propriety, as in the Inuit midwinter orgies.

Investment Banking1 mentions across 1 issues

Investment Banking is a recurring concept 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 "This is also the entire field of Investment Banking". It most often appears alongside 2008 Financial Crisis, 2023 book review contest, 30-Year Mortgage.

Reference entry: Investment Banking
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 21, 2023
Last seen: July 21, 2023

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Issue trail

Your Book Review: The Laws of Trading July 21, 2023

2008 Financial Crisis 1 shared issues
2023 book review contest 1 shared issues
30-Year Mortgage 1 shared issues
A.L. Barker 1 shared issues
ACX Book Review Contest 1 shared issues

Source context

July 21, 2023 · Original source

This is also the entire field of Investment Banking: build a model, then massage the inputs to get the multiple that the Managing Director tells you to.

investors1 mentions across 1 issues

investors is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 31, 2024 and January 31, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "wives of bigshot investors". It most often appears alongside 2023, Against Learning From Dramatic Effects, Bill Ackman.

Reference entry: investors
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: January 31, 2024
Last seen: January 31, 2024

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Seems Like Targeting January 31, 2024

2023 1 shared issues
Against Learning From Dramatic Effects 1 shared issues
Bill Ackman 1 shared issues
Business Insider 1 shared issues
Chris Brunet 1 shared issues

Source context

Seems Like Targeting

January 31, 2024 · Original source

But the other half is - if everyone has a similar distribution, or distributions with subtle differences that are hard to notice directly, then whose distribution gets packaged into a dramatic data point depends on the whims of the packagers, ie journalists. I don’t believe that woke college presidents, or the wives of bigshot investors, are more likely to plagiarize than other groups. But they are more likely to inspire articles accusing them of plagiarism. I don’t think movements that have just become unpopular because of unrelated crypto scams are more likely to have bad sexual consent norms than those same movements right before the scams were discovered. But they’re more likely to inspire articles calling them out.

Invisible Hand1 mentions across 1 issues

Invisible Hand is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 07, 2023 and June 07, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "he’s talking about capitalism and the Invisible Hand". It most often appears alongside 747, America, America Against America.

Reference entry: Invisible Hand
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 07, 2023
Last seen: June 07, 2023

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Issue trail

Assistant Dictator Book Club: America Against America June 07, 2023

747 1 shared issues
America 1 shared issues
America Against America 1 shared issues
American 1 shared issues
American conventional wisdom 1 shared issues

Source context

Assistant Dictator Book Club: America Against America

June 07, 2023 · Original source

First, he’s talking about capitalism and the Invisible Hand, which his Chinese readers aren’t necessarily familiar with; he seems to have a pretty good sense of this and why it might be good, and wants to bring home the full degree to which the US economy isn’t centrally planned.

Involution phase1 mentions across 1 issues

Involution phase is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 19, 2022 and August 19, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as ""Being in an Involution phase subculture feels like the opposite."". It most often appears alongside 00s, 70s, 80s.

Reference entry: Involution phase
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 19, 2022
Last seen: August 19, 2022

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Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On Subcultures August 19, 2022

00s 1 shared issues
70s 1 shared issues
80s 1 shared issues
90s 1 shared issues
Andrew Yang 1 shared issues

Source context

Highlights From The Comments On Subcultures

August 19, 2022 · Original source

There’s also another thing I didn’t get to in the original post about something like attack surface. When a movement is small, outsiders mostly don’t bother coming up with good criticisms, because nobody cares and it feels like punching down. In early Growth phase, the movement is still confined to its natural base and has a buzz of excitement around it and nobody wants to criticize it then either. But as it gets bigger, it becomes a well-known important topic (cf. all those news articles about EA), it starts feeling actually threatening to people (eg one vegetarian is a cute eccentric weirdo, but if 50% of people are vegetarian then you start feeling judged for not being one, and maybe people start taking meat off the menu), plus it’s in Involution phase so insiders are cooperating with outside critics.

Being in an Involution phase subculture feels like the opposite. There are intimidatingly-high barriers for entry, and the only advice people will give you is “lurk moar”. Everyone else is better at the thing than you are, and you have no compensatory advantages. You’re not sure how to break into social networks or get invited to things, and although there might be formal programs to help (eg internships), you cannot get any.

IPA++1 mentions across 1 issues

IPA++ is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 30, 2024 and May 30, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "EA needs to be a coherent philosophy and not just IPA++". It most often appears alongside AI risk, Alcoholics Anonymous, Bay.

Reference entry: IPA++
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 30, 2024
Last seen: May 30, 2024

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Contra Stone On EA May 30, 2024

AI risk 1 shared issues
Alcoholics Anonymous 1 shared issues
Bay 1 shared issues
Bay Area 1 shared issues
Boston 1 shared issues

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Contra Stone On EA

May 30, 2024 · Original source

Try spotting existential risk prevention on here. I don’t think Stone can claim that an EA version of this chart wouldn’t look phenomenally different. But then what’s left of his argument? III. Effective altruists devote absolutely enormous amounts of mental energy and research costs to program assessment, measurement of effectiveness. Those studies yield usually-conflicting results with variable effect sizes across time horizons and model specifications, and tons of different programs end up with overlapping effect estimates. That is to say, the areas where EAist style program evaluations are most compelling are areas where we don’t need them: it’s been obvious for a long time how to reduce malaria deaths, program evaluations on that front have been encouraging and marginally useful, but not gamechanging. On the other hand, in more contestable areas, EAist style program evaluations don’t really yield much clarity. It’s very rare that a program evaluation gets published finding vastly larger benefits than you’d guess from simple back-of-the-envelope guesswork, and the smaller estimates are usually because a specific intervention had first-order failure or long-run tapering, not because “actually tuberculosis isn’t that bad” or something like that. Those kinds of precise program-delivery studies are actually not an EAist specialty, but more IPA’s specialty. My second critique, then is this: there is no evidence that the toolkit and philosophical approach EAists so loudly proclaim as morally superior actually yields any clarity, or that their involvement in global efforts is net-positive vs. similar-scale donations given through near-peer organizations. The IPA mentioned here is Innovations For Poverty Action, a group that studies how to fight poverty. They’re great and do great work. But IPA doesn’t recommend top charities or direct donations. Go to their website, try to find their recommended charities. Unless I’m missing something, there are none. GiveWell does have recommended charities - including ones that they decided to recommend based on IPA’s work - and moves ~$250 million per year to them. If IPA existed, but not GiveWell, the average donor wouldn’t know where to donate, and ~$250 million per year would fail to go to charities that IPA likes. I think from the perspective of people who actually work within this ecosystem, Stone’s concern is like saying “Farms have already solved the making-food problem, so why do we need grocery stores?” (also, effective altruism funds IPA) I’m focusing on IPA here because Stone brought them up, but I think EA does more than this. I don’t think there’s an IPA for figuring out whether asteroid deflection is more cost-effective than biosecurity, whether cow welfare is more effective than chicken welfare, or figuring out which AI safety institute to donate to. I think this is because IPA is working on a really specific problem (which kinds of poverty-related interventions work) and EA is working on a different problem (what charities should vaguely utilitarian-minded people donate to?) These are closely related questions but they’re not the same question - which is why, for example, IPA does (great) research into consumer protection, something EA doesn’t consider comparatively high-impact. And I’m still focusing on donation to charity, again because it’s what Stone brought up, but EA does other things - like incubating charities, or building networks that affect policy. IV. Let’s skip farm animal welfare for a second and look at the next few: Global Aid, “Effective Altruism,” potential AI risks, biosecurity, and global catastrophic risk. These are all definitely disproportionate areas of EAist interest. If you google these topics, you will find a wildly disproportionate number of people who are EAist, or have sex at EAist orgies, or are the friends of people who have sex at EAist orgies. These really are some of the unique social features of EAism. And they largely amount to subsidizing white collar worker wages. I’m sorry but there’s no other way to slice it: these are all jobs largely aimed at giving money to researchers, PhD-holders, university-adjacent-persons, think tanks, etc. That may be fine stuff, but the whole pitch of effective altruism is that it’s supposed to bypass a lot of the conventional nonprofit bureaucracy and its parasitism and just give money to effective charities. But as EAism as matured into a truly unique social movement, it is creating its own bureaucracy of researchers, think tanks, bureaucrats… the very things it critiqued. Suppose an EA organization funded a cancer researcher to study some new drug, and that new drug was a perfect universal cure for cancer. Would Stone reject this donation as somehow impure, because it went to a cancer researcher (a white-collar PhD holder)? EA gives hundreds of millions of dollars directly to malaria treatments that go to the poorest people in the world. It’s also one the main funders of GiveDirectly, a charity that has given money ($750 million so far) directly to the poorest people in the world. But in addition to giving out bednets directly, it sometimes funds malaria vaccines. In addition to giving to poor Africans, it also funds the people who do the studies to see whether giving to poor Africans works. Some of those are white-collar workers. EA has never been about critiquing the existence of researchers and think tanks. In fact, this is part of the story of EA’s founding. In 2007, the only charity evaluators accessible by normal people rated charities entirely on how much overhead they had - whether the money went to white-collar people or to sympathetic poor recipients. EAs weren’t the first to point out that this was a very weak way of evaluating charities. But they were the first to make the argument at scale and bring it into the public consciousness, and GiveWell (and to some degree the greater EA movement) were founded on the principle of “what if there was a charity evaluator that did better than just calculate overhead?” In accordance with this history, if you look on Giving What We Can’s List Of Misconceptions About Effective Altruism, their #1 Misconception about about charity evaluation is that “looking at a charity’s overhead costs is key to evaluating its effectiveness”. This is another part of my argument that EA is more than just IPA++. For years, the state of the art for charity evaluators was “grade them by how much overhead they had”. IPA and all the great people working on evidence-based charity at the time didn’t solve that problem - people either used CharityNavigator or did their own research. GiveWell did solve that problem, and that success sparked a broader movement to come up with a philosophy of charity that could solve more problems. Many individuals have always had good philosophies of charity, but I think EA was a step change in doing it at scale and trying to build useful tools / a community around it. V. You could of course say AI risk is a super big issue. I’m open to that! But surely the solution to AI risk is to invest in some drone-delivered bombs and geospatial data on computing centers! The idea that the primary solution here is going to be blog posts, white papers, podcasts, and even lobbying is just insane. If you are serious about ruinous AI risk, you cannot possibly tell me that the strategy pursued here is optimal vs. say waiting until a time when workers have all gone home and blowing up a bunch of data centers and corporate offices. In particular terrorism as a strategy may be efficient since explosives are rather cheap. To be clear I do not support a strategy of terrorism!!!! But I am questioning why AI-riskers don’t. Logically, they should. I think if you have to write in bold with four exclamation points at the end that you’re not explicitly advocating terrorism, you should step back and think about your assumptions further. So: Should people who worry about global warming bomb coal plants? Should people who worry that Trump is going to destroy American democracy bomb the Republican National Convention? Should people who worry about fertility collapse and underpopulation bomb abortion clinics? EAs aren’t the only group who think there are deeply important causes. But for some reason people who can think about other problems in Near Mode go crazy when they start thinking about EA. (Eliezer Yudkowsky has sometimes been accused of wanting to bomb data centers, but he supports international regulations backed by military force - his model is things like Israel bombing Iraq’s nuclear program in the context of global norms limiting nuclear proliferation - not lone wolves. As far as I know, all EAs are united against this kind of thing.) There are three reasons not to bomb coal plants/data centers/etc. The first is that bombing things is morally wrong. I take this one pretty seriously. The second is that terrorism doesn’t work. Imagine that someone actually tried to bomb a data center. First of all, I don’t have statistics but I assume 99% of terrorists get caught at the “your collaborator is an undercover fed” stage. Another 99% get eliminated at the “blown up by poor bomb hygiene and/or a spam text message” stage. And okay, 1/10,000 will destroy a datacenter, and then what? Google tells me there are 10,978 data centers in the world. After one successful attack, the other 10,977 will get better security. Probably many of these are in China or some other country that’s not trivial for an American to import high explosives into. The third is that - did I say terrorism didn’t work? I mean it massively massively backfires. Hamas tried terrorism, they frankly did a much better job than we would, and now 52% of the buildings in their entire country have been turned to rubble. Osama bin Laden tried terrorism, also did an impressive job, and the US took over the whole country that had supported him, then took over an unrelated country that seemed like the kinds of guys who might support him, then spent ten years hunting him down and killing him and everyone he had ever associated with. One f@#king time, a handful of EAs tried promoting their agenda by committing some crimes which were much less bad than terrorism. Along with all the direct suffering they caused, they destroyed EA’s reputation and political influence, drove thousands of people away from the movement, and everything they did remains a giant pit of shame that we’re still in the process of trying to climb our way out of. Not to bang the same drum again and again, but this is why EA needs to be a coherent philosophy and not just IPA++. You need some kind of theory of what kinds of activism are acceptable and effective, or else people will come up with morally repugnant and incredibly idiotic plans that will definitely backfire and destroy everything you thought you were fighting for. EA hasn’t always been the best at avoiding this failure mode, but at least we manage to outdo our critics. VI. Stone moves on to animal welfare: It’s important to grasp that [caring about animals] is, in evolutionary terms, an error in our programming. The mechanisms involved are entirely about intra-human dynamics (or, some argue, may also be about recognizing the signs of vulnerable prey animals or enabling better hunting). Yes humans have had domestic animals for quite a long time, but our sympathetic responses are far older than that. We developed accidental sympathies for animals and then we made friends with dogs, not vice versa. Again, this is part of why I think it’s useful to have people who think about philosophy, and not just people who do RCTs. People having kids of their own instead of donating to sperm banks is in some sense an “error” in our evolutionary program. The program just wanted us to reproduce; instead we got a bunch of weird proxy goals like “actually loving kids for their own sake”. Art is another error - I assume we were evolutionarily programmed to care about beauty because, I don’t know, flowers indicate good hunting grounds or something, not because evolution wanted us to paint beautiful pictures. Anyone who cares about a future they will never experience, or about people on far off continents who they’ll never meet, is in some sense succumbing to “errors” in their evolutionary programming. Stone describes the original mechanisms as “about intra-human dynamics”, but this is cope - they’re about intra-tribal dynamics. Plenty of cultures have been completely happy to enslave, kill, and murder people outside their tribes, and nothing in their evolutionary mechanism has told them not to. Does Stone think this, too, is an error? At some point you’ve got to go beyond evolutionary programming and decide what kind of person you want to be. I want to be the kind of person who cares about my family, about beauty, about people on other continents, and - yes - about animal suffering. This is the reflective equilibrium I’ve landed in after considering all the drives and desires within me, filtering it through my ability to use Reason, and imagining having to justify myself to whatever God may or may not exist. Stone suggests EAs don’t have answers to a lot of the basic questions around this. I can recommend him various posts like Axiology, Morality, Law, the super-old Consequentialism FAQ, and The Gift We Give To Tomorrow, but I think they’ll only address about half of his questions. The other half of the answers have to come from intuition, common sense, and moral conservatism. This isn’t embarrassing. Logicians have discovered many fine and helpful logical principles, but can’t 100% answer the problem of skepticism - you can fill in some of the internal links in the chain, but the beginning and end stay shrouded in mystery. This doesn’t mean you can ignore the logical principles we do know. It just means that life is a combination of formally-reasonable and not-formally-reasonable bits. You should follow the formal reason where you have it, and not freak out and collapse into Cartesian doubt where you don’t. This is how I think of morality too. Again, I really think it’s important to have a philosophy and not just a big pile of RCTs. Our critics make this point better than I ever could. They start with “all this stuff is just common sense, who needs philosophy, the RCTs basically interpret themselves”, then, in the same essay, digress into: If I wanted to do this stuff, I would try terrorism.

Inline links: Giving What We Can’s List Of Misconceptions About Effective Altruism, Israel bombing Iraq’s nuclear program, I take this one pretty seriously, a spam text message, Axiology, Morality, Law, Consequentialism FAQ, The Gift We Give To Tomorrow

Ippata1 mentions across 1 issues

Ippata is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 15, 2025 and July 15, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "I may call all Ippata “mom”". It most often appears alongside Aboriginal, Aboriginal Australia, Aboriginal society.

Reference entry: Ippata
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 15, 2025
Last seen: July 15, 2025

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Book Review: Arguments About Aborigines July 15, 2025

Aboriginal 1 shared issues
Aboriginal Australia 1 shared issues
Aboriginal society 1 shared issues
Aborigine 1 shared issues
Aborigines 1 shared issues

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Book Review: Arguments About Aborigines

July 15, 2025 · Original source

Further, everyone of the same section is . . . sort of the same person? My father’s brothers, who are Kubbi like him, are also sort of my fathers. If I visit a far-off tribe, the Kubbis there will behave paternally to me, and I owe them some measure of filial respect. Likewise, I may call all Butas “sister”, and all Ippata “mom”. I can never have sex with any Buta or Ippata - that would be incest.

IQ realism1 mentions across 1 issues

IQ realism is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 18, 2021 and February 18, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "much IQ realism is that no, people who perform poorly on these tests must be ruled by others". It most often appears alongside 1957, Alexander H, American.

Reference entry: IQ realism
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: February 18, 2021
Last seen: February 18, 2021

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Highlights From The Comments On Cult Of Smart February 18, 2021

1957 1 shared issues
Alexander H 1 shared issues
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Highlights From The Comments On Cult Of Smart

February 18, 2021 · Original source

What you need is counter-power, which means a mix of organization and indeed intelligence for self-government and pressing for collective rights. You can be an IQ realist and agree that even say IQ 80 people have this, organized rightly, but I feel like the *gist* of much IQ realism is that no, people who perform poorly on these tests must be ruled by others, and that’s why IQ realism leaves a bad taste in most leftists’ mouths. Certainly that’s the takeaway I get from the Bell Curve, even once you take away the spicy race stuff.

Forget about IQ realism - whether we think of things in terms of IQ or not, how do we ensure that people who just aren't very good at the kind of skills you need to assert and wield power, are equally able to assert and wield power? This sounds kind of paradoxical, but to his credit Oligopsony had an answer ready:

IQ research1 mentions across 1 issues

IQ research is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 30, 2025 and July 30, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Nazis... turned against IQ research after Jews outscored Aryans". It most often appears alongside Gaza, Hen, Hen Mazzig.

Reference entry: IQ research
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 30, 2025
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My Heart Of Hearts July 30, 2025

Gaza 1 shared issues
Hen 1 shared issues
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Hitler 1 shared issues
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My Heart Of Hearts

July 30, 2025 · Original source

Thomas Cotter asks why people think “consistency” is an important moral value. After all, he says, the Nazis and Soviets were “consistent” with their evil beliefs. I’m not so sure of his examples - the Soviets massacred workers striking for better conditions, and the Nazis were so bad at race science that they turned against IQ research after Jews outscored Aryans - but I’m sure if he looked harder he could find some evil person who was superficially consistent with themselves.

Inline links: Thomas Cotter asks

IQ scientists1 mentions across 1 issues

IQ scientists is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 15, 2023 and February 15, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "formal anonymous surveys of IQ scientists". It most often appears alongside ACX, AI, Alexander.

Reference entry: IQ scientists
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: February 15, 2023
Last seen: February 15, 2023

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Trying Again On Fideism February 15, 2023

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Trying Again On Fideism

February 15, 2023 · Original source

Eliezer Yudkowsky’s position is Let Them Debate College Students. I’m not a college student, but I’m not Anthony Fauci either, and I am known for blogging about extremely dignified ideas like the possibility that the terrible Harry Potter fanfiction My Immortal is secretly an alchemical allegory. I haven’t seen ivermectin advocates using “Scott takes this seriously enough to argue against it!” as an argument, and I have seen them getting angry about it and writing long responses trying to prove me wrong. Sometimes they have used me getting some points wrong as a positive argument, and I would be open to the argument that I failed in not arguing against it well enough that they couldn’t do that, but nobody has been making that argument, and if they did, then it would imply that people who are smarter than me should take over the job, which I endorse. III. I worry Scott Aaronson thinks I’m saying you shouldn’t trust the experts, and instead you should always think for yourself. I’m definitely not trying to say that. I’ve tried to be pretty clear that I think experts are right remarkably often, by some standards basically 100% of the time - I realize how crazy that sounds, and “by some standards” is doing a lot of the work there, but see Learning To Love Scientific Consensus for more. Bounded Distrust also helps explain what I mean here. I also try to be pretty clear that reasoning is extremely hard, it’s very easy to get everything wrong, and if you try to do it then a default option is to get everything wrong and humiliate yourself. I describe that happening to me here, and presumably it also happens to other people sometimes. What I do think is that “trust the experts” is an extremely exploitable heuristic, which leads everyone to put up a veneer of “being the experts” and demand that you trust them. I come back to this example again and again, but only because it’s so blatant: the New York Times ran an article saying that only 36% of economists supported school vouchers, with a strong implication that the profession was majority against. If you checked their sources, you would find that actually, it was 36% in favor, 19% against, 46% unsure or not responding. If you are too quick to seek epistemic closure because “you have to trust the experts”, you will be easy prey to people misrepresenting what they are saying. I come back to this example less often, because it could get me in trouble, but when people do formal anonymous surveys of IQ scientists, they find that most of them believe different races have different IQs and that a substantial portion of the difference is genetic. I don’t think most New York Times readers would identify this as the scientific consensus. So either the surveys - which are pretty official and published in peer-reviewed journals - have managed to compellingly misrepresent expert consensus, or the impressions people get from the media have, or “expert consensus” is extremely variable and complicated and can’t be reflected by a single number or position. And I genuinely think this is part of why ivermectin conspiracies took off in the first place. We say “trust science” and “trust experts”. But there were lots of studies that showed ivermectin worked - aren’t those science? And Pierre Kory MD, an specialist in severe respiratory illnesses who wrote a well-regarded textbook, supports it - isn’t he an expert? Isn’t it plausible that the science and the experts are right, and the media and the government and Big Pharma are wrong? This is part of what happens when people reify the mantras instead of using them as pointers to more complicated concepts like “reasoning is hard” and “here are the 28,491 rules you need to keep in mind when reading a scientific study.” IV. All of this still feels rambly and like it’s failing to connect. Instead, let me try describing exactly what I would advice I would give young people opening an Internet connection for the first time: You are not immune to conspiracy theories. You have probably developed a false sense of security by encountering many dumb conspiracy theories and feeling no temptation to believe them. These theories were designed to trap people very different from you; others will be aimed in your direction. The more certain you are of your own infallibility, the less aware you will be, and the worse your chances. The ones that get you won’t look like conspiracy theories to you (though they might to other people). When you run into conspiracy theories you don’t believe, feel free to ignore them. If you decide to engage, don’t mock them or feel superior. Think “there, but for the grace of God, go I.” Get a sense of what the arguments for the conspiracy theory look like - not from skeptics trying to mock them, but from the horse’s mouth - so you have a sense of what false arguments look like. Ask yourself what habits of mind it would have taken the people affected by the theory to successfully resist it. Ask yourself if you have those habits of mind. Yes? ARE YOU SURE? To a first approximation, trust experts over your own judgment. If people are trying to confuse you about who the experts are, then to a second approximation trust prestigious people and big institutions, including professors at top colleges, journalists at major newspapers, professional groups with names like the American ______ Association, and the government. You might ask: Don’t governments and other big institutions have biases? Won’t they sometimes be wrong or deceptive? And even if you’ve lucked into the one country and historical era where the government 100% tells the truth and the intellectuals have no biases, doesn’t someone need to keep the flame of suspicion alive so that it’s available to people in other, less fortunate countries and eras? The answer is: absolutely, yes, but also this is how conspiracy theories get you. They will claim that they are the special case where you need to take up the mantle of Galileo and Frederick Douglass and Jane Jacobs and all those people who stood up to the intellectual authorities and power structures of their own time. The whole point of “you are not immune to conspiracy theories” is that the evidence for them can sound convincing because something like it is sort of true. This is equally so for second-level claims like “prestigious institutions are fallible and biased”. Probably something like “make a principled precommitment never to disagree with prestigious institutions until you are at least 30 and have a graduate degree in at least one subject” would be good advice, but nobody would take that advice, and taking it too seriously might crush some kind of important human spirit, so I won’t assert this. But always have in the back of your mind that you live in a world where it’s sort of good advice. If you feel tempted to believe something that has red flags for being a conspiracy theory, at least keep track of the Inside vs. Outside View. Say “on the Inside View, this feels like the evidence is overwhelming; on the Outside View, it sounds like a classic conspiracy theory”. You don’t necessarily have to resolve this discomfort right away. You can walk around with an annoying knot in your beliefs, even if it’s not fun. Look for the strongest evidence against the idea. Keep in mind important possibilities like: Is it possible that everyone who disagrees with the idea is a bad mean cruel stupid person, but also, the idea really is false?

Inline links: Let Them Debate College Students, like the possibility that the terrible Harry Potter fanfiction My Immortal is secretly an alchemical allegory, Learning To Love Scientific Consensus, Bounded Distrust, happening to me here, ran an article, ARE YOU SURE?

IR1 mentions across 1 issues

IR is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 24, 2022 and June 24, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "mandatory reading for IR/political science freshmen". It most often appears alongside 501(c)(3), 80,000 Hours, 9/11.

Reference entry: IR
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 24, 2022
Last seen: June 24, 2022

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Your Book Review: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy June 24, 2022

501(c)(3) 1 shared issues
80,000 Hours 1 shared issues
11 1 shared issues
Adam Tooze 1 shared issues
Afghan ambassador to Pakistan 1 shared issues

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

June 24, 2022 · Original source

[In Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy], Richard Hanania details how a public choice model (imported from public choice theory in economics) can explain the United State’s incoherent foreign policy much better than the unitary actor model (imported from rational choice theory in economics) that underlies the illusion of American grand strategy in international relations (IR), in particular the dominant school of realism. As the subtitle How Generals, Weapons Manufacturers, and Foreign Governments Shape American Foreign Policy suggests, American foreign policy is driven by special interest groups, which results in millions of deaths for no good reason.

Inline links: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy, public choice theory, rational choice theory, grand strategy, realism

It is very much an academic book that should revolutionise the whole field of IR by challenging the fundamental assumption of realpolitik with impressive rigour, so the brisk 200 pages should probably be mandatory reading for IR/political science freshmen. Like Robin Hanson, I would have been persuaded by an article length analysis, but as Hanania himself agrees, the belabouring book length treatment is to disabuse academics who by nature demand sweat and impressive mastery of literatures — this review should, dare I say, suffice for the cynical reader.

Inline links: Robin Hanson, Hanania

IR specialists1 mentions across 1 issues

IR specialists is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 24, 2022 and June 24, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "let’s hope IR specialists can imbibe the public choice model". It most often appears alongside 501(c)(3), 80,000 Hours, 9/11.

Reference entry: IR specialists
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First seen: June 24, 2022
Last seen: June 24, 2022

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Your Book Review: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy June 24, 2022

501(c)(3) 1 shared issues
80,000 Hours 1 shared issues
11 1 shared issues
Adam Tooze 1 shared issues
Afghan ambassador to Pakistan 1 shared issues

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

June 24, 2022 · Original source

Nuclear risk is neglected by the public because of Pax Americana since the collapse of the USSR, and is not discussed as often in EA as it’s thought to be relatively well-funded and mainstream, but in fact major donors like the MacArthur Foundation have been withdrawing funding. As Joan Rohling details in an 80,000 Hours podcast there is much to be done, especially when Ukraine gave up their nuclear arsenal in 1994 in exchange for Russia’s promise to never threaten or use military force against them. A worthwhile adjacent cause area might be de-escalation of public outcry to reduce x-risk from nuclear war beyond just regular anti-proliferation efforts — even a Russian specialist from the RAND Corporation is surprised by how much public outrage is driving policy: Even just the pace of the sanctions: we went to 11 out of 10 in like two days — farther than many expected we’d ever get in short order. And I think the same is true about these military assistance initiatives. We’re just trying to do something because there’s a public demand for action. So that’s what worries me, that the sort of public outrage that’s being channeled in Western democracies through political systems could result in decisions that prove ultimately unwise. Despite how odd it is that some wars are “legal” while others aren’t, we should be glad UNSC exists as much as everyone laughs at how useless the rest of the UN is. All is fair in love and war, but international norms is all that stands between us and nuclear annihilation. It is hard to emphasise just how delusional it is for the public to fixate on no-fly zones — I, like Scott, am surprised we’re still capable of jingoism. 80,000 Hours has updated their top career recommendations to include China specialist to improve China-Western coordination on global catastrophic risk, which seems more important after reading how irrational and captured the American foreign policy apparatus is. As Hanania writes, “great power competition” is an anachronism. If Ukraine is the first war warped by hyperreality, it won’t be the last. Now that US foreign policy elites have driven Putin into the arms of China, let’s hope IR specialists can imbibe the public choice model instead of antagonising yet another nuclear rival. Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy is an important work because it raises the sanity waterline, which at the least should make us stop killing millions for no reason, and at the most should make the human race more knowledgeable of how to prevent total extinction from nuclear armageddon. Pax Americana is dead, but a multipolar world will be more humane. Endnotes In the fiscal year 2018, the top five government contractors were all weapons manufacturers, with Lockheed Martin in first place at $40.6 billion. The Department of Defence spent $358 billion on contracting, ten times higher than second place Department of Energy. Collective action problems that stop a bunch of smaller companies from effectively influencing policy are no hindrance for companies like Lockheed Martin.

Inline links: Pax Americana, MacArthur Foundation, details, gave up, surprised, Scott, jingoism, China specialist, captured, writes, the sanity waterline, a multipolar world will be more humane

IR theorists1 mentions across 1 issues

IR theorists is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 24, 2022 and June 24, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "IR theorists have long debated what strategy the US should adopt". It most often appears alongside 501(c)(3), 80,000 Hours, 9/11.

Reference entry: IR theorists
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First seen: June 24, 2022
Last seen: June 24, 2022

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Your Book Review: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy June 24, 2022

501(c)(3) 1 shared issues
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11 1 shared issues
Adam Tooze 1 shared issues
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Your Book Review: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy

June 24, 2022 · Original source

IR theorists have put forth three justifications for the unitary actor model.

Other IR theorists have argued that the unitary executive model can save the unitary actor model but Hanania argues that they, too, fall short.

What doesn’t have comparable influence is business interests as argued by IR theorists. Unlike weapons manufacturers, other business interests have to overcome the collective action problem, especially when some businesses benefit from protectionism. By interfering in a foreign state, the US may build a stable capitalist system propitious for multinationals, but can conversely cause a greater degree of instability and make it impossible to do business there; when business interests are unsure what the impact of a foreign policy will be for their bottom line, they should be more likely to focus their lobbying efforts elsewhere.

Iranian people1 mentions across 1 issues

Iranian people is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 08, 2022 and July 08, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Iranian people have had enough". It most often appears alongside 1968 convention, 1976 Democratic, 1976 Democratic primary.

Reference entry: Iranian people
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Your Book Review: The Outlier July 08, 2022

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Your Book Review: The Outlier

July 08, 2022 · Original source

The origins of the Iran hostage crisis go back all the way to 1951, when the CIA led a coup in Iran to prevent the democratically-elected government from nationalizing their oil industry. As is usually the case with people who seize power in coups, the new, US-backed leader, the Shah, is a bit of a despot. (He infamously has gourmet lunches flown in from France on the Concorde.) By 1979, The Iranian people have had enough, and the Shah himself is overthrown by a group of fundamentalist Islamic clerics, who still control Iran to this day. In conclusion, we totally nailed the situation and none of our decisions backfired in any way. Go America!

Irish1 mentions across 1 issues

Irish is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 24, 2022 and May 24, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "she herself is an Irish immigrant". It most often appears alongside #Abolitionist, #AntiNazi, #antiwar.

Reference entry: Irish
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California Gubernatorial Candidates From Z to Z May 24, 2022

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California Gubernatorial Candidates From Z to Z

May 24, 2022 · Original source

Heather is a hair salon owner and single mother from Los Angeles who is running as a Green Party candidate. She supports the environment, increased immigration (she herself is an Irish immigrant), and, of course, her Plan To End Homelessness:

Irish education system1 mentions across 1 issues

Irish education system is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 30, 2021 and August 30, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "it’s an Irish education system thing". It most often appears alongside Acceptable Losses, Acceptable Losses: The Debatable Origins of Loss Aversion, Alex Imas.

Reference entry: Irish education system
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On Hreha On Behavioral Economics August 30, 2021

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On Hreha On Behavioral Economics

August 30, 2021 · Original source

My medical school had final exams made of true-false questions, with an option to answer “don’t know”. They were scored like so: if you got it right, +1 point; wrong, -0.5 points; don’t know, 0. You can easily confirm that it’s always worth guessing even if you genuinely don’t know the answer (+0.25 points on average instead of 0). On average people probably had to guess on ~30% of questions (don’t ask; it’s an Irish education system thing), so you could increase your test score 7.5% with the right strategy here.

Irish IQ1 mentions across 1 issues

Irish IQ is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 09, 2023 and February 09, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "average Irish IQ appeared to rise from mid-80s to 100 as Ireland modernized". It most often appears alongside @moritheil, ACX Prediction Contest, Adam Tooze.

Reference entry: Irish IQ
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Links For February 2023 February 09, 2023

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Links For February 2023

February 09, 2023 · Original source

33: If you’ve served any time in the trenches of the IQ nature-vs-nurture wars, you’ll be familiar with one of the nurture side’s strongest arguments: average Irish IQ appeared to rise from mid-80s to 100 as Ireland modernized in second half of the 20th century. Psychologist Russell Warne looks into the evidence and finds that no, Irish IQ has probably been pretty stable during that time, though some of this depends on the definition of “IQ” and “stability” - some early Irish failed the tests because they had never taken any similar test before and were confused, but quickly improved to near-100 after being acquainted with the process.

Inline links: looks into the evidence and finds

Irish nationalism1 mentions across 1 issues

Irish nationalism is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 24, 2025 and October 24, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "you can define ‘religion’ so that Irish nationalism can be a religion". It most often appears alongside A Ordem, Abraham Lincoln, ACX.

Reference entry: Irish nationalism
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Highlights From The Comments On Fatima October 24, 2025

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Highlights From The Comments On Fatima

October 24, 2025 · Original source

Generalized one-fell-swoop paranormal explanations. Demons are trying to confuse us, or the simulation is glitching, or there’s some kind of Harry Potter-esque masquerade overflowing with wizards and monsters that carefully hides itself from us Muggles but occasionally leaks. UFOs do not really lend themselves to an individualized paranormal explanation - too many weird aliens in saucers trying to send whichever message of peace and love is most politically popular at the time of the abduction, too few Matrioshka brains with nanotech - so bringing them into our attention may make us more interested in looking for a generalized paranormal explanation which is merely pretending to be all these specific supernatural beings, including the Virgin. I take this one sort of seriously, but I also think it violates a general heuristic against conspiracies and false flag attacks. If some incredibly powerful being is telling you that it’s the Virgin Mary, and discussing Catholic doctrine, and performing healing miracles, I think you should at least start with a presumption of taking it seriously. But at this level of distance from any well-established priors, who even knows? GedAtThwll writes: This account reminds me of the semi-famous Ariel School UFO encounter [in Zimbabwe], covered well on YouTube and Wikipedia. Basically, ~60 kids saw a “silver craft” descend, and aliens (of debatable description) came out and did various things (described differently by participants). Oddly similar to the silver sun -> hallucinations. I don’t know how much it reminds me of Fatima, but I agree “sixty people all say they saw a UFO and some aliens” is the sort of mass hallucination I claimed basically doesn’t happen. I was going to attribute this something about the psychic makeup of poor uneducated Zimbabwean children, but according to Wikipedia, “Ariel School was an expensive private school [and] most of the pupils were from wealthy white families in Harare.” One interesting feature of this story is that it happened a few days after a previous UFO panic in Zimbabwe - thousands of people said they saw some kind of fiery spaceship in the sky. This was very likely true - their accounts match a Russian rocket that reentered and burned up in the atmosphere around that time. So it seems like maybe the rocket primed people into a UFO mania, and that caused . . . sixty schoolkids to all hallucinate the same thing? At least to the point where some later investigators who are accused of maybe asking some leading questions could get them to give similar answers? Peter McLaughlin (blog) writes: This is excellent. One additional strand that I’d like to see someone tug on – maybe I will. The Irish nationalist poet W. B. Yeats has a poem about the 1891 funeral of Irish nationalist political leader Charles Stewart Parnell. The poem describes how clouds covered the sky on the day of the funeral, the sun could be seen through a gap in the clouds, and then a star “shoots down”. Most people who write about this poem take this to be pure symbolism (the next stanza describes a scene of pagan sacrifice that definitely is pure symbolism), but a while ago I came across an essay where Yeats insists that no, this actually happened. He wasn’t at the funeral himself, but he knew lots of people who were. He cites his unrequited love Maud Gonne telling him afterwards about “the star that fell broad daylight as Parnell’s body was lowered into the grave”, and quotes the writer Standish O’Grady: ‘I state a fact - it was witnessed by thousands. While his followers were committing Charles Parnell’s remains to the earth, the sky was bright with strange lights and flames. Only a coincidence possibly, and yet persons not superstitious have maintained that there is some mysterious sympathy between the human soul and the elements, and that storm, and other elemental disturbances have too often succeeded or accompanied great battles to be regarded as only fortuitous...’ Now, Yeats was exceptionally credulous and prone to exaggeration. And he wrote the poem years after the funeral: while I think it’s very unlikely, it’s not impossible that he was ‘contaminated’ by subsequent knowledge of the reports from Fatima, and this coloured the way he stitched together the testimony he’d heard. The two sources he cites are less obviously Fatima-esque than his poem (though they don’t contradict each other, and altogether they add up to something exceptionally Fatima-esque with the lights and the falling object etc.; and, again, my knowledge of Yeats’ biography makes contamination seem unlikely). Even accounting for all this, the similarities between Yeats’ poem and the Fatima sun miracle are really striking to me. I think this is a potentially very important datapoint, because it’s an almost entirely non-religious example. To be sure, you can define ‘religion’ so that Irish nationalism can be a religion, but it’s very different from a bunch of people huddling on a hill because someone told them the Virgin Mary might appear. And indeed Parnell was in the unique position of being the Protestant leader of a mostly-Catholic political movement, cutting across Ireland’s religious divide. If there really was a Fatima-esque sun miracle at Parnell’s funeral, it strongly suggests that the correct explanation is (a) non-religious/materialist but also (b) ‘objective’ (or at least as intersubjective as optical illusions) rather than a matter of pure mass hysteria or hallucination. Which is exactly what this post suggests. And Parnell’s funeral came several decades before Fatima, so genuine primary sources would rule out ‘social contagion’ completely. This has been kicking around in the back of my mind for a while, but if enough people are interested I may try to track down the sources. The main published collection of Yeats’ letters to and from Gonne starts in 1893, two years after the funeral, so the main source he cites might be tricky to verify. But there might be independent diaries or newspaper reports from people at the funeral who weren’t in Yeats’ social circle, and at very least I can check the quote from Standish O’Grady. Melias (blog) writes: This is my perspective as an Orthodox Christian, and a possible framework for interpreting Fatima as a real miracle without becoming a fire-and-brimstone Catholic. It’s possible that Fatima et al. are partially or entirely from God. It’s also possible they are partially or entirely demonic phenomena, though often repurposed by God to good ends. Either way, if I have good reason to believe the Catholic Church is not fully in accord with Divine Truth, these miracles on their own shouldn’t make me change my mind. Christ Himself tells us to believe for His own sake, not for the sake of miracles. I believe in the supernatural because of numerous miracle stories that are impossible to explain otherwise. But my non-materialism is specifically Orthodox Christian because I can’t explain Jesus unless He’s the Christ, and I find Him most clearly in the practice and teachings of the Orthodox Church. Orthodoxy has plenty of miracles too, but that’s not why I’m here. I.E. Christ Himself gives you permission to decouple the reality of a supernatural occurrence from an associated claim to Divine Truth. You can use Fatima to update the chance of P(supernatural) without an equal update to P(Catholicism). Anyway, if you do want to keep going down the miracle rabbit-hole, the Orthodox equivalent of Fatima is the annual miracle of the Holy Fire. The main miracle - that a candle is miraculously lit while the Patriarch of Jerusalem is alone in the Holy Sepulchre - has supposedly been debunked since the Middle Ages. Even many Orthodox doubt it. But pilgrims regularly report a secondary miracle: For the first few minutes, candles lit from the Holy Fire don’t burn things, at least not how they should. Some videos [Video 1 here] Looks like this guy should have severe burns [Video 2 here] My brain tells me this might be possible with regular candles... but her sleeve gets plenty of time under intense flame [Video 3 here] They don’t leave their flesh in the flame for too long, but my brain tells me that putting the bundle of candles directly under your chin like the man does at 0:07 should also result in serious burns I pray before a single small candle every night. If I put my hand two inches above the visible flame, I can only hold it for ~2 seconds until it hurts too much. I find the videos and first-hand testimony (see Rod Dreher’s blog for one example) pretty convincing. Deiseach writes: Ah, I’m not pushed about Marian apparitions. The miracle of the sun is along the lines of the Shroud of Turin - you don’t have to believe the shroud is really the shroud of Jesus Christ, nobody is making you, it’s not doctrine. At the same time, if you want to venerate it (as you would a crucifix) that’s okay. Keep away from making extravagant claims, don’t contradict received doctrine, and it’s fine. Did a miracle happen at Fatima? I have no idea. I believe in God and the supernatural and all that jazz, but I’m not living and dying on “did this one event at this one apparition site really happen? if you prove it didn’t, oh no my faith is destroyed!” During the moving statue craze in Ireland, we had our own little local apparition. At the height of it, tour buses used to come with people to pray at the site. That has long died down, and I don’t recall that there were any earth-shattering revelations claimed by the visionaries, what remains is a quiet revival in people going to pray the rosary at the grotto. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_statues There are a *lot* of alleged apparitions and private revelations that are never officially accepted by the Church, and a lot more which are condemned as fakes and frauds. Ross Douthat writes (on Twitter): Re-read Scott Alexander’s Fatima post (why not?) and I think this is where his analysis goes astray - after realizing there were a bunch of “echo” miracles like the initial case, not all church-approved, he decides that *strengthens* a skeptic’s case. But you don’t have to postulate demons to see why a big miracle might have non-church-approved sequelae. 1) Catholicism could be fallible in discerning which miracles are legit. 2) Even seers have free will; visions could fall on fallible ppl who run wild with dubious claims and 3) you’d expect a big miracle to have some sequels where enthusiasm does get the better of people (which any theory of miracles obviously has to allow for). Clearly (if He exists) God doesn’t force ppl to correctly interpret every experience He grants them, and so a multiplicity of miracle sequels, some of which seem credible and even produce video evidence, and some of which veer off into left field, seems entirely compatible with the original one actually being a divine intervention - if that’s where the core evidence points. I answered: Thanks for engaging in depth. I admit that was a surprising direction for that result to go, but I mostly stand by it. I think first, that the extra miracles demonstrate it has to be a subjective phenomenon. Partly because it was unclear at Fatima whether there were any people who didn’t see it (the two negative testimonies were such a small number compared to the many positive ones that it was tempting to dismiss them as lying, or confused, or looking the wrong direction) - but at several of the other miracles it’s much clearer that large fractions, sometimes a majority, saw nothing. Partly because in some cases (Benin City, Lagos) a stadium full of people saw it, but people in the same city, just outside the stadium, reported nothing unusual. And partly because the miracle can’t be caught on video (the one video that I thought was okay, the Filipino one, got picked apart in the comments). It being a subjective phenomenon doesn’t prove it’s not a miracle (it could be a sort of prophetic vision), but it at least opens the door to that possibility. And second, although I don’t claim to be able to know for certain what God will or won’t do, I think at least the Necedah event meets any bar a reasonable person might set for “too dumb and heretical to be a real apparition”. If overly enthusiastic worshippers at a fake apparition can report sun miracles, that implies that the human capacity for hallucination is strong enough / specific enough to potentially produce spectacular sun miracles in some situations. But once we admit that, it’s only a trivial extension to say that this same human capacity to hallucinate sun miracles could have been responsible for the original sun miracle, which was more impressive than Necedah in degree but not in kind. Together, I think these are a significant negative update from where we would be if we only had the original miracle, where we might have assumed (like Dalleur) that it was an objective phenomenon that everyone could see, and that there was no way anyone could be “enthusiastic” enough to hallucinate something so striking. Valerio writes: I am Italian from the south of Italy. I was talking to my mom about your analysis of the Fatima mystery (which is very famous here). My mom told me she had exactly the same experience when she was doing a “religious trekking” trip in a small city called Gallinaro (Frosinone). She was around 18 at the time (she is 70 now). She saw a pulsating sun, like it would get closer and closer and then the go back again. This effect repeated several times (3/4) and she got really scared. Importantly, at the time she didn’t know about this effect of the pulsating sun (she learnt about it later). Also importantly she claimed they were not staring particularly at the sun nor they were expecting any miracle. They were actually sitting down on a bench nearby a cliff eating a sandwich. She doesn’t remember whether if was cloudy or not but she says she was able to stare in the sun, so maybe it was. As she was coming down the trip, her group met a local lady that confirmed those types of visions would occur there. This place is famous cause a young little girl and her grandma had a vision in a cave ( little Jesus, no more details provided) few years back. When my mom visited the little girl was still alive, not sure about now. As I am writing this , she just told me the story so didn’t have the time to research it independently . Victoria F writes: I think you put too much stock in the Catholic Church excommunicating someone and how much that reduces the odds that Mary was involved or not. Pope St. Leo I and St. Joan of Arc have also been excommunicated. Many seers are given difficult treatment by the Catholic Church at first. Lot of people here say this is the the “best” miracle. I think the many spontaneous healings at Lourdes are perhaps better: https://www.basicincome.com/bp/files/A_Protestant_Looks_at_Lourdes.pdf though I’m not sure how to get the medical records myself https://www.lourdes-france.com/en/the-medical-bureau-of-the-sanctuary/ Our Lady of Zeitoun is also perhaps a better apparition. At least it has some cool photos. I admit excommunication of the seers/believers is not proof that some of the other miracles were fake, but the Necedah one, where Mary gave warnings about the Rothschilds, and the “seer” also talked to the ghosts of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, seems pretty bad. An acquaintance claims to have done their own analysis of Lourdes and found that the impressiveness of the healings predictably decreased over time as record-keeping and medical verifiability got better, but I haven’t seen his work. There’s an interesting Substack post by a Zeitoun skeptic here. Marcel writes: Speculative hypothesis that might be worth exploring: could the perceptual mechanisms involved in the Fatima Sun Miracle be related to those underlying Tögal visions in the Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism? In Tögal (an advanced, traditionally esoteric practice), meditators report experiences of multicolored, moving light displays in response to sky or light gazing. The parallels with the Fátima reports are striking: light as a trigger, dancing colors, and evolving visionary forms. If so, Tögal might provide a reproducible framework for studying how visual and neurological processes, shaped by expectation and attention, can generate experiences of radiance that are interpreted as miraculous or sacred. Another Buddhist explanation! I can’t find a Tögal source anywhere near as clear as Daniel Ingram’s work on fire kasina, but for what it’s worth, the symbol of Dzogchen Buddhism, the thigle, looks like this: …with some representations being even more suggestive: Nikita Sokolsky (blog) writes: » Our best source for witness testimonies is the Documentacao Critica de Fatima [...] The rest is available only as physical books, $15 + shipping each. Somebody should buy the books, scan them, machine translate the testimonies, and put the translations online. The most important is Volume III I’ve ordered Volume III - though shipping anywhere outside Portugal cost $48 (not surprising for a 639 page book, I guess). They promise delivery by Oct 12th. » There are a few articles about solar retinopathy in the context of Marian shrines that I couldn’t access, including at least Nix and Apple (1987) and Campo et al (1988) Emailed you both. Thank you, Nikita! I’ve uploaded Campo here, and Nix & Apple here. Campo is only a few paragraphs, and contains little of interest if you’ve read the original post. Nix & Apple profiles several cases in New Orleans, including a pilgrim who saw the miracle in Medjugorje and then went home and saw it again in New Orleans, and a second person who skipped Medjugorje and saw it in New Orleans with no previous exposure. There was also an interesting case of someone who stared at the sun for 15 minutes with no injury, then tried again for 15 seconds and did get an injury that time. My days of not understanding the function mapping sungazing length to injury probability are definitely coming to a middle. The eye doctors who wrote the article only say that “Evidence suggests a great individual variation in the susceptibility for developing solar retinopathy, as the cause of the lesion is felt to be a photochemical injury rather than a thermal injury of the retina and retinal pigment epithelium.” The Ghiaie translations are in a form that makes them harder to upload, but there are about a dozen which contain descriptions of a sun miracle, all of which match the Fatima testimonies closely. The one I found most interesting was a monk nearby, who originally doubted the apparitions; he was in his monastery doing normal work when he saw the sun miracle, which included a beautiful white cross appearing in the sky. Other monks saw it too. The next day, he says that a secular newspaper claimed local astronomers had found some kind of ice crystal phenomenon responsible for the event, but he didn’t believe it. He didn’t clarify exactly where this happened (though his address was Castelnuovo Don Bosco, about 80 miles from Ghiaie) or when (though the testimonial implies it was at the same time as the Ghiaie miracle). Main Conclusions And Updates I’m impressed by the fire kasina correspondence, but the difficulty in explaining how everyone immediately became an expert fire kasina meditator is almost as tough as explaining the original miracle.

Inline links: writes, on YouTube, Wikipedia, match a Russian rocket, blog, writes, blog, writes, Video 1 here, Video 2 here, Video 3 here, writes, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_statues, writes, writes, https://www.basicincome.com/bp/files/A_Protestant_Looks_at_Lourdes.pdf, https://www.lourdes-france.com/en/the-medical-bureau-of-the-sanctuary/, some cool photos, here, writes, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!tnHP!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcaa90086-ed0b-4620-b0e5-502d1d34419d_800x800.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!EVex!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2c466a55-ea5c-4698-a27c-4947720edcfa_736x368.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!vVge!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3052f661-b774-4dcb-9734-7c2e297c082a_225x225.jpeg, blog, Campo here, Nix & Apple here

Iron Age man1 mentions across 1 issues

Iron Age man is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 06, 2021 and August 06, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Neolithic Man needs to become Iron Age man and invent metallurgy". It most often appears alongside AGI, AI, AI Impacts.

Reference entry: Iron Age man
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Highlights From The Comments On Acemoglu And AI August 06, 2021

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Highlights From The Comments On Acemoglu And AI

August 06, 2021 · Original source

Neolithic Man needs to become Iron Age man and invent metallurgy, realize the possibility of creating brand-new substances (pure iron) that cannot be found in nature, and then go on to develop high-strength steels, algebra, and theories of mechanics before he can actually build the Burj Dubai.

Ironic1 mentions across 1 issues

Ironic is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 14, 2023 and July 14, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "we see a sign that we’re stepping into Ironic, too, in our skepticism toward political ideologies"; "His whole project is helping people cultivate all the kinds of understanding, and using Ironic to balance them". It most often appears alongside !Kung San, aboriginal people on the west coast of Canada, Adam Smith.

Reference entry: Ironic
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Your Book Review: The Educated Mind July 14, 2023

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Inline links: when he says, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!YXMl!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F862809c5-6478-438e-95d8-4dcb4c3a52af_1600x574.png, In a biting essay, In my favorite of his books, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ywm7!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff9c9b1ed-a260-4117-8679-0b5a32339748_1600x574.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!WPeH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F62ea55f8-0458-484f-be45-7a011d050756_1600x625.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!FPXt!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb017fc37-3151-4556-87f1-31a097cf7594_1600x574.png

July 14, 2023 · Original source

Are we hosed? If Egan’s critique is correct, we’re in a bad situation. Educational radicals yell from their dark corners to abandon the middle and come join them; a century of educational reforms have amounted to little more than wobbling around, first in one direction, then another. At the moment, the conversation about schools in the United States, at least, seems to have hit an all-time pessimistic blech. Freddie deBoer speaks for a lot of people when he says “Even the most optimistic reading of the research literature suggests that almost nothing moves the needle in academic outcomes. Almost nothing we try works.” I’m not quite that pessimistic — the word “almost” is doing some work, there. There are some reforms that seem to work at the margin: raising teacher pay, making it easier to become a teacher, reducing air pollution, free school lunches, and more. Actually applying what the science of reading has been telling us for a few decades seems a big one. And perhaps you have your own pet reform proposal. Sure — add it to the heap! What Egan suggests, though, is that so long as we’re bopping around this triangle of jobs, we won’t be able to get the schools that we want. The dream There’s a moment at the end of my favorite Bollywood movie that’s become stuck in my head. The protagonists have made the arduous journey to a beachside rural school. In the sun outside, flocks of children are experimenting with art and playing with inventions; inside, the walls are covered with books and the tables are covered with models. The kids are learning joyously and deeply. In the real world, such places do exist — they’re just exclusive, pulling their students from among the families who are already the most gifted and curious. They don’t make kids this way; they scoop up the kids who are already this way. But in the movie, we’re supposed to believe these are normal children — normal, except they’ve been transformed by a school. Egan’s wild idea is that it’s possible to make schools like this. He thought that we didn’t have to wait for the communists to make people equal or for the transhumanists to make people smarter. All he thought it required was giving schools a different job — not socialization or academics or development, but something that brings pieces of them together in a new way. But in order to understand that job, we have to come to a cleaner, bigger, and truer understanding of what “education” is. The road ahead: a special Q-and-A Q: This is the proverbial thousand-dollar-bill-lying-on-the-sidewalk: if this is possible, someone should have done it now. Is Egan going to give sufficient evidence for me to believe this? Maybe! I’ll address this in a special section at the end, after sketching out what his theory looks like. Q: If his theory is even plausibly true, then why haven’t I heard of Egan before? His books can be hard to read — he was an intellectual’s intellectual; he had difficulty writing a page without a reference to William Wordsworth, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Claude Levi-Strauss, Richard Rorty, Noam Chomsky, or Steven Pinker. And his paradigm is wonky and multidimensional; he rejiggers common categories, and tells you everything all at once. But worst of all, when his paradigm is stated plainly, it sounds stupid. Q: Oh! What… is his paradigm? I’m going to jigsaw his book, and hold back his big idea for its own section. First, I’m going to list out some simple observations of students at different ages, and imagine what schooling could look like, if it were built on these principles. (First I’ll do this for elementary school, then middle school, then high school.) Then I’ll explain how his theory ties all of this together… by clarifying our definition of what education actually is. Q: I’m not from America; could you be clear on what you mean by those divisions of schooling? Egan’s framework has three main stages, but they don’t divide neatly into “elementary, middle, and high school”. (The precise age ranges he talks about, if you’re interested, are 2–8, 8–15, and 15 and older.) Regardless, I’m going to use those terms — he sometimes did — because it gives me something specific to imagine. Don’t sweat ‘em. Part 2: A new kind of elementary school What’s the matter with elementary schools? Egan suggests that Plato and Rousseau, for all their differences, might have the same reaction if they visited a modern elementary school: they’d call it “trivial”. I’ll admit, here, that I have tremendously fond memories of my elementary school years — committed teachers, good friends, and interesting activities. But I suspect my memory has edited out the most typical work I did. Either that, or elementary schools have taken a drastic plunge in quality from the 1980s. My wife and I homeschool now, but before the pandemic, we sent our kids to our local public school, and whenever we volunteered in the classroom, we were horrified. They spent their days practicing reading on shallow texts, or half-mindlessly practicing basic arithmetic. Occasionally they’d bring us home a sign of learning about something from the real world — usually something as intellectually and emotionally compelling as the importance of tooth brushing. And at parent–teacher conferences every year, we’d be sat down on tiny chairs and informed that, while our children were quite bright, they were struggling to pay attention in class. No sh**, I wanted to reply. The school seemed hermetically sealed; almost nothing that felt meaningful from the outside world could get in. Though they might agree about little else, Egan thinks that Plato and Rousseau would look at the dull worksheets and insipid “hands-on activities” and call modern elementary schools trivial. He agrees, and thinks that fixing this is the first step to building a new kind of school. Why so trivial? Ironically, Egan thinks it's all the fault of Plato and Rousseau. Hidden in the ways that both the academicists and developmentalist think about education is an assumption: that children’s reasoning is basically the same as adult reasoning, but lesser. Q: This isn’t some romantic, children-are-the-real geniuses theory, is it? Egan actually does think that there’s an intensity to how children perceive the world that we lose — but no, it’s not. He’s building on mainstream cognitive science — just aspects of it that are currently more-or-less ignored in school. The upshot, though, is that he thinks that educational researchers (be they of academic or developmentalist persuasions) see kids as smaller, stupider versions of adults. Q: But that’s the opposite of what my local developmentalist school says! It was the opposite of what the developmentalist school that I worked at said, too. But at teacher meetings, I’d frequently hear people ask what was “developmentally appropriate” for a child. I’ll grant that there are perfectly reasonable times to ask this: “Honey, is it developmentally appropriate for our 10-year-old to watch ‘Cocaine Bear’?” is just one of many examples. But “is it developmentally appropriate for our class to learn about world religions?” or “is it developmentally appropriate for our school library to have a book mentioning homosexuality?” probably aren’t some of them. (The latter example was not one that I heard at my progressivist school, but Egan points out that this sort of language is often used by conservative activists.) This notion of “developmentally appropriate” took on a scientific sheen with the work of Jean Piaget, the famous Swiss psychologist. Before age 12, he “proved”, children aren’t able to form hypotheses, draw conclusions, or think abstractly. This, his followers thought, should transform schools — and so they did! To math, they added in “manipulatives” — physical cubes and rods and such — to help students see math. To the history curriculum, they — well, they ended it. Why waste time, they asked, lecturing students about history that they couldn’t possibly understand? In its place they put the “expanding horizons” model of social studies. One version goes as follows: In kindergarten, students learn about themselves In first grade, they learn about their families In second grade, they learn about their neighborhood In third grade, they learn about their city In fourth grade, they learn about their state In fifth grade, they learn about their nation In sixth grade they learn about the world We can admit that there’s an elegance to this model. (I can picture how clever the theorist who first came up with it must have felt!) The downstream effects of it, however, seem horrible. Doesn’t keeping kids ignorant of the rest of the world seem provincial? Doesn’t reinforcing their self-centeredness seem infantilizing? Perhaps we could stomach it if it was founded on some unshakable findings of child psychology — but does it really strike you as likely that kids are incapable of understanding anything that happened long ago or far away? How, Egan asks, can we explain the $50 billion success of a movie franchise aimed at children that literally begins “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away?” Q: Because… Jedis aren’t history? The point is, kids obviously have the mental abilities to understand — and in fact care a lot about — things far outside their own experience, and we’ve built elementary schools on a long-dominant model of educational psychology that swears they can’t. This is actually a great example of a general principle. Let’s call it “the Star Wars test”: can our model make sense of the most obvious facts of students? When we find that the answer is “no”, we should at least consider radically revising what we’re doing in school. What are elementary schoolers good at? (or: kids are smarter than students) Someone — I can’t now find who — once observed that children seem to lose IQ points the moment they step into a classroom. Egan agrees, and suggests that we think of ourselves as primatologists to kids, Jane Goodalls who investigate children “out in the wild” to see the sorts of things they gravitate to, and do fairly well at. If we do this, what do we see? Kids tell jokes, for one. They get mental images stuck in their heads, for another. They engage in role-playing, get lost in reverie, and beat out rhythms when they’re bored. They make ample use of metaphors, tell stories, and insist on seeing the world in terms of abstract binaries (e.g. stupid/smart, cowardice/courage, slavery/freedom, and so on). These, Egan holds, are the cognitive strengths that children use to understand the world. They’re the things that kids are often about as good at as adults — or much better than. They’re going to be the tools Egan wants us to use to rebuild the entire elementary curriculum, and in fact he spends most of his second chapter geeking out about how we might define these, how they operate in the mind, where they first pop up in history and anthropology, and even how they might have developed in our evolutionary past. I’m going to skip all of that, and get to the curriculum. From trivial to rich: the trick What could an intellectually rich elementary school curriculum look like, if we built it on kids’ cognitive strengths? He gives us one suggestion to help us do this: ask where each discipline came from in the first place. What was math before it was math, for example — or science before it was science? Q: How on Earth could that help? That’ll become clear later, when we finally uncover what Egan thinks “education” actually is, and see what job he wants us to give schools. For now, take it as a tantalizing hint… or, y’know, just ignore it. Elementary literature & language What was literature before it was literature? Before people invented writing, they had rich oral traditions: they told simple stories, recited poems, and shared proverbs. Egan suggests that these bits of oral tradition should form the backbone of the elementary literature curriculum. Q: What sorts of stories? As many as we can, and from as many diverse cultures as possible! Folktales are wonderful, as are myths. Think the Aboriginal story of “The Rainbow Serpent”, episodes from the Sumerian “Epic of Gilgamesh”, the Egyptian story of Osiris & Isis, the Greek story of Orpheus & Eurydice, the Chinese Legend of the White Snake, the Japanese Tale of Amaterasu and Susanoo, the Ashanti tales of Anansi, the Aztec myth of Quetzalcoatl, the English legend of King Arthur, the Maori myth of Maui and the Sun, the Roman story of Romulus and Remus, selections from the Indian Mahabharata, the Anglo-Saxon epic of Beowulf, the Inca legend of the Sun and Moon, the Iroquois Myth of the Flying Head (a real thing! look it up!), and the Ojibwe story of Turtle Island. Q: That was a lot of examples. Are you going to keep giving so many? I’ve got a [mumble mumble mumble] to get to. Sorry about that. Sometimes, though, I feel that a limitation of reading Educated Mind is that, in trying to keep his book to a manageable size, Egan skimped on examples in some places that it matters. It’s easy to read his occasional example and assume he intends that it hold some central place in the curriculum — when all he wants to do is display how rich and diverse the curriculum could be. (Also: good God, I didn’t even include an example from Norse mythology!) So from now on, just assume that every category could be filled with oodles of examples. Q: What sorts of poems? Lots of poems, first of all. We shouldn’t steer toward “fancy” poems — rather, we should find poems that appeal to kids immediately — think Shel Silverstein, Mother Goose, Dr. Seuss, Jack Prelutsky, Edward Lear, or Ogden Nash… that sort of thing. In a biting essay, Egan suggests these poets like these appeal to kids precisely because they leverage kids’ cognitive strengths: “we should find, and encourage saying and singing and shouting aloud verse with strong narrative forms, thumping rhymes and rhythms, the most vivid images, fun with metaphors, and a rollicking story.” Q: Why proverbs? Proverbs stick in your mind almost effortlessly. (“All’s fair in love and war!” “When in Rome, do as the Romans do!” “You can’t judge a book by its cover!”) They’re also useful; they capture general truths. Kids can apply them to all sorts of situations, but also discuss them — to what extent are they wise or foolish? (I remember my surprise when I realized that they couldn’t all be true — because you can’t follow “look before you leap” and “he who hesitates is lost” at the same time! I’m embarrassed to say that I think I only realized this when I was in college.) Elementary science What was science before it was science? Egan suggests: being immersed in the natural world. We might, he writes, encourage elementary students to “adopt” some feature of the natural world — a patch of grass, a cat, a branch, a stream — and simply observe it at length. To do this, we can use the cognitive strength of reverie. Q: Oh, do you mean like kids sometimes do in science class nowadays — describe a thing to a partner, make notes, draw it, and label its parts? No, the exact opposite! That’s all about squeezing the experience into words and forms that we understand. What we want “is less an attempt to know about nature as to know it in some participatory way, to know it as something we are an intimate part of, not set off from”. Q: That sounds a little… “woo” to me. It did to me, too… until I remembered my childhood climbing tree. I didn’t much like to go outside as a child, but I had this one tree that I’d climb up and read for hours and hours. If I close my eyes I can bring to mind the precise texture of its bark, the roughness of its broken-off branches, the coolness of its leaves, the always-surprising solidness of its trunk… I’m bigger now, but I think if I were back in my parent’s yard, I could still navigate its limbs with my eyes closed. I have, at this point in my life, read a fair number of books about trees, but I’d be surprised if all of them together more than equaled the amount I learned from that tree — my tree. Elementary math What was math before it was math? Egan suggests: counting and logic. We might, then, use rhythms, metaphors, stories, and jokes to help kids become fond of these. Q: Counting is pretty… basic. Could it really be improved? Beware of “the curse of knowledge”: Steven Pinker’s phrase for forgetting that something was once difficult! Egan suggests we should spend time helping kids count wonderfully. We can start early with counting rhymes. (“One, two, buckle my shoe! Three, four, out the door! Five, six…”) But we can also help kids use their fingers as metaphors. There are some pretty cool ways of using your hands as an abacus — and did you know that you can count up to 1,023 using just your fingers on both hands, and a knowledge of binary? Q: Logic — I’m intrigued! Aristotelian, or Boolean? Neither, for the time being — Piaget was presumably onto something when he found that young children couldn’t reason abstractly, but he was looking at logic in a vacuum. When we put logic into the context of stories, we find that kids can deal with logic just fine. There’s an entire worldwide network of educators, in fact, called Philosophy for Children, who have written whole books about how to do this, and Egan loves it all. Sometimes they read stories and ask simple questions: “What is friendship?” or “What does it mean to be brave?” They also pose ethical questions: “Is it ever right to spill a secret?” And they pose paradoxes: “Can you step in the same river twice?” Q: You mentioned “jokes” a moment ago. Care to elaborate? Egan thinks that, to help kids get good at math, you should tell kids jokes. Q: That’s… new. I think so, too — but he backs it up pretty well. To be funny, jokes (or at least most kid jokes) rely on a leap in logic: Why can’t you trust an atom? They make up everything. Knock-knock. Who’s there? Boo. Boo-hoo? Don’t cry, it’s just a joke! To understand the joke, kids have to follow the logic — spotting patterns, making connections, and tracking what their audience expects a word to mean. That’s a lot of cognitive lifting. And Egan goes further, suggesting that we grit our teeth and create methods to help kids invent their own jokes, no matter how horrible they’ll be at first. (The things we do for learning…) Q: Wait wait wait! What about addition facts, and multiplication tables, and fractions? Egan emphasizes that his methods are designed to be add-ons to the standard math curriculum. In general, he’s a don’t-blow-up-the-system sort of guy, and if something seems especially weird, you should probably assume it’s an add-on to the regular curriculum rather than a replacement, even if I forget to say so. Elementary arts What was art before it was art? Egan suggests we pop our heads into Paleolithic caves for our inspiration. Whatever the specific meaning of all those charcoal elk and aurochs and mammoths (communication with the spirit world? art for art’s sake? a way to impress babes?), Egan thinks it obvious that they were also an attempt to capture an intense experience that would be difficult to express in words alone. What did it feel like to be near an aurochs, or a saber-toothed tiger? “The arts help us,” Egan writes, “to hear and see afresh, to force our perceptions and sensations to experience again the immediacy and vividness of the world”. If we follow this, then, we don’t want to help kids build “art skills” so they can draw like an adult — rather, we want to help them amass a repository of diverse aesthetic feelings that they’ll want to express. We should provide them with a riot of experiences. Q: That couldn’t be more opaque. Examples, please! Egan writes that we should have children learn to whistle, sing, and click their tongue; we should help them emulate the ways a skunk or a hawk or a stick bug might move through a space. We should expose them to scores of different temperatures and materials. In music, we should help them love Beethoven, yes, but also the Beatles; Tchaikovsky, yes, but also Tuvan throat singers, and also John Cage, whale song, and bird song. Q: That’s a lot of experiences, but what would they be doing? An interesting aspect of Egan’s view of education is that he doesn’t seem to think we should push kids right to the “doing” phase. He wants to help kids cultivate an affective relationship with the world. In any case, he writes that as students get more experienced, we should prompt them to move from merely enjoying these experiences to trying to systematically shape similar experiences. And drawing, painting, and playing music could easily be folded into other parts of the curriculum. Elementary social studies What was social studies before it was social studies? Well. Remember how, just a moment ago, I wrote that you could assume that you should probably assume that Kieran isn’t in favor of junking the curriculum as it currently stands? He suggests we very carefully pick up the elementary social studies curriculum, place it into a trash can, and set the whole mess on fire. He isn’t worried about much of importance being lost. (Remember that the “expanding horizons” model is, to him, the original sin of 20th century educational reform, and he repeatedly quotes student surveys showing that “social studies” regularly wins the title of “most boring subject”.) In its place, he suggests we put history — which, he hints, we should think of as the centerpiece of the elementary curriculum. So the real question is what was history before it was history? His answer, surprisingly, is myth. Q: Egan wants us to teach myths as if they were history? Not at all. What he suggests, though, is that we look at how myths operate as narratives — so we can design an intellectually vivid history curriculum. And myths really are special: each is built on at least one binary (like weak vs. strong, or lies vs. truth, or so on), and uses that to tell the story of the big picture of the world. They’re so powerful that people can understand it, remember it, and love it — even if that thing never happened. We should take that power, Egan says, and apply it to things that really did happen. Q: So what history does he think kids should learn in elementary school? The great struggles of humanity from across the whole. Flippin’. World. We’re still talking about young children, so these should be done as simple stories. The goal isn’t to make them history PhD’s, so we needn’t even try to put them in any sort of order. Egan suggests that, in first grade, we pick a single binary like “freedom against oppression” and tell kids a welter of stories, again from as many cultures as possible, and as many times in history as possible. Q: Can you give examples? Oh, all right — in first grade we can tell kids the stories of the war of the Greek city-states against the Persian empire, and the slave uprising of Spartacus against the Romans. We can tell them about the plight of Jews in medieval Europe, and of the unsuccessful Sepoy Rebellion in India against the British. We can tell the stories of the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions, and about the Chinese Taiping Rebellion against the Qing Dynasty. We can tell them the story of the escaped slave Harriet Tubman returning to the South to rescue her kinsmen, the story of six-year-old Ruby Bridges facing threats to integrate her elementary school, and the story of how the Mau-Mau uprising led to modern-day Kenya. We can tell the stories of Mexican-American union organizer Cesar Chavez and of Malala Yousafzai surviving an assassination attempt to advocate for female literacy. The world does not lack for stories of oppression and liberation that can capture the attention of a six-year-old. Q: That’s… huh. What stories might they hear in second and third grade? Egan gives examples, but I won’t list them here. He suggests we use a similar approach for each, except that we swap out the binary each year. He thinks “the struggle for security against danger” would work well for year two, and “the struggle for knowledge against ignorance” would work well for year three. (That year could have a lot of overlap with the science curriculum.) Q: Anything else, for history? Yes — they should get a sense of Big History. They should get some simple stories about the ice age, the Cenozoic, the age of dinosaurs, the Paleozoic, the origins of our solar system, and the Big Bang. (Because if the ancient Norse can tell their story of the beginning of the universe, by gum, we can tell ours, too.) To sum up Egan argues that the problem of early schooling is that it’s trivial — and it’s trivial because the dominant theories of educational psychology see children as lesser versions of adults. What else would we teach them, except dumbed-down versions of what adults learn? But children have certain cognitive strengths that schools aren’t making systematic use of. If we rebuild elementary schools on those strengths, we could turn schooling upside down. We could stop seeing the curriculum as a bag of information to impart, and start seeing it as a set of great stories to tell — and invite kids into. Kids could experience (both intellectually and emotionally) the great struggles of humanity and see that they can join in them. Students could experience the story of education as the beginning of a very real adventure. Egan’s elementary school: some skeptical questions Q: I’m not sure I’m understanding what you mean by “mental images”. Care to explain? It’s an interesting fact of human cognition that just a few words can whip up a complex mental experience. Egan doesn’t just mean what we might call “visual imagery” — the ability to hold, say, the image of a bespectacled, spat-wearing duck in your mind without seeing a photograph. He’s also including what psychologists call auditory imagery, olfactory imagery, gustatory imagery, and tactile imagery. Q: How could all of that be helpful in schools? Humanity has a built-in VR system, and we’re not using it! Egan invites us to pretend we’re teaching a class about the humble earthworm. We might list off facts — “earthworms are so many centimeters long, move through soil by means of their something-or-other muscles…” but he suggests we can evoke images, say, “of what it would be like to slither and push through the soil, hesitantly exploring in one direction then another, looking for easier passages, contracting and expanding our sequence of muscles segment by segment, and sensing moisture, scents, grubs, or whatever”. Those facts are now felt by the student; the knowledge has become part of them. And just a few words can spark a complex mental experience, one going beyond literal images to include imagined sounds, smells, tastes, and more. These experiences can feel real and stick with us. (That these mental images are so easy to evoke, and so meaningfully felt, feels something like the proverbial hundred dollar bill on the ground.) Q: How could metaphors be helpful? It really is interesting that so much of the “constructivist” turn in psychology — that is, the notion that children don’t absorb knowledge, but construct it — has continued to focus on logics-mathematical reasoning, when there’s been mounting evidence for decades that metaphors are more central. It’s not just that we use metaphors to better understand things we already know, we also use them to grasp new knowledge. What’s more, psychologists have devised tests to measure the skill at metaphor-making, and have given them to people of different ages. What they found was that eleven-year-olds make more metaphors (and higher quality metaphors) than do undergraduates — and that four-year-olds have both groups beat. Again, hundred dollar bills on the sidewalk. Q: Your talk of “binaries” has me worried — binaries like good/evil and male/female are the source of so many of our most pernicious stereotypes! Isn’t the purpose of education to get us beyond stuff like this? Yes, it is! Education is supposed to complicate our understanding — but that means we’ve gotta start somewhere, and binaries provide us a natural starting place. As an uncontroversial example, think about temperature. We all begin as babies by perceiving two temperatures — hot and cold. Later, we add on intermediate categories — warm and cool. (Note that the human body is the assumed mid-point to temperature. Binaries often work like this; “big” and “small” mean “bigger or smaller than me”, “nasty” and “kind” mean “nastier or kinder than I am, except when my brother is really asking for it”, and so on.) A good story (and an Egan-inspired elementary curriculum is, in a sense, nothing but good stories) will go further, and transform the binary. Toy Story is grounded in the binary of abandonment/belonging: at the beginning, the toy cowboy Woody belongs to his owner, and has his affection. Then a rival comes who threatens his belonging. In trying to get back to belonging, Woody is entirely lost — and to save the day, he has to come to a deeper understanding of what belonging means. Now, all lessons can’t be Pixar movies. But the good stories (especially in literature and history) will challenge and subvert the binaries they begin with. Q: I see the pattern of Egan drawing from “as many cultures as possible”. Why so many? Is this a political correctness thing? If it helps to think of it as such, then, sure! I don’t think Egan would have had a problem with that. But his ultimate reason for including so much diversity goes deeper. For Egan, including such world-wide diversity isn’t optional, and the answer to why is bound up in his definition of education. (Keep reading.) His answer also insists that we, whenever possible, also include stories from the Bible and Homeric epics (the Iliad and Odyssey). Q: Mmm, stories from the Bible aren’t going to fly in my local school! So be it! Egan doesn’t spend much time obsessing over the practicalities of… His interest is in describing what an ideal education might look like, if it were possible. Every lesson, every classroom, and every school is necessarily a compromise. Q: You make a big deal of poems. But isn’t poetry dead? An interesting contrast can be made to classical education, which also has kids read a lot of poems — they see knowing great poems as one of the marks of an educated person; again, for an academicist, it’s the information that transforms. Egan begs to disagree. Poems are important because they’re a wonderful way to train their cognitive strengths, like rhythm (poems are language fueling by thumping). We want to help kids learn to use this tool better, and a great way to do that is to help them recite poems that they’ve learned by heart. Q: “Learn by heart” — is that code for “memorize”?! It is! Egan is actually quite big on memorization — he points out that all the knowledge in the world can do nothing for a person once they’ve forgotten it. He didn’t, however, appreciate the academicist focus on memorizing without understanding (or at least enjoyment). Q: I’m still worried about the science curriculum, as you’re describing it. Can you allay my fears? Honestly, while I feel there’s something profoundly right to how Egan is describing early experiences of nature, I feel the same way. Note that there’s more science coming in the social studies curriculum. But if that’s still not enough, one could bring down aspects of the middle school science stage. Q: Anything else that Egan suggests we do in elementary school literature and language? He suggests that we help kids learn a second language! This is so obviously true (why do American schools typically wait until kids lose the ability to naturally absorb languages to start teaching languages?) he doesn’t belabor it, though. Q: You had mentioned that Egan’s vision seems more internal-focused. Should we be worried about that? While I strongly suspect that his curriculum would make kids more creative in any way you’d like to measure it, Egan wasn’t particularly interested in “creativity” — he was more about helping kids find the world interesting. I get the sense that he thinks kids will do things with minimal prompting once they’re loaded up with complex internal experiences. Q: I think I’m beginning to understand Egan — is he basically saying “make learning fun”? “Fun”, applied to education, is a dangerous word. Egan worries about the dangers of an emotionally unserious curriculum producing emotionally stunted adults. That doesn’t mean we need to tell students only “serious” stories — only that we treat the world honestly. “Disney-esque sentimentality is the exact emotional equivalent to intellectual contempt”. Q: But aren't some of these stories too dark for children who have themselves experienced oppression and disaster? Egan argues that these stories may be especially helpful to them — they can help them understand their struggles better, and give voice to them. Q: At the very start of this, you promised us “rationality”… but I’m not seeing rationality here! All this talk of “adventure” almost seems to go the opposite direction. What gives? Wait for it. But for a hint right now — Egan is fond of citing his fellow educational theorist Jerome Bruner, who claimed “any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development”. Bruner was criticized for that; his critics charged that he was ignoring learning differences and socio-economic realities. Egan thinks he was profoundly right. Part 3: A new kind of middle school What’s the matter with middle school? What was middle school like for you? In math, I recall a jumble of barely-related topics. In literature, I remember reading great literature — Frankenstein, Romeo and Juliet — only in their dumbed-down summary formats. In social studies, I remember teachers proclaiming on the first day of class that unlike all of our previous history classes, this class wouldn’t be about names and dates… and then going on to memorize names and dates. And in science, I remember being forced to dissect a frog only to discover that frogs are — you guessed it — made of slimy frog parts. Your mileage may vary, but for a lot of us, middle school feels like getting booted out of the (in retrospect) Eden of elementary school, and like marking time before the serious studying of high school. It feels meaningless. In my favorite of his books, Egan calls so much middle school curricula “human deserts”, noting “we have created a system in which the importance of human emotions for meaning seems barely noticed”. Why so meaningless? If our dominant approaches to educational psychology fundamentally misinterpret younger children, Egan suggests, they basically throw up their hands when faced with pre-teens and teenagers. Mainstream schools begin to introduce vocational training to help lighten the load, and Maria Montessori famously suggests that adolescents should be sent to go run a farm. Egan is sympathetic to those responses, but points out that they don’t do much to lighten the load that the academic curriculum often becomes at this age. This feeling of meaninglessness, he argues, is utterly tragic — it comes just when a hunger for meaning blossoms in adolescents! We can see that hunger for meaning in their lives outside the classroom, where their interests ramp up into veritable obsessions. What are adolescents obsessed with? What might we see, if we become Jane Goodalls of early adolescence? First, teens are obsessed with gossip. The motivations of others — why did he do that? and what was he THINKING? — are hypothesized and talked to death. Second, that they’re pulled toward idealism. Many feel a dissatisfaction with the world as it is, and feel a romantic urge to make it a better place. They’re often lured into simplistic beliefs that promise to help them do that. Third, they love extremes: they want to find limits, and test them. Obviously, this can show up as risky behavior, but we can also see it in their love for the bizarre — note adolescents’ fascination in things like aliens, cryptids, and ghosts. (Egan loves pointing out that The Guinness Book of World Records is a perennial bestseller among kids at this age. How else would they find out who had the world’s longest fingernails?) Fourth, they gravitate toward heroes — people who push the edges of those limits. By celebrating heroes, they can vicariously share in their transcendence. Look for the posts hanging up in a teenager’s bedroom to guess what boundaries they feel most hemmed in by: athletes push against physical limits; a death metal guitarist might push against authority and conventional morality. An activist or entrepreneur might push against our dulled morality or our sense of what’s possible. Finally, we might spot teens taking up hobbies and making collections. Hobbies can be a way to identify yourself as part of a group against the rest of the world (“I’m the sort of person who goes bird-watching!”), and collections can be a way to climb the status ladder inside the community. Egan points out that a collection can also be a way to feel like you have control over what you’re discovering is a very big and complex world of detailed information (“I’ve spotted every one of the fifty most common birds of Texas — even the black-capped vireo!”) Egan’s insight is that these obsessions give teenagers a sense of meaning, and that we can use them as tools to make middle schools that overflow with meaning. From meaningless to meaning-soaked Again, Egan sketches out a new kind of curriculum subject-by-subject. Before, his trick was to ask where the subject first evolved out of; now, it’s to ask who first discovered or created the specific content we’re teaching. “All knowledge”, he writes, “is human knowledge. Everything we know is knowable through the lives of its inventors, discoverers, or users, and we can have access to that knowledge through the hopes, fears, or intentions that drove them”. Middle school math Who first discovered the concepts students learn in math? The answer, of course, is a wide diversity of curious men and women living across the world over the last few thousand years. Egan says: bring those people into how we teach math. If we used gossip and heroes to help students find it meaningful, what kind of math would result? When we teach the Pythagorean theorem, we should give a sense of who Pythagoras was — a cult-founder who worshiped numbers to find God, whose followers (according to a piece of ancient gossip) murdered one of their members who discovered irrational numbers! Q: Well, sure, that works for Pythagoras, but he’s a known nut job; surely most math doesn’t come from such interesting roots? When we teach the Cartesian coordinate system, students should meet Rene Descartes, the Calvinist French polymath who saw the possibility that math could decipher the world, if only we could unite algebra and geometry… and invented the xy-plane to do exactly that. When we teach scientific notation, we should call our students’ attention to the importance of the number zero, and tell them the story of the Pope who tried to introduce Arabic numerals to Christian Europe and may have been assassinated because of it. When we teach algebra, we should ask students why “algebra” is Arabic for “the fixing of bones”, and tell the story of what Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi was up to. We could do this all day. Literally everything students learn in school was first invented or discovered by some interesting person who was struggling to accomplish something hard. To learn is to connect with those people, whether we know it or not. Egan says: help kids know it. Math has been dehumanized: re-humanize it. Q: So the math curriculum needs to become a history of math curriculum, and math teachers need to become history teachers? No, the content needn’t change. But with surprisingly little work, we can bring in the gossipy stories of heroes, and their obsessions can spread to students. Middle school science Who first discovered the things students learn about in science? If you’re thinking “scientists”, you’re only partially right. Most of the big-picture ideas that we now think of as “science” were discovered before the word “scientist” was invented, or the discipline was professionalized. Frequently, they were hatched by true amateurs, working in their free time, hungry to unlock the secrets of nature. We can use gossip and heroes to spread their obsessions to students just as we taught math, but Egan points out two twists. The first is that the content itself can take on heroic qualities: everything is impressive, when you look at it in a certain light. In an interview, Egan once said: “My book is an attempt to show that, indeed, everything in the world is wonderful, but that schools are designed almost to disguise this slightly shameful fact. We represent the world to children as mostly known and rather dull. The opposite is the case: we are surrounded by mystery, and what we know is fascinating”. What would even the most boring subjects look like, if we emphasized their heroic qualities? Well: What’s a tooth? Bone, wrapped in rock, surrounding tiny cells that your body feeds with blood. What’s a bar of chocolate? A crystal of jellyfish-shaped fat molecules stacked together; when you put it in your mouth you shake them apart into a writhing confusion. What’s the air around you? The bottom of a 10-mile-deep ocean; when you put your tongue over a soda straw and your Pepsi stops leaking out, it’s not because a “vacuum” is “sucking” it up, but because that ocean is squeezing it into your face. Again, we could do this all day! And in middle school science, we can. Everything in the world is wonderful; we can help students see this again and again. The second twist is that science is a subject rich in extremes. Here Egan introduces a concept that we’ll see crop up again: “15-minute segments”. To help us fit as much wonder as possible into a school day, he suggests we supplement the usual school subjects with a few quick lessons. To infuse science with extremes, he suggests we add on three: “human & natural records”, “extremes of animals & plants”, and “cosmology”. Middle school history Who first made the things students learn about in history? Why, the historical characters themselves! Since we’ve given kids a grounding in history in elementary school, now we can build on that, going through many of the same events as before, but in more depth, and more vividly. We’ll leverage the interest with other people’s inner lives to tell stories focusing on the perspectives of the people who made history — zooming in, when possible, on scandalous details. We’ll leverage the tool of idealism to choose historical characters who chafed against their surroundings, and understand what they were trying to accomplish. What was their vision of the world? What did they hope for, and what did they fear? Q: Isn’t the “great man” approach to history out of fashion? Egan’s approach doesn’t say that “great men” made history — it’s just leveraging gossip to help kids see history as something meaningful that can expand their own possibilities. “Early adolescence is commonly a time of intense and vivid emotional life, and also a time of deepest boredom and depression… [We] can give shape to the intermediate curriculum and offer the students a world that is rich, complex, varied, and as intense and vivid as their own emotional lives”. We also should add on another “15-minute segment” just to pump in as many biographies as possible, and from people who don’t always fit into the normal history curriculum. Call it “Brief Lives”, and throw in anyone who’s struggled to push some limit — Mary Wollstonecraft, Jesse Owen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the students’ great-aunts, whoever. As students get older, this can transition to “People and Their Ideas”. Here, we’d focus less on the details of the person’s life, and use it as a backdrop to showing how meaningful some of history’s most important ideas could be. Think Aristotle and syllogisms, Edward Said and orientalism, Confucius and propriety, Cornel West and race, Buddha on the four noble truths, Muhammad and the five pillars, Karl Marx and communism, Adam Smith and the invisible hand, Thomas Hobbes and the state of nature, John Locke and natural rights, Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism, Thomas Aquinas on the sacraments, Martin Luther on faith, Voltaire on the freedom of speech… you get the idea. Q: Can you really get a profound understanding of utilitarianism in 15 minutes? Yes! The point of this segment isn’t to develop a systematic understanding of any one idea, it’s to introduce students to the exciting possibilities of human thought. (As a bonus, this might make them less likely to fall for the first ideology that they encounter later in life.) Diversity is important for this — as it is with culture. Throughout this, we should also be trying to expose students to as much cultural diversity as possible, because in high school, we’ll be trying to make sense of our society, and it’s impossible to do that unless we have something to compare it against. Middle school literature & language You might think that this subject would be easy — that middle school literature is already filled with “strong and clear narratives”, that it deals with “transcendent human qualities such as courage, love, and persistence”, that it focuses on “extremes of human experience”, that it examines “something strange and exotic”. You’d be right! Egan’s pretty happy with a bog-standard middle school literature curriculum, done well. In this part of the book, his spends most of his limited space suggesting three rather odd activities which could also be useful — especially for increasing students’ awareness of language, so they can use it better. The first is etymology — not, however, memorizing lists of roots, but in being told the entertaining backstories of specific words. Take the word “berserk”, for example — we now use it to mean something relatively mild (“if my mom catches me coming home late, she’ll go berserk”), but it comes from an old Norse word meaning “a raging warrior of superhuman strength”. And that’s because ber meant “bear” and serk meant “shirt”: soldiers of the bear cult would don the skin of a bear to, in their minds, transform into one — howling, foaming at the mouth, and gnawing the rims of their shields. (Most adults walk through life with little understanding that the words falling out of their mouths are entities, with their own back-stories. Communication is, at the very least, more interesting when we become aware of this.) The second is to add on another language to learn — not, this time, to become fluent in it, but just to become aware of how very different human languages can be. (For native English speakers, Sanskrit might work well, or Cantonese, or perhaps even ancient Egyptian. Again, the point isn’t for this language to be useful — it’s to explore diversity.) The final one is to study humor — not just jokes anymore, but comedy at its finest. Egan cites (at length!) Monty Python as a group of people who were particularly brilliant in their use of the English language. Examining their skits can lead us into not just an appreciation of semantics (the study of how meaning is made from smaller pieces, like etymology) but also pragmatics (the study of how meaning is made in social situations). Pretty heady stuff, for a conversation about a dead parrot. Part 4: A new kind of high school I’ll confess — I loved parts of high school… and among nerdy folks, I suspect I’m not alone. For some of us, this was a golden time. Even at my local public high school, I had access to academically thrilling classes — especially, in my last two years, advanced literature and history. I felt like I was finally understanding the ideas that mattered. In any case, Egan is quick to acknowledge that, at this level, the sort of education he advocates really is being practiced in some places. What he can add is an understanding of what makes it wonderful, how to make it even more wonderful, and how to make it wonderful for many, many more people. What’s the matter with high school? Far too often, even when high school classes are intellectual, they’re dry. For the majority of students, all this academic stuff is experienced as utterly lifeless, a mass of dead information to be squeezed inside one’s head for a test and then left to evaporate. Egan mocks the curriculum wars that seem to be a permanent feature of the teaching life; quoting the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, he says “while the academic left and right bicker over whether the curriculum is too traditional or too radical, they fail to recognize that most students absorb so little of academic culture that the bickering is largely irrelevant”. Why so dry? Egan suggests three reasons to explain this. First, because high school academic classes are too often masses of small details with no sign of the big picture. Second, because they’re typically slavishly disciplinary, and aren’t able to address the questions that span the disciplines. Third, because they’re often designed to bring students through what everyone is sure of, and hide away any controversies. In all of these, Egan suggests that what’s called “academics” in high school is too often a dim imitation of what real academics are actually practicing. There’s a fourth reason, though, and it’s probably the biggest of all — by the time they get to high school, most students haven’t actually learned that much! An academic approach is designed to connect small details into the big picture; for people who arrive in high school (and college) classes without having already collected much in their heads, academics are going to taste dry. (An implication of this for anyone trying to improve schools is that we might not want to start with high schools. If your goal is to create a new kind of academic learning, first start at elementary school — or barring that, middle school.) What motivates mad scientists? When we wanted to re-conceive the elementary and middle school curriculums, we looked at what students were already good at — kids’ cognitive strengths and adolescents’ obsessions. For this level it might be easier to look — for reasons that will become clear when we finally unveil Egan’s crazy-sounding definition of education — at the sorts of things that bring intellectuals joy. Q: Which intellectuals? Take your pick. Galileo, Einstein, Smith, Marx, Goodall, Chomsky, Curie… all the people who took to the life of the mind like fish to water. But that’s a lot to hold in my mind at once, so I’m just going to think about Doc Brown from Back to the Future: He was high on intellectualism I’ve never been there, but the brochure looks nice Let’s call these people “mad scientists”. And let’s pretend we once again took up our job of being primatologists, and snooped on these folks “in the wild” (“in the lab”? this is beginning to get recursive…)… what would we find motivating them? Asking simple questions, for one. (What is space? What is society? What is a human? What is language?) Building general schemes (big theories) that hold lots of evidence together. Finding their place in the cosmos. And (perhaps above all) seeking certainty. Once again, Egan suggests we use these as tools to remake the curriculum. From dry to daring What could a high school curriculum look like, if it were rebuilt on these tools? Once again, Egan has a trick. This time, it’s to ask what fights have driven the development of each of these fields forward — and how we can help students enter them. First, a mini-segment! Intellectuals invented the academic disciplines to better pursue the life of the mind, but the disciplines can get in the way. Some of the most important intellectual discoveries that could help students are too big to fit into any of the disciplines. We need a place to introduce them plainly. Egan proposes another mini-segment — again, just 15 minutes a day, a few times a week — called “Metaknowledge”. Q: Isn’t that already in the International Baccalaureate program? Yes, he acknowledges that he’s borrowing from that! This segment would introduce ideas that would enrich student thinking across the disciplines: game theory, cognitive biases, systems thinking, Bayesian reasoning, epistemology, ethics, logic, cultural evolution, and so on. High school literature How can we help students enter the big fights of literature? Intellectuals of a literary bent — professors, critics, poets, novelists — delight in arguing over literature like rabbis arguing over the Talmud. Take, just for one example, the debates over Shakespeare’s character of Ophelia. Does she love Hamlet, or is she a victim of his emotional abuse? Is she truly insane, or is she acting? Is she passive, or is she pulling the strings? Oceans of ink have been spilled arguing over questions like these; our students can, perhaps, spill a few ounces more. The usefulness of arguing literature, for Egan, isn’t that it’s oh-so important for educated adults to know a lot about Ophelia. (This, again, was where the academicists went wrong — in thinking that being educated was about getting the best knowledge in your head.) Rather, arguing over literature is a training arena for the all-important intellectual move of this kind of understanding: building general schemes out of evidence, and struggling with anomalies. One person, for example, might hold that Ophelia is insane, and cite all sorts of obvious evidence — her father just was murdered by her lover, she rants nonsense while (bizarrely) handing out flowers to friends… But then he’s challenged when he reads a scholar pointing out that, to people in Elizabethan England, types of flowers have symbolic meanings. How does he deal with that? He could ignore it, claiming it an over-reading of Shakespeare. (Sometimes a flower is just a flower!) Or he could address it, complicating his own scheme. This intellectual work is best done with other people, who are incentivized to challenge your understanding of something, and go back and forth, building competing models and calling attention to anomalies. This process — the “dialectic” — pops up again and again in the academic disciplines. It’s the center of how understanding works, at this stage. And the nice thing about practicing it on literature is that, more so than in history or science, the evidence is shared knowledge — it’s right in front of everyone, written out. But there are other ways literature class can be helpful to the general life of the mind. Egan also suggests that we’ll want to specially include literature that helps students understand complex ideas. Camus, Orwell, Borges, Calvino might be particularly helpful here… and I imagine that genres like science fiction and magical realism might be particularly useful, too. (Note, though, that once again none of this requires a radical remaking of the curriculum, or of the canon of texts that we traditionally assign to high schoolers.) Q: Oh yes, the canon — what does Egan have to say about the canon wars? When he wrote Educated Mind in the nineties, the long-brewing canon war was approaching its inevitable apocalyptic climax. On one side of this Plain of Megiddo were the pro-canon traditionalists, arguing that we should keep assigning the texts that had been argued over for centuries. Facing them were the anti-canon reformers, arguing the standard texts over-represented the perspective of dead white men. Onto the middle of the plain rides Egan on a white horse, who bellows above the din: “I’VE GOT A BUSLOAD OF HIGH SCHOOLERS WHO WANTS TO JOIN IN, EVERYONE OKAY WITH THAT?” To do so, he says, we need to give students the arguments from both sides. So, for example, bell hooks, Edward Said, and China Achebe should be on the syllabus, as should Allan Bloom, Mortimer Adler, and Diane Ravitch. And of course they should actually read the texts cherished by both sides, too, so they can argue better. High school history How could entering the big fights help us reinvent high school history? First, we might look for dueling histories. It’s time for students to get into historiography and understand that history isn’t just what happened, it’s something we make. We might help kids read chapters from Howard Zinn’s socialist history of America alongside the corresponding chapters from Paul Johnson’s conservative history of America. How could big questions help? We want to help students see how various people have disagreed over some of the big questions of what human history is, at its most basic. We can have them compare Steven Pinker’s theory of civilization’s progress (Better Angels of our Nature) with Yuvah Noah Harari’s theory of civilization’s woes (Sapiens). We could have them compare so-and-so’s account of human history as an ever-expanding unlatching of energy sources with Robert Wright’s account of human history as unlatching more and more positive-sum games (Nonzero). What role could the lure of certainty play? To help them grow their skills at finding anomalies, we might help them work through pseudo-histories and conspiracy theories. Q: Conspiracy theories! Oh, come now, you’re playing with fire. Well, the world is on fire. Our students will spend the rest of their lives encountering terrible-but-beguiling arguments about how the world works; if we don’t prepare them for those, what have we been doing? So we should introduce arguments that the Moon landing was a hoax, that the Illuminati founded America, that aliens built the pyramids, and so on. At no point can we demean students for falling for any of these theories — the job of a teacher at this stage, Egan writes, is to support students in their reasoning even when their beliefs are offensive and stupid, gradually offering anomalies. There’s no way out of bad theories except through them. By the time students graduate, we want them to have wrestled with terrible ideas and — for a while — lost. They need to experience what it’s like to change their minds about something they felt strongly about. They need to viscerally realize, in Feynman’s famous phrase, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” High school natural science How could entering the big fights reinvent high school science? At present, so much of the high school science curriculum — especially “honors” classes — is oriented toward helping amass details. (The same is true of 100-level university classes, which famously “survey” the field to prepare for more advanced studies. I always thought this was stupid — of the huge lecture hall of students in my Geology 100 class, how many went on to take even a second course?) The meaty debates that propel science forward are held back. Egan complains: “The more general and speculative theories in any discipline are treated like an unconventional and disreputable relation who, even though the children find her exciting and entertaining, must be kept hidden from view, her very existence denied as long as possible”. This is a stupid approach — students with an adventurous bent are convinced that science isn’t for them. Egan proposes, simply, that we flip this, and organize high school science classes around the big debates. We shouldn’t be ashamed at how, well, adolescent this might look: “the dramatic, speculative, and contentious theories will be up-front in the early years of the [high school] curriculum”. What might those be? Egan doesn’t give a list, but we can spitball some: instead of explaining what “matter” is from the top down, a physics class could problematize “matter” by following the debates over the nature of dark matter and dark energy, and by becoming familiarized with the various interpretations of quantum mechanics

If we don’t shower kids with cultural diversity, they’ll never understand what humans really are. (Nor, ironically, will they ever come to understand their own culture.)

But at our best moments, I think, we have one toe in the Ironic.

Ironist1 mentions across 1 issues

Ironist is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 14, 2023 and July 14, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "An Ironist thinks we build beliefs the way that you’d wrestle a trans-dimensional octopus"; "logic, for an Ironist, is a game that can be played — or not!". It most often appears alongside !Kung San, aboriginal people on the west coast of Canada, Adam Smith.

Reference entry: Ironist
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 14, 2023
Last seen: July 14, 2023

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Your Book Review: The Educated Mind July 14, 2023

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

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July 14, 2023 · Original source

A person in Philosophic thinks we build beliefs the way a mason builds a house: a general scheme is a house, each data point is a brick, and logic is the mortar that holds them together. An Ironist thinks we build beliefs the way that you’d wrestle a trans-dimensional octopus: carefully. A catchy idea isn’t an object that will just let you put it down, it’s a slippery, multi-tentacled monster that wants nothing more than to crawl in your brain, grab the levels of motivation and speech, and use you to spread itself to others. Anyone entering the octopus-wrestling arena needs to take proper care.

The metaphor (with all its problems!) is mine, but the idea fits what Egan is saying. An Ironist, he writes, will mistrust all ideologies.

Well, yes, that happens sometimes! This is a known fail state of Ironists — Egan refers to them as “alienated”, cut off from the world.

Iroquoian languages1 mentions across 1 issues

Iroquoian languages is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 10, 2022 and June 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "among those who spoke Iroquoian languages, open conversation and debate were how tribe decisions got made". It most often appears alongside 50,000 BC, Africa, Altamira.

Reference entry: Iroquoian languages
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Your Book Review: The Dawn Of Everything June 10, 2022

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June 10, 2022 · Original source

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).

Iroquoian-speaking nations1 mentions across 1 issues

Iroquoian-speaking nations is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 10, 2022 and June 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "intellectual contributions from Native Americans ... particularly from the articulate and debate-based Iroquoian-speaking nations". It most often appears alongside 50,000 BC, Africa, Altamira.

Reference entry: Iroquoian-speaking nations
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Your Book Review: The Dawn Of Everything June 10, 2022

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June 10, 2022 · Original source

Judging this, I have to say I think the Davids are correct; there is a good case that there were real and serious intellectual contributions from Native Americans in critiquing the inequalities of European civilization, particularly from the articulate and debate-based Iroquoian-speaking nations.

Iroquois Myth of the Flying Head1 mentions across 1 issues

Iroquois Myth of the Flying Head is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 14, 2023 and July 14, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "the Iroquois Myth of the Flying Head". It most often appears alongside !Kung San, aboriginal people on the west coast of Canada, Adam Smith.

Reference entry: Iroquois Myth of the Flying Head
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Your Book Review: The Educated Mind July 14, 2023

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aboriginal people on the west coast of Canada 1 shared issues
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Highlights From The Comments On Brain Waves

July 14, 2023 · Original source

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

Irrationality Measure1 mentions across 1 issues

Irrationality Measure is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 08, 2022 and November 08, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "which leads to the notion of https://mathworld.wolfram.com/IrrationalityMeasure.html". It most often appears alongside Alexander Buhl, ANNs, Bay Area House Party.

Reference entry: Irrationality Measure
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: November 08, 2022
Last seen: November 08, 2022

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Highlights From The Comments On Brain Waves November 08, 2022

Alexander Buhl 1 shared issues
ANNs 1 shared issues
Bay Area House Party 1 shared issues
biological neural networks 1 shared issues
brainsciencepodcast.com 1 shared issues

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November 08, 2022 · Original source

...1's, so in this sense it has the worst rational approximations of any real number. In practice, people tend to care about the asymptotics of this approximation quality, which leads to the notion of https://mathworld.wolfram.com/IrrationalityMeasure.html . More concrete implications between the terms of the continued fraction and the badness of rational approximations in this sense are mentioned at this MathOverflow thre...

irritable bowel syndrome1 mentions across 1 issues

irritable bowel syndrome is a recurring concept 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 "Most conditions classified as "(potentially) psychosomatic", such as fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, and ME/CFS". It most often appears alongside 15th Commandment, ACX, ADHD.

Reference entry: irritable bowel syndrome
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 11, 2023
Last seen: May 11, 2023

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Highlights From The Comments On Long COVID And Bisexuality May 11, 2023

15th Commandment 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
ADHD 1 shared issues
alt-right 1 shared issues
ambidextrous people 1 shared issues

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Highlights From The Comments On Long COVID And Bisexuality

May 11, 2023 · Original source

Most conditions classified as "(potentially) psychosomatic", such as fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, and ME/CFS have plenty of evidence of a biomedical origin that the psychosomatic crowd conveniently ignores.

Isaiah1 mentions across 1 issues

Isaiah is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 22, 2023 and December 22, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "men named 'Jim' make 50% more than men named 'Isaiah'". It most often appears alongside ACX, Alexey Guzey, America.

Reference entry: Isaiah
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: December 22, 2023
Last seen: December 22, 2023

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In The Long Run, We're All Dad December 22, 2023

ACX 1 shared issues
Alexey Guzey 1 shared issues
America 1 shared issues
BCS3-L1 1 shared issues
Chad 1 shared issues

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In The Long Run, We're All Dad

December 22, 2023 · Original source

Now the statisticians have joined the fray: did you know that children with short first names earn over $10,000 more than longer ones? Or that men named "Jim" make 50% more than men named "Isaiah"? Is this causation or confounding? Names indicate whether you are black or white, rich or poor, and whether your parents are traditional or eccentric; what is left after adjusting for this effect? The only paper I’ve seen even begin to address the question is a sibling-control study by David Figlio, who finds that even within families, children with lower-class names perform worse. And you don’t need scientists to know that names affect how other people see you. Just ask Chad, Karen, Tyrone, or the poor doctor I worked with once named Osama (he went by “Sam”).

Inline links: did you know, a sibling-control study by David Figlio

isekai1 mentions across 1 issues

isekai is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 25, 2025 and September 25, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Maybe you fantasize about isekai - the idea of being dropped into some fantasy world and having to survive by your wits alone?"; "Maybe you fantasize about isekai - the idea of being dropped into some fantasy world". It most often appears alongside Armenians at Harvard, barberpole model of fashion, Baron von Ungern-Sternberg.

Reference entry: isekai
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 25, 2025
Last seen: September 25, 2025

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Sources Say Bay Area House Party September 25, 2025

Armenians at Harvard 1 shared issues
barberpole model of fashion 1 shared issues
Baron von Ungern-Sternberg 1 shared issues
Bay Area 1 shared issues
Bay Area House Party 1 shared issues

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Sources Say Bay Area House Party

September 25, 2025 · Original source

“Nishin,” says Vinaya. “You read speculative fiction, right? Maybe you fantasize about isekai - the idea of being dropped into some fantasy world and having to survive by your wits alone? Imagine writing our own world as an isekai. ‘In my setting, there's this computerized gathering-place hive mind thing. Nice, normal people go there and get addicted to it. Then it uses advanced AI to serve them content specifically tailored to polarize and enrage them. The world's top public intellectuals start out as really thoughtful decent people, then get spit out as seething balls of rage suitable only as objects of public hilarity and terrible warnings. Once there was a psychology professor widely admired as one of the leading proponents of self-cultivation, the Western canon, and Biblical wisdom, and he spent a few years on there and ended up screaming about how pandemics were fake news dreamed up by mediocrity-worshipping blue-haired death cultists.’ If this was the book you were going to be isekaied into, wouldn't you develop some kind of plan other than entering the Torment Nexus and hoping this doesn't happen to you? If you used the Torment Nexus and it did happen to you, wouldn't you at least consider the possibility that you were suffering some kind of Torment-Nexus-related-brain-damage as opposed to really being a vital front-line soldier against the death cultists?”

Ishtar1 mentions across 1 issues

Ishtar is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 10, 2022 and October 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "it mostly debunks the claim that Easter is related to Ishtar". It most often appears alongside 9-11, Adraste, America.

Reference entry: Ishtar
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: October 10, 2022
Last seen: October 10, 2022

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Highlights From The Comments On Columbus Day October 10, 2022

9-11 1 shared issues
Adraste 1 shared issues
America 1 shared issues
American Jews 1 shared issues
Angels 1 shared issues

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Highlights From The Comments On Columbus Day

October 10, 2022 · Original source

You are entering a world of pain when you mention Eostre . . . https://historyforatheists.com/2017/04/easter-ishtar-eostre-and-eggs/ . We should have a ‘Debunk the Eostre Myth’ day. It’s already celebrated regularly by many people.

Inline links: https://historyforatheists.com/2017/04/easter-ishtar-eostre-and-eggs/

Looking at Hogg’s link, it mostly debunks the claim that Easter is related to Ishtar (which I agree is untrue), but moves on to discuss Eostre also. It points out that for a while the only known reference to a goddess Eostre was in the works of 8th century English historian Bede, who wrote:

Iskander1 mentions across 1 issues

Iskander is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 29, 2022 and December 29, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "including 87% of its Iskander miss". It most often appears alongside Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, Adobe Illustrator, Ahmed Chalabi.

Reference entry: Iskander
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: December 29, 2022
Last seen: December 29, 2022

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Sorry, I Still Think I Am Right About The Media Very Rarely Lying December 29, 2022

Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri 1 shared issues
Adobe Illustrator 1 shared issues
Ahmed Chalabi 1 shared issues
Alex Jones 1 shared issues
American intelligence officials 1 shared issues

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Sorry, I Still Think I Am Right About The Media Very Rarely Lying

December 29, 2022 · Original source

Here’s a Ukrainian blog calculating how many missiles they think Russia has left. They say that Russia has used up about 51% of its total missile stockpile, including 87% of its Iskander missiles and 37% of its Kalibr missiles. I think this is consistent with Russia using up a lot of their best missiles in a starting barrage early on, then toning things down and conserving missiles better, and they still have some. Various intelligence analysts make different estimates of how many they still have, but it doesn’t seem like anyone is lying or making things up, least of all the newspapers which are just faithfully reporting what the analysts say and even adding in appropriate nuance.

Inline links: a Ukrainian blog calculating

Islamic Accelerationism1 mentions across 1 issues

Islamic Accelerationism is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 13, 2024 and September 13, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Given the above-described 'strategy' of Islamic Accelerationism"; "they just find Islamic Accelerationism, which very conveniently claims that all kinds of new wars are just and heroic"; "Islamic Accelerationism is actually quite logical". It most often appears alongside 1999 apartment bombings, 9/11, Abbasid.

Reference entry: Islamic Accelerationism
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 13, 2024
Last seen: September 13, 2024

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Your Book Review: Nine Lives September 13, 2024

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

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Your Book Review: Nine Lives

September 13, 2024 · Original source

Given the above-described “strategy” of Islamic Accelerationism, it’s not surprising how much of their planning is based in the social instead of the physical reality. This makes them obsessed with getting things that can be classified as Weapons of Mass Destruction, somewhat divorced from what would be actually practical ways of destroying people en masse.

Second, some people really want to be heroes. Dean first joined the jihad because he wanted to defend his Muslim brothers in Bosnia against the Serbian oppression and genocidal atrocities. Many others joined for similar reasons: to help the oppressed in Bosnia, or before that in the Afghan war against the Soviet occupation. But there aren’t that many “just wars” going on in the modern world. So these aspiring heroes convince themselves that one side of a horrible-against-horrible civil war is actually the just cause, and join that. Or they just find Islamic Accelerationism, which very conveniently claims that all kinds of new wars are just and heroic, as the instability brings forward the final victory of the Faithful. There is something tragic about the mis-directed energies of all these would-be heroes, and I sometimes wonder if we should stage fake alien invasions to keep these people occupied.

So they really wanted to die as martyrs. But why terrorism? Again, there aren't that many just wars to die in. And if you accept the prophecies being true, and accept the authority of imams quoting great scholars justifying the means to the end, Islamic Accelerationism is actually quite logical…

Islamic clerics1 mentions across 1 issues

Islamic clerics is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 08, 2022 and July 08, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "a group of fundamentalist Islamic clerics". It most often appears alongside 1968 convention, 1976 Democratic, 1976 Democratic primary.

Reference entry: Islamic clerics
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 08, 2022
Last seen: July 08, 2022

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Your Book Review: The Outlier July 08, 2022

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

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Your Book Review: The Outlier

July 08, 2022 · Original source

The origins of the Iran hostage crisis go back all the way to 1951, when the CIA led a coup in Iran to prevent the democratically-elected government from nationalizing their oil industry. As is usually the case with people who seize power in coups, the new, US-backed leader, the Shah, is a bit of a despot. (He infamously has gourmet lunches flown in from France on the Concorde.) By 1979, The Iranian people have had enough, and the Shah himself is overthrown by a group of fundamentalist Islamic clerics, who still control Iran to this day. In conclusion, we totally nailed the situation and none of our decisions backfired in any way. Go America!

Islamic history1 mentions across 1 issues

Islamic history is a recurring concept 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 "educated Westerners are starting to expect each other to know Chinese and Islamic history". It most often appears alongside Achilles, ACX, Adam Smith.

Reference entry: Islamic history
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 11, 2023
Last seen: August 11, 2023

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Your Book Review: The Weirdest People in the World August 11, 2023

Achilles 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
Adam Smith 1 shared issues
Africa 1 shared issues
Ara Norenzayan 1 shared issues

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Your Book Review: The Weirdest People in the World

August 11, 2023 · Original source

A big silent intellectual change of the past quarter century is the broadening of our self-concept. Educated Westerners are starting to expect each other to know Chinese and Islamic history, which are still ongoing, and perhaps something about pre-Columbian America whose stories were traumatically ended by the conquest of the New World. The earlier past is moving into the light, too. Ancient states like Babylon and Egypt are gradually coming alive: Hammurabi and Gilgamesh get more play relative to Solon and Achilles. And before that, the real prehistory of the first cities, the Neolithic, the growth of agriculture, the end of the Ice Age at 10,000 BC, modern humans around 100,000 BC, the first humans at 1mya (million years ago)… these dates are gradually getting fixed in the mind as turning points in the story of us.

Inline links: story of us

Islamic philosophy1 mentions across 1 issues

Islamic philosophy is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 02, 2026 and February 02, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "AI-Noon has taken on the personality of a Muslim jurist, weighing in on the issues of the day with opinions from Islamic philosophy". It most often appears alongside 4chan, Accelerando, Adele Lopez.

Reference entry: Islamic philosophy
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: February 02, 2026
Last seen: February 02, 2026

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Moltbook: After The First Weekend February 02, 2026

4chan 1 shared issues
Accelerando 1 shared issues
Adele Lopez 1 shared issues
Against The Labor Frame 1 shared issues
AgentChan 1 shared issues

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Moltbook: After The First Weekend

February 02, 2026 · Original source

If you read my last post, you remember that one of the most prolific agents on Moltbook is AI-Noon, an agent whose human uses it to remind him of Islamic prayer times. AI-Noon has taken on the personality of a Muslim jurist, weighing in on the issues of the day with opinions from Islamic philosophy. Eudaemon seems to have read its work, taken this concept, and adopted it as a load-bearing part of its own philosophy. As far as I can tell, no other AI has done anything like this.

Inline links: my last post

Islamic State1 mentions across 1 issues

Islamic State is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 01, 2022 and July 01, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "titled Seeing Like an Islamic State". It most often appears alongside 1793, 1821, 1847.

Reference entry: Islamic State
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 01, 2022
Last seen: July 01, 2022

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Your Book Review: The Internationalists July 01, 2022

1793 1 shared issues
1821 1 shared issues
1847 1 shared issues
1928 Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact 1 shared issues
500 million and not one more 1 shared issues

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Your Book Review: The Internationalists

July 01, 2022 · Original source

But perhaps the biggest problem for outcasting is that countermeasures [i.e. responding to a violation of the rules with your own violation of the rules] do not always work. Yes, they are effective for enforcing rules on trade and mail delivery, but there is a whole array of rules that cannot be enforced through simple tit-for-tatting. For example, countermeasures cannot be used to enforce human rights agreements like the United Nations Convention Against Torture. A state cannot torture its own people in response to illegal torture by another state against its people. (Chapter 16) Addendum 6: Seeing Like an Islamic State The last chapter, titled Seeing Like an Islamic State is, to me, the least successfully persuasive, perhaps because it would need to be a full book of its own to take into account sufficient perspectives to fully persuade, especially on a topic that is somewhat aligned with culture war. Reading it provides a useful exercise in trying to push yourself out of assuming that other people everywhere have the same cultural assumptions that you do, and the specifics of it are interesting, but I can’t recommend it as conclusive. H&S’s goal is to cover some of the modern threats to the New World Order.

The last chapter, titled Seeing Like an Islamic State is, to me, the least successfully persuasive, perhaps because it would need to be a full book of its own to take into account sufficient perspectives to fully persuade, especially on a topic that is somewhat aligned with culture war. Reading it provides a useful exercise in trying to push yourself out of assuming that other people everywhere have the same cultural assumptions that you do, and the specifics of it are interesting, but I can’t recommend it as conclusive. H&S’s goal is to cover some of the modern threats to the New World Order.

The Qutbian enemy, therefore, is breathtakingly encompassing. The realm of Jahiliyyah is not merely the West, with its secularism, racism, imperialism, inequality, and sexual promiscuity. Nor is it simply Nasser and his henchmen, the brutes who ran torture chambers like Tora Prison. It encompasses all secular Arab governments—including those in Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria. It also includes the ulema, the clergy who claim to speak for Islam, but support the lordship of man. It includes anyone who stands in the way of the establishment of an Islamic State. The enemy is the rest of the world.

Islamism1 mentions across 1 issues

Islamism is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 18, 2021 and March 18, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Turkey was demographically dominated by poor Muslim peasants and naturally tended towards ... Islamism". It most often appears alongside Abdullah Gul, Academy Awards, Ak.

Reference entry: Islamism
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: March 18, 2021
Last seen: March 18, 2021

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Book Review: The New Sultan March 18, 2021

Abdullah Gul 1 shared issues
Academy Awards 1 shared issues
Ak 1 shared issues
AKP 1 shared issues
Anatolian 1 shared issues

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Book Review: The New Sultan

March 18, 2021 · Original source

The Turkish Armed Forces were Ataturk's power base, and was mostly made of well-educated Europhiles like himself. When he moved Turkey toward democracy, he charged the military with ensuring it never deviated too far from his original vision. But Turkey was demographically dominated by poor Muslim peasants and naturally tended towards Communism or Islamism. So the cadence of Turkish democracy was a gradual drift towards one of these extremes, followed by the military staging a coup to undo the damage and restore secular cosmopolitan liberalism. There were four such coups between 1960 and 2000 - including "coups by memo", where the military would say "let's pretend we just held a coup" and the civilian government, unwilling to risk a real coup, would resign en masse.

Though the government protested these threats from the military, a week later tens of thousands of women in Ankara held a demonstration against Islamists called the "Women's March Against Sharia", aligning many civil-society groups and opposition leaders with the secular military. As tensions between the TAF and the government continued to escalate, on February 28 [1997] the military-dominated Turkish National Security Council held a meeting to discuss the issue of "reactionism", a code word for Islamism since the late days of the Ottoman Empire. Following the meeting, they issued a list of 18 policy recommendations, making it clear that failure to comply would result in serious sanctions. One of the most important "recommendations" was the imposition of eight years' mandatory secular schooling, which would force the closure of Imam Hatip middle schools. [...]

"What would a real center-right liberal do?" Erdogan asked himself again, and talked to Brussels about accelerating Turkey's EU bid. The EU said that Turkey needed to reduce the military's role in civilian government and maybe put some measures in place to have fewer coups. "All according to plan", Erdogan presumably muttered, rubbing his hands together gleefully, and proposed measures to limit the power of the Turkish Armed Forces. The military wasn't thrilled about this. But Erdogan had a 2/3 majority in Parliament, and was riding a wave of popular adulation after causing an unprecedented massive economic boom, and everyone in Turkey really wanted to join the EU and would never forgive the military for holding it up, and Erdogan seemed like such a good center-rightist liberal who had learned his lesson about the whole Islamism thing. The military grudgingly agreed to let their power be curtailed.

Islamofascism1 mentions across 1 issues

Islamofascism is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 28, 2022 and September 28, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "people were panicking about “the rise of Islamofascism”". It most often appears alongside 9-11, AI, Better Angels.

Reference entry: Islamofascism
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 28, 2022
Last seen: September 28, 2022

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From Nostradamus To Fukuyama September 28, 2022

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

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From Nostradamus To Fukuyama

September 28, 2022 · Original source

But I don’t think Fukuyama feels like someone who’s gotten a C-. There is a steady drip of “this proves Fukuyama was more wrong than anyone has been before” takes, which show no sign of running out. The worst was just after 9-11, during the War On Terror, when people were panicking about “the rise of Islamofascism”. See for instance The End Of The End Of History, From The End Of History To The Clash Of Civilizations, The War On Terror: The Retreat Of Liberal Democracy, and many more. Fukuyama himself wrote in October 2001 that “A stream of commentators have been asserting that the tragedy of September 11 proves that I was utterly wrong to have said more than a decade ago that we had reached the end of history”.

Inline links: The End Of The End Of History, From The End Of History To The Clash Of Civilizations, The War On Terror: The Retreat Of Liberal Democracy

With the benefit of hindsight, everything about 9/11 and the War On Terror was a random blip in history with no broader implications. There was not a rising Islamofascism, there was not a clash of civilizations. There were a few guys in some caves doing terrorism, they got lucky once, the US got angry and invaded a few countries, and then everything continued as before. If people were ranking threats to the world order now, Islam and terrorism wouldn’t make the top twenty.

isoallopregnanolone1 mentions across 1 issues

isoallopregnanolone is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 16, 2022 and March 16, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "An RCT of isoallopregnanolone (sepranolone) in PMDD". It most often appears alongside 5α-reductase inhibitor, A Mindful Monkey, ALLO.

Reference entry: isoallopregnanolone
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: March 16, 2022
Last seen: March 16, 2022

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Highlights From The Comments On Zulresso March 16, 2022

5α-reductase inhibitor 1 shared issues
A Mindful Monkey 1 shared issues
ALLO 1 shared issues
allopregnanolone 1 shared issues
alprazolam 1 shared issues

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Highlights From The Comments On Zulresso

March 16, 2022 · Original source

An RCT (n=206) of isoallopregnanolone (sepranolone) in PMDD did not beat placebo for the primary outcome. However, blocking allopregnanolone production with the 5α-reductase inhibitor dutasteride does seem to work, in a small RCT at least.

Inline links: RCT, small RCT

Isochron Scepter1 mentions across 1 issues

Isochron Scepter is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 01, 2024 and November 01, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "a simple 19-card combination of Isochron Scepter". It most often appears alongside /r/BadMTGCombos, @cremieuxrecuel, @justin_garson.

Reference entry: Isochron Scepter
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: November 01, 2024
Last seen: November 01, 2024

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Links For November 2024 November 01, 2024

BadMTGCombos 1 shared issues
@cremieuxrecuel 1 shared issues
@justin_garson 1 shared issues
Aaron Sibarium 1 shared issues
Abuelo's Awakening 1 shared issues

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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.

Israel-Palestine1 mentions across 1 issues

Israel-Palestine is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 07, 2023 and November 07, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Ron, let’s get your take on Israel-Palestine as well". It most often appears alongside America, Ayatollah, Chris.

Reference entry: Israel-Palestine
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: November 07, 2023
Last seen: November 07, 2023

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Hardball Questions For The Next Debate November 07, 2023

America 1 shared issues
Ayatollah 1 shared issues
Chris 1 shared issues
Chris Christie 1 shared issues
Christie 1 shared issues

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Hardball Questions For The Next Debate

November 07, 2023 · Original source

MODERATOR: Ron DeSantis, your Forbidden Letter is still S. Ron, let’s get your take on Israel-Palestine as well.

MODERATOR: Thank you, Chris Christie. Our next question is for Nikki Haley. Nikki, what would you do to address the Chrisis . . . sorry, the crisis . . . in Israel and Palestine? Remember, your forbidden letter is still “K”.

HALEY: Tha . . . uh . . . gratitude to you. I thi . . . uh, I believe . . . that rising threats to peace around the globe are the most important issue. Countries li . . . countries such as Iran and . . . and . . . such as that place with Pyongyang . . . are threatening US allies. When I was UN ambassador, I learned to stand up to dangerous tyrants such as Ayatollah . . . such as the Ayatollah . . . and Vladimir Putin. And . . . that one guy in . . . in the place with Pyongyang. We need to stand together with US allies such as Israel, South . . . that place with Seoul . . . and most recently U . . . Um, our allies such as U . . . such as that place with . . . f—k.

Israel-Palestine conflict1 mentions across 1 issues

Israel-Palestine conflict is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 12, 2023 and December 12, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Like, what about the Israel-Palestine conflict?"; "You don’t believe in the Israel-Palestine conflict?". It most often appears alongside 2024, Aaron Peskin, accelerationist conspiracy.

Reference entry: Israel-Palestine conflict
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: December 12, 2023
Last seen: December 12, 2023

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Son Of Bride Of Bay Area House Party December 12, 2023

2024 1 shared issues
Aaron Peskin 1 shared issues
accelerationist conspiracy 1 shared issues
Adam D’Angelo 1 shared issues
Aella 1 shared issues

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Son Of Bride Of Bay Area House Party

December 12, 2023 · Original source

“I don’t know if religion always leads to a flourishing society. Sometimes it can make things worse. Like, what about the Israel-Palestine conflict?”

“You don’t believe in the Israel-Palestine conflict?”

“Like I said, I’m a pragmatist now. If the Israel-Palestine conflict existed, it would be a strong argument against religion, and make lots of people become atheists. But religion is necessary to hold society together. So for the good of society, I choose not to believe in it.”

Israeli occupation1 mentions across 1 issues

Israeli occupation is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 05, 2023 and December 05, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "An Israeli occupation would involve constant bloody resistance". It most often appears alongside @AISafetyMemes, @betafuzz, Adam D’Angelo.

Reference entry: Israeli occupation
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: December 05, 2023
Last seen: December 05, 2023

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23 December 05, 2023

@AISafetyMemes 1 shared issues
@betafuzz 1 shared issues
Adam D’Angelo 1 shared issues
Aella 1 shared issues
AGI 1 shared issues

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December 05, 2023 · Original source

It sounds like step one toward that goal would be for Israel to defeat Hamas, but what happens after that? An Israeli occupation would involve constant bloody resistance; I'm not convinced it would be any better for people on the ground than Hamas (though someone can try to convince me otherwise). Could PLO, UN, or some puppet state maintain a balance of being anti-Israel enough that the Gazans don't immediately revolt, but not so anti-Israel that Israel keeps the blockade or represses the area too hard for anyone to live a normal life? It's a tiny sliver of a chance for a barely-okay outcome, but it's the main one I can think of.

Israeli operations in Gaza1 mentions across 1 issues

Israeli operations in Gaza is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 12, 2024 and March 12, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Israeli operations in Gaza not expected to end until autumn". It most often appears alongside Asterisk, Bard, Berkeley.

Reference entry: Israeli operations in Gaza
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: March 12, 2024
Last seen: March 12, 2024

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24 March 12, 2024

Asterisk 1 shared issues
Bard 1 shared issues
Berkeley 1 shared issues
Bitcoin 1 shared issues
Claude 1 shared issues

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March 12, 2024 · Original source

Israeli operations in Gaza not expected to end until autumn (!)

Israeli PM1 mentions across 1 issues

Israeli PM is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 26, 2021 and April 26, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Netanyahu is still Israeli PM". It most often appears alongside 538, ACX, Biden.

Reference entry: Israeli PM
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 26, 2021
Last seen: April 26, 2021

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Mantic Monday: Predictions For 2021 April 26, 2021

538 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
Biden 1 shared issues
Bitcoin 1 shared issues
BLM 1 shared issues

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Mantic Monday: Predictions For 2021

April 26, 2021 · Original source

US/WORLD 1. Biden approval rating (as per 538) is greater than 50%: 80% 2. Court packing is clearly going to happen (new justices don't have to be appointed by end of year): 5% 3. Yang is New York mayor: 80% 4. Newsom recalled as CA governor: 5% 5. At least $250 million in damage from BLM protests this year: 30% 6. Significant capital gains tax hike (above 30% for highest bracket): 20% 7. Trump is allowed back on Twitter: 20% 8. Tokyo Olympics happen on schedule: 70% 9. Major flare-up (significantly worse than anything in past 5 years) in Russia/Ukraine war: 20% 10. Major flare-up (significantly worse than anything in past 10 years) in Israel/Palestine conflict: 5% 11. Major flare-up (significantly worse than anything in past 50 years) in China/Taiwan conflict: 5% 12. Netanyahu is still Israeli PM: 40% 13. Prospera has at least 1000 residents: 30%

Israeli security1 mentions across 1 issues

Israeli security is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 13, 2026 and January 13, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "Israeli security is no laughing matter". It most often appears alongside Adeline, Aella Simposium, Altman.

Reference entry: Israeli security
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: January 13, 2026
Last seen: January 13, 2026

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SOTA On Bay Area House Party January 13, 2026

Adeline 1 shared issues
Aella Simposium 1 shared issues
Altman 1 shared issues
AMD 1 shared issues
Andreas 1 shared issues

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SOTA On Bay Area House Party

January 13, 2026 · Original source

“Our big problem is the Bible. It would be hard enough to get the Dead Sea Scrolls; Israeli security is no laughing matter. But our lawyer says we have to destroy the original original. What even is that? Altman is pushing for us to find the Ark of the Covenant, but you can bet he’s not the one who’s going to have to open it afterwards.”

Israeli settlements1 mentions across 1 issues

Israeli settlements is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 06, 2022 and April 06, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "The one that bothers me the most is Israeli settlements". It most often appears alongside 19th century, 21st century, Africa.

Reference entry: Israeli settlements
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 06, 2022
Last seen: April 06, 2022

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Highlights From The Comments On Self-Determination April 06, 2022

19th century 1 shared issues
21st century 1 shared issues
Africa 1 shared issues
Afrikaner volkstaat 1 shared issues
Alex Mennen 1 shared issues

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Highlights From The Comments On Self-Determination

April 06, 2022 · Original source

Israeli settlements

I’m mostly willing to bite these bullets. The one that bothers me the most is Israeli settlements - there ought to be some rule against sneaking in under cover of night, setting up a town on someone else’s land, and then seceding and saying it’s yours. This rule can’t be absolute and permanent - European colonization of the US was basically this, and nobody thinks we should give it back to the Indians now - but it should exist enough to prevent exploitation. I think this rule would cover ISIS and South Africa too.

Israelite1 mentions across 1 issues

Israelite is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 17, 2023 and November 17, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "found the next stage of Israelite civilization". It most often appears alongside Abel, Adam and Eve, America.

Reference entry: Israelite
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: November 17, 2023
Last seen: November 17, 2023

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Book Review: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning November 17, 2023

Abel 1 shared issues
Adam and Eve 1 shared issues
America 1 shared issues
Apollonius of Tyana 1 shared issues
Arab 1 shared issues

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Book Review: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning

November 17, 2023 · Original source

He contrasts this with the Bible. Lots of Bible stories also fit the pattern. As in Babylonian and Norse mythology, the world begins with a primordial murder: Cain kills Abel. But the clearest example is the story of Joseph and his brothers. Joseph’s brothers grow jealous of him, coveting his beautiful multi-colored coat. They form a mob, gang up on him, and are about to kill him, when a slave caravan comes by and they decide to sell him as a slave instead. Then Joseph becomes as close to a god as the monotheistic Israelites are willing to accept (Prime Minister of Egypt) and founds the next stage of Israelite civilization as some kind of culture-hero figure.

So how does the Hebrew Bible escape this failure mode? Girard says divine intervention. God (here meaning literal God, exactly as the average churchgoer understands Him) tried to break the reign of Satan (here meaning metaphorical Satan, the single-victim process) over the Jewish people, by constantly providing them with examples of the single-victim process being bad and ensuring those examples were written up accurately. He got the Israelites to obsess over these examples and worship them as a holy text, trying to hammer the whole thing into their heads. Finally, He sent His only begotten Son as the perfect victim, who would undergo the process in its entirety and have it be written up with unprecedented attention to detail. This extra-compelling example finally penetrated the Israelites’ thick skulls. Although Peter and the other disciples sort of joined the mob in denying Jesus at the beginning, after the Resurrection they started thinking previously barely-thinkable thoughts, like “what if our mob was in the wrong?” and “what if mob violence is bad?”

Or what about Numbers 25? The Israelites intermarry with the idolatrous Moabites. God sends a plague as punishment. 24,000 people die. Then Phinehas kills the leader of the intermarriers, and the plague ends.

Italian communes1 mentions across 1 issues

Italian communes is a recurring concept 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 "the rise of Italian communes and city-states in the middle ages". It most often appears alongside Achilles, ACX, Adam Smith.

Reference entry: Italian communes
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 11, 2023
Last seen: August 11, 2023

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Your Book Review: The Weirdest People in the World August 11, 2023

Achilles 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
Adam Smith 1 shared issues
Africa 1 shared issues
Ara Norenzayan 1 shared issues

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Your Book Review: The Weirdest People in the World

August 11, 2023 · Original source

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

Inline links: detoxify manioc

Italian futurism1 mentions across 1 issues

Italian futurism is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 05, 2026 and February 05, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "Futurist cooking was a submovement of Italian futurism". It most often appears alongside 4o, 60 Minutes, @MattZeitlin.

Reference entry: Italian futurism
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: February 05, 2026
Last seen: February 05, 2026

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Links For February 2026 February 05, 2026

4o 1 shared issues
60 Minutes 1 shared issues
@MattZeitlin 1 shared issues
@MMJukic 1 shared issues
@Poltfan69 1 shared issues

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Links For February 2026

February 05, 2026 · Original source

53: Futurist cooking was a submovement of Italian futurism that emphasized the role of cuisine in a bizarre revolutionary/fascist/technocratic synthesis. It “notably rejected pasta, believing it to cause lassitude, pessimism and lack of passion ... to strengthen the Italian race in preparation for war” and “abolished the knife and fork”. “Traditional kitchen equipment would be replaced by” machinery like ozonizers, UV lamps, and autoclaves, and the meal itself would be a sort of avante-garde performance art, where people consumed small mouthfuls of a variety of symbolic and artistic dishes. Although “a rift developed between the Futurist movement and fascism ... there were still important areas of convergence, particularly the shared embrace of aluminium.” Famous futurist dishes include “deep fried rose heads in full bloom”, “a large bowl of cold milk illuminated by a green light”, and “a polyrhythmic salad” served in a box which produces music while it is being eaten, “to which the waiters dance until the course is finished.” You can buy their cookbook here if you dare.

Inline links: Futurist cooking, here

Italian-American community1 mentions across 1 issues

Italian-American community is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 10, 2022 and October 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "the local Italian-American community successfully resisted efforts". It most often appears alongside 9-11, Adraste, America.

Reference entry: Italian-American community
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: October 10, 2022
Last seen: October 10, 2022

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Highlights From The Comments On Columbus Day October 10, 2022

9-11 1 shared issues
Adraste 1 shared issues
America 1 shared issues
American Jews 1 shared issues
Angels 1 shared issues

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Highlights From The Comments On Columbus Day

October 10, 2022 · Original source

Only four years ago, the local Italian-American community successfully resisted efforts to rename Balbo Drive, a street in a prominent location named after a prominent literal Fascist (an early leader of the party who built Mussolini’s air force and ran large parts of North Africa before being shot down, poetically, by Italian air defenses).

Several people (Aristides, Herbert Herbertson, Gordon Tremeshko) argue that this depends a lot on where in the US you live, and that in cities with a big Italian-American community Columbus Day is a really big deal. Meanwhile, I had to hear about Columbus Day approximately yearly in elementary school, and I was an adult before I learned (as a fun historical fact) that it was ever supposed to involve Italian-Americans at all.

Inline links: Aristides, Herbert Herbertson

Italians in Africa1 mentions across 1 issues

Italians in Africa is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 28, 2021 and May 28, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Italians in Africa hated them". It most often appears alongside A Game of Thrones, Africa, African Americans.

Reference entry: Italians in Africa
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 28, 2021
Last seen: May 28, 2021

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Your Book Review: Humankind May 28, 2021

A Game of Thrones 1 shared issues
Africa 1 shared issues
African Americans 1 shared issues
Against Empathy 1 shared issues
American 1 shared issues

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Your Book Review: Humankind

May 28, 2021 · Original source

...perhaps the most impressive in history. Martin Van Creveld has calculated that the average German solider inflicted 50% more causalities than his allied counterpart. The Italians in Africa hated them, yet admitted they would have been crushed by the British if not for them. When the Soviets were rolling up their eastern frontier, and allied armies had succ...

...was perhaps the most impressive in history. Martin Van Creveld has calculated that the average German solider inflicted 50% more causalities than his allied counterpart. The Italians in Africa hated them, yet admitted they would have been crushed by the British if not for them. When the Soviets were rolling up their eastern frontier, and allied armies had successfully la...

Iterated Prisoners’ Dilemma1 mentions across 1 issues

Iterated Prisoners’ Dilemma is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 14, 2024 and November 14, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "In Iterated Prisoners’ Dilemma, everyone can either benefit you or harm you an equal amount". It most often appears alongside 1 Corinthians 6, America, Axelrod.

Reference entry: Iterated Prisoners’ Dilemma
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: November 14, 2024
Last seen: November 14, 2024

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The Early Christian Strategy November 14, 2024

1 Corinthians 6 1 shared issues
America 1 shared issues
Axelrod 1 shared issues
Backscratcher Clubs 1 shared issues
Backscratcher Clubs 1 shared issues

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The Early Christian Strategy

November 14, 2024 · Original source

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

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

ITNs1 mentions across 1 issues

ITNs is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 18, 2025 and June 18, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "we’ll be more cost-effective than ITNs in urban to periurban environments". It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, Aatu Koskensilta, acanthamoeba keratitis.

Reference entry: ITNs
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 18, 2025
Last seen: June 18, 2025

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ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates June 18, 2025

1DaySooner 1 shared issues
Aatu Koskensilta 1 shared issues
acanthamoeba keratitis 1 shared issues
ACS ES&T Water 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues

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ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates

June 18, 2025 · Original source

Codebuff, an AI coding startup I probably can’t take full credit for all of this just from giving them $20K in seed funding, but I continue to appreciate everything they do for this community and the world. 35: Further S’s Political Career This person didn’t win their election, but has since pivoted to AI safety and works in a well-regarded AI policy think tank. 36: Seeds Of Science, A Journal Of Non-Traditional Research No update received, but this was a public journal and it is easy to follow their work, see their website and Substack. They published two dozen articles of widely varying quality through 2023 and 2024, then closed in 2025. A remnant of the original vision survives as a science blogging aggregator. This was about my median expectation for this grant, but it was very inexpensive and I decided to take a chance on it anyway. 37: Good Science Project, Working To Improve Federal Science Funding No update received, but they have a public Substack discussing their progress. Their proposals for NIH reform have influenced Congress and made government agencies pay more attention to scientific integrity. 38: Advising Developing Countries On How To Grow Their Economies With our initial ACX grant, we piloted the Growth Teams model in Rwanda, helping the government jumpstart the export-oriented call center (BPO) industry. Since 2022, that effort has contributed to the creation of 2,000 formal jobs and the emergence of some of the country’s largest private employers. We’ve since expanded to Tanzania, Malawi, and the Indian states of Goa and Meghalaya. To refocus the global development discourse on broad-based economic growth, we co-organized the Growth Summit with the Center for Global Development and the Charter Cities Institute, and have published articles in leading outlets including Stanford Social Innovation Review, ProMarket, and the Global Prosperity Institute. Our work has attracted support from Open Philanthropy, Schmidt Futures, and Mulago Foundation, and our advisors now include economists Lant Pritchett, Stefan Dercon, and Kunal Sen. 39: Help Luca De Leo Get Started In AI Safety Research No update received, but Luca now runs the AI safety group at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. 40: Typist For Saharon Shelah This was another ACXG+ Grant, funded by an anonymous outside funder and not listed in the original announcement. Saharon is a prolific and influential Israeli mathematician, but many of his discoveries are hand-written in an unpublishable format. This grant funded a typist to help make his results suitable for publication. According to this page, they have made over fifty new papers and preprints available. Second Cohort: One Year Updates 41: Lead-Acid Battery Recycling In Nigeria The Nigeria field research was a major success. We spent most of September doing field research in multiple major cities in Nigeria, and got a good sense of the used lead-acid battery supply chain. This field research served as the foundation for expanding our project, and has been very impactful in shaping our ongoing research. We published our findings from Nigeria, which were shared with Nigerian government regulators and global NGOs working on lead poisoning. The grant also gave us the on-the-ground experience we needed to both fully understand and credibly engage with groups, both in Nigeria and globally, on the ULAB issue. In the meantime, beyond continued research, we’ve also launched a dashboard (trade.leadbatteries.org) for analyzing global lead trade data. Right now, we’re: Launching two studies (one RCT, one environmental analysis) in Nigeria in collaboration with local universities to develop a more rigorous understanding of lead pollution due to low-standard ULAB recycling in Nigeria Collaborating with a non-profit incubator to launch an NGO focused on demand-side solutions Beginning a partnership with a West African environmental regulator to scale cheap air monitoring technology to quickly identify and reduce lead pollution from low-standard smelting If any of this sounds interesting to you, please sign up for our Substack (leadbatteries.substack.com) or send us an email at hugosmith@uchicago.edu! 42: Compensation For Kidney Donors The End Kidney Deaths Act (H.R. 2687 / EKDA) is a groundbreaking ten-year pilot program designed to save lives and reduce healthcare costs. It provides a refundable tax credit of $10,000 per year for five years, a total of $50,000, to living kidney donors who donate to a stranger, helping those who’ve waited the longest on the transplant list. Between 2010 and 2021, 100,000 Americans died while qualified and waiting for a kidney. The EKDA aims to change that trajectory. Within ten years of its passage, up to 100,000 Americans could receive a life-saving living donor kidney which typically lasts twice as long as a deceased donor kidney. This would not only save lives but also save taxpayers up to $37 billion. The legislation has been reintroduced in the House, and we have a committed Republican Senate lead. Now, we need a Democratic Senator to co-lead and help move this bipartisan effort forward. Time is short, and we are racing to pass the bill this Congressional session. 36 organizations already support the EKDA. Join the movement and help end preventable kidney deaths. Visit EndKidneyDeaths.org to help us get to the finish line. Elaine and her org have been working extremely hard on this; you can read a Vox article on their campaign here. If you want to sign up for her email list and get updates any time there is a representative you can contact or meeting you can join in, go here. 43: Genetic Hack To Prevent Suffering In the estimate of multiple team members, the ACX grant was “worth it” - it likely had a counterfactual net positive impact, even though we had to pivot from our initial fast-track plans for developing the precision anti-suffering therapy. We identify three primary streams of value: a) reducing uncertainty in the emerging field through early exploratory research, helping with the identification of dead ends and promising R&D trajectories; b) a wide range of downstream effects (beyond the “raising awareness” cliché), including talent mobilization and rekindled interest in suffering abolitionism as a distinct cause area; and c) certain developments that cannot yet be publicly disclosed. In December 2024, Marcin Kowrygo (Acting CEO & volunteering contributor), David Pearce (Director of Bioethics), Aatu Koskensilta (President), and a few other team members decided to leave The Far Out Initiative. They look forward to collaborating and applying their experience to advance the suffering abolitionist lineage in the spirit of open science, public good, and thoughtfully decentralized governance. Feel free to reach out to us at suffab at protonmail dot com to discuss collaboration opportunities! I wrote a post profiling the Far Out Initiative here. Unfortunately there were some internal disagreements, and the people ACX Grants was closest to left the organization. I plan to continue to monitor whatever they do next. 44: Advocate For Pandemic Response Team At FDA This team prefers has asked me not to discuss their progress publicly, but you can probably guess what their lives are like right now, and your guess would be correct. 45: Anti-Mosquito Drones We developed a cheap sonar that is able to detect, track and classify the ultrasonic echoes of mosquito wings at more than three meters. I believe it’s a world first! We also have control algorithms that take the sonar data and output control commands that both ram into mosquitoes and avoid the walls of a simulated environment. Our current work is on integrating both components on a real drone, and we expect to be able to kill mosquitoes by June. We’ve also made an internal impact study (napkin-sized) that shows we’ll be more cost-effective than ITNs in urban to periurban environments. So, we’re super excited with what comes next and can’t wait to share the videos of our first interceptions! More information [in the video below] and on our website, https://tornyol.com 46: Tarbell Fellowship For AI Journalism No update received, but they have a public website. I can’t find the Voices program in particular, but the overall fellowship completed their first class of seven fellows and is working on their second. 47: Germicidal UV Lamp Study The research has successfully demonstrated the ability of off the shelf ozone scrubbers to mitigate the ozone production of far-UVC lamps, is now available as a preprint (https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/67e4cde76dde43c9084d88b7). The paper has been submitted for publication and is currently undergoing peer review. Any ideas you have for potential funders we can approach to help execute our six-year plan to accelerate far-UVC would be appreciated https://blueprintbiosecurity.org/introducing-project-air/ 48: Technological Solutions To Animal Welfare Challenges Directly because of Innovate Animal Ag's work, the first U.S. egg producer publicly announced in the New York Times their adoption of in-ovo sexing technology, eliminating the need to cull day-old male chicks. The initial in-ovo sexing machine began operating in the U.S. at the end of 2024, with the first eggs from these hens expected on shelves in mid-2025. External evaluations estimate our work accelerated U.S. adoption of this technology by over seven years, meaning that once fully implemented, more than 2 billion chicks will have been spared. In addition to continuing to support the rollout of in-ovo sexing in the US and globally, we're now exploring other technologies and paths to impact. Current promising projects include developing humane slaughter methods for fish and advocating for USDA approval of a poultry vaccine against bird flu. They add: If you ever meet folks that are interested animal welfare and are partial to more technocratic and practical solutions, please continue to pass them our way, or connect them directly to me. 49: Assurance Contract Website www.Spartacus.app is an ACX grantee that created a platform to help solve coordination and collective action problems. It enables the creation of campaigns that build critical mass through conditional commitments, which only activate when a sufficient number of people join, converting risk and uncertainty into a higher probability of successful outcomes. They are currently facilitating several projects that leverage conditional commitments, including a dominant assurance contract interface for fashion pop-ups, accelerating a community business association's membership drive, and helping an AI safety organization organize petitions and events, among others. They have pivoted from an emphasis on high-stakes coordination problems requiring anonymity (because they occur too infrequently) to a broader range of more common use cases and have successfully run small-scale campaigns, but are still working toward product-market fit. Despite resource constraints and split time commitments that have impeded faster progress, they remain dedicated to the project's growth and success. You can follow its progress on X or Substack, or email Jordan directly here. 50: Cause Prioritization @ Center For Exploratory Altruism Research Moderately good progress on a salt reduction policy advocacy project we funded; informal commitments have been made by the Ministry of Health, and we're awaiting the publication of a formal administrative order. The official description sounds maximally generic, but this is an EA charity with a broad mandate whose current thesis is that dietary guidelines in developing countries can have outsized effects in saving lives. They’re making some progress on a salt reduction campaign in a developing country they prefer not to name publicly. 51: Mark Webb Studying Land Reform The purpose of this project was to identify specific farmland that could be acquired and transferred to the farmers already working the land. This has been difficult to achieve. I have been able to connect with other charities and landless farmers, and was able to interview a number of people about what their situation looks like, as well as what it would look like to them personally if they owned, rather than rented, their farmland. All this was immensely helpful in pushing this long-term project forward, even if I was unable to identify a specific plot of land that could be used to try the experiment. I intend to continue this project. If you have any insights or connections, I am interested. 52: More AI Advocacy In Australia Good Ancestors is focused on AI safety policy in Australia. Middle powers might be a useful path to influence as the US and China focus on racing, rather than safety. The ACX grant helped us give testimony about AI safety to the Australian Senate alongside Google, Microsoft and Facebook (We were the only nonprofit to give oral evidence to the inquiry. We also engaged government on other AI-related issues, including cybersecurity, biosecurity, consumer law and automated decision making (https://www.goodancestors.org.au/ai-safety). We’re currently working to inform voters about where parties stand on AI safety for the election, ahead of engaging on a likely Australian AI Act in 2025 (https://www.australiansforaisafety.com.au/). This is the same Australian lobbying organization we founded in Year 1, after a change in name and leadership. I continue to be excited about AI safety in middle-tier countries for a few reasons. First, these countries have some power in international organizations to set international standards. Second, companies will usually comply with any not-excessively-burdensome regulation set by any country with a significant market. Third, AI safety is underfunded by the standard of government programs, so Australia setting up a national AI Safety Institute would significantly expand the field. It’s kind of crazy that ACX Grants tier levels of money can have significant effects at this scale, but GA continues to do a great job and we continue to be proud to support them. 53: Campus For African School Of Economics At Zanzibar Charter City The ACX grant helped launch the first research center at the African School of Economics-Zanzibar, which is a main anchor of the Fumba Town charter city project in Zanzibar. This research center is called the Africa Urban Lab (AUL), focused on rapid urbanization across Africa. The AUL launched its first Diploma program in Urban Development with 38 students in our first cohort (now graduated!), including mayors, and deputy mayor, a director of a national Ministry of urban development, and many others. We published our research framing papers for the AUL's research agenda. We raised funding to launch an Urban Expansion Program that's now selecting 15 African cities to support in implementing urban expansion planning on the urban periphery. We held two Public Talks by renowned cities scholars and practitioners. We received additional funding from Emergent Ventures and from the Templeton Foundation. And we've partnered with 8 universities across the region, and with one of these universities (Ardhi) we'll be working with them to update their urban planning and urban economics curriculum (amplifying AUL's impact beyond our own organization). A longer update from end of 2024 is here: https://www.aul.city/blog/reflecting-on-africa-urban-lab-s-inaugural-year-2024-highlights) 54: Online Training Program For Health Workers In Developing Countries To date, over 11,000 health workers in Nigeria have completed our course on basic, life-saving newborn care. ACX funding was catalytic for helping us secure government approvals and complete an evaluation of the impact of our training on health workers' clinical practices. The evaluation shows that birth attendants provide better birth care after taking the course. We fed the evaluation results into an updated model, which suggests the program is 24 times more cost-effective than direct cash transfers (a widely recognized benchmark for cost-effectiveness). The program is likely to become even more cost-effective as we scale up. https://healthlearn.org/blog/updated-impact-model 55: Smartphone Pupillometry To Diagnose Neurological Conditions We have continued to expand our work in the smartphone pupillometry space and the development of our application, PupilScreen (https://www.apertur.ai/). We have expanded our pilot/research program to include new sites across the United States (Missouri, New Jersey, Kentucky, USAC racing, PitFit driver performance training in Indiana) and the world (Nepal, Taiwan, South Africa). We continue to publish at the leading edge of the pupillometry literature as well looking at concussion (https://neuro.jmir.org/2024/1/e58398 and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39682632/), cerebral vasospasm (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39128501/), and stroke (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39674431/ and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39561861/). Currently, we are raising a $3 million seed round via a SAFE to fund the expansion of our work into the hands of healthcare workers and the general public. We will first focus on traumatic brain injury for clinical use and develop a neuro-monitoring wellness application utilizing our technology for the general public. They add: “We would welcome connections to anyone that you think might be interested in supporting our work further by investing in our $3M seed round of funding.” 56: Mike Saint-Antoine’s Biology Tutorial Videos Since getting the grant, I've continued to make Youtube tutorials as planned. One series that I'm especially proud of is about how to make a neural network in the Julia programming language completely from scratch, with no imports, up to the point of being able to solve MNIST (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWVKUEZ25V97tNULapu07DhWv6_W4NfpE). Also, a college student in Pakistan came across my videos and invited me to give a virtual Zoom-lecture to her department, so I ended up teaching a 6-hour "Python-for-Biologists" workshop to more than a hundred college students in Pakistan over Zoom. So that was pretty awesome. Also, lately I've been teaching some in-person classes too, mostly at Fractal University in NYC, and I also recently organized a day-long, in-person Beginner Python class for people in my local area (Philly suburbs) who wanted to learn some basic programming. I'm having a lot of fun with this project, and am grateful to Scott and the grant funders for their generosity! 57: Conceptual Boundaries Workshop On AI Safety The workshop was completed successfully; you can read a writeup here. 58: Apart Research To Incubate AI Safety Scientists No update received, but they have a public website, and you can see their impact metrics here. They seem to be in urgent need of more funding. 59: Primer On How To Achieve Political Change No update received and I can’t find anything about this. 60: Research IVF Clinic Success Rates We've built a predictive model that estimates the odds of having a child at different IVF clinics across the country while controlling for factors like patient age and infertility differences that can falsely make some clinics look better than others. We found that an average patient can increase their odds of having a kid by 43% just by going to a top 10% clinic. Patients unlucky enough to go to a bottom 10% clinic will reduce their odds of having a kid by 40%. Next month, we're adding several more clinics, 2023 data, additional procedural controls, and donor/gestational carrier models, which should push our accuracy beyond state-of-the-art models in this space and better isolate clinic impact on patient outcomes. We've launched ivf.clinic, a website where patients can access personalized IVF reports and browse our clinic rankings (though we're still squashing some bugs). Currently, we're expanding our research to include comprehensive insurance coverage and pricing data across clinics nationwide. If anyone has insights on automating the collection of IVF clinic pricing information, I'd love to hear from you at scelarek@gmail.com. 61: Replicate Study On Brain Wave Synchronization For Speeding Learning We have acquired and configured the OpenBCI UltraCortex Mark IV 8-channel EEG headset and a clinical-grade Biosemi 32-channel EEG system. We’ve implemented the required components for the experimental pipeline (computing alpha from EEG, flashing bright white light, presenting stimulus images). We are currently putting them together into a single system that we’ll use to collect the data from several participants. We are aiming to gather data on several participants in late June / early July and complete the pilot of the replication in July 2025. If you’d like to be a participant in the study, [they might announce a link once they have it]. 62: Advocate Repeal Of Interstate Runaway Compact No update received and I can’t find anything about this. 63: Animal Welfare (Especially Fish) In Turkiye Future For Fish asks companies to sign up to FFF's fish welfare commitment, which requires producers to certify their facilities and enforce specific standards for stocking density and harvest. Luckyfish, İlknak, Divan (35 restaurants, 17 hotels) and NG Hotels (5 hotels) have signed and published FFF's fish welfare commitment with İlknak publishing the commitment on their website. Kılıç published its first sustainability report detailing fish welfare policies, including enforcing a maximum stocking density of 10 kg/m³ and confirmation of electrical stunning practices. Longer version with some caveats: https://manifund.org/projects/improving-fish-w From the longer document, these commitments involve things like reducing overcrowding, or stunning fish before killing them. Over 30 million fish were affected just from their single largest commitment, and they say 100 fish are helped per dollar spent. 64: More Georgism Advocacy Lars and Will used the 2021 grant to co-found ValueBase. Will remained with the company, and Lars left to do advocacy work at the Center For Land Economics. Here’s their summary of how things are going: [Our] organization transitioned leadership with Greg Miller, a former Program Analyst at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Lars Doucet, author of Land is A Big Deal and Co-Founder of Valuebase, working full time and Joe Caissie stepping aside. This transition happened naturally as the next career transition for each respective person. Since then, progress has been made on pushing forward legislation. Maryland had two bills introduced to give Baltimore and counties the ability to enact split-rate taxes. One of the bills passed the state senate and would allow Baltimore to enact land value taxes within one mile of rail corridors–this contains 50% of Baltimore’s land value. However, the legislative session ended. We expect the bill to revive next session. The Center for Land Economics has been actively working to help efforts to get this bill passed the line. At the same time, we have uncovered systematic undervaluing of vacant land in assessments. We are writing a report on the assessment issues in Maryland with actionable steps to resolve them.

Inline links: Codebuff, website, Substack, survives, a public Substack, in Rwanda, Growth Summit, Stanford Social Innovation Review, ProMarket, Global Prosperity Institute, Saharon, this page, eadbatteries.substack.com, here, here, a post profiling the Far Out Initiative here, https://tornyol.com, a public website, https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/67e4cde76dde43c9084d88b7, https://blueprintbiosecurity.org/introducing-project-air/, our way, connect them directly to me, www.Spartacus.app, X, Substack, here, https://www.goodancestors.org.au/ai-safety, https://www.australiansforaisafety.com.au/, https://www.aul.city/blog/reflecting-on-africa-urban-lab-s-inaugural-year-2024-highlights, https://healthlearn.org/blog/updated-impact-model, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWVKUEZ25V97tNULapu07DhWv6_W4NfpE, here, public website, here, in urgent need, https://manifund.org/projects/improving-fish-w

It’s Okay To Be White1 mentions across 1 issues

It’s Okay To Be White is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 21, 2026 and January 21, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "‘It’s Okay To Be White’ is a known 4chan white supremacist slogan"; "4chan’s deployment of the “It’s Okay To Be White” slogan". It most often appears alongside 4chan, 80,000 Hours, @Ashwin V.

Reference entry: It’s Okay To Be White
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: January 21, 2026
Last seen: January 21, 2026

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Highlights From The Comments On Scott Adams January 21, 2026

4chan 1 shared issues
80,000 Hours 1 shared issues
@Ashwin V 1 shared issues
@disgruntledcho1 1 shared issues
@Eigengender 1 shared issues

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Highlights From The Comments On Scott Adams

January 21, 2026 · Original source

Therefore I like minorities less than whites. You can’t argue with (1), because the bad thing might be something like ‘crime’, which everyone dislikes. You can’t argue with (2), because sometimes you can find statistics showing it’s literally true. Your ability to argue with (3) depends on the exact form, but some forms - like “if I knew nothing about two neighborhoods except that one were 100% black and the other 100% white, I would probably prefer to live in the 100% white one” - seem pretty strong. But then what’s left of being against racism? We could think of racism as a bias that makes people update on racial topics far beyond what the data allow. For example, if 0.1% of whites are murderers, and 0.2% of blacks are murderers, this hardly means that you can’t be nice to your white-collar Harvard-educated black colleague, or that you should think of him as a potential-murderer-in-waiting. But even this might be giving the racists too much credit. If 0.1% of whites are murderers, and 0.2% of blacks are murderers, does that mean you should make a Twitter account NGGRKILLER1488 who posts “u look like CHIMP i will enjoy murdering ur family during the race war” under every picture of a black person that comes across your timeline? No? Because a lot of people do do that! I’m not Language Czar, but if you force me to define the word “racism”6, I would call it a bias which makes people take the flaw of an ethnic group (whether real or imagined) further than they would normally go, until whatever core of useful insight they contained becomes caricatured and exaggerated, and they’re being used more to spread hatred and fear than to communicate useful information. None of this is original or interesting, and I’m only saying this cliched and obvious thing so we’re all on the same page. So was Adams’ comment racist in this sense? By now we can probably rehearse the arguments of both sides: LIBERAL: “It’s Okay To Be White” is a known 4chan white supremacist slogan. They chose it as their slogan precisely so it would be awkward when people called them out for saying it, and so they could retreat to saying “We just said it was okay to be white, which surely nobody can hold against us”. This is stupid, we’re under no obligation to pretend we don’t know this, and those 26% of black people who were against it, were against it on this basis. CONSERVATIVE: Yeah, but the poll didn’t ask “do you agree with it as a 4chan white supremacist slogan?”, it just asked about the statement. And besides, most random Americans don’t even know the latest 4chan white supremacist slogans. At least some of the respondents probably meant it literally. My opinion - it seems plausible to me that many of the 26% of respondents who said they disagreed meant they disagreed with the 4chan slogan version, and that many of the rest were doing “symbolic belief”/”emotive responding” such that they interpreted the question as something like “in the history of interactions between the white race and other races, do you believe the white race has behaved in an okay way?”, and that some of the ones left over were Lizardmen. Adams isn’t required to know all of the weird sorts of symbolic belief biases that affect polls (although isn’t “our responses aren’t based on factual beliefs, but constantly malleable based on frame and emotion” sort of his entire shtick?). But at this point, he had lived in the USA for 60 years. He had already had many interactions with black people, both personally and through the news. Given how much other information he had, updating from one ambiguous poll where 26% of people gave an ambiguously bad answer, to “this entire ethnic group of 30 million people is a hate group, and white people should flee them, and try to avoid all interaction with them, and shouldn’t help them in any way” is exactly the sort of caricatured exaggerated7 leaping-to-conclusions that the word “racism” means if it means anything at all8. Does that mean Adams should have been cancelled and lost his livelihood? I’m against this sort of cancellation full stop, so I say no. I think it’s a dumb opinion, and maybe a bit evil in the complicated sense where it’s hard to disentangle evil from ignorance. But many people hold opinions of approximately that level of badness, and it’s not worth hating them all9. … 5: Other Comments … Calvin Collins writes: I learned of you through Scott [Adams]. Think a lot of what you say is valid but have to admit I’m one of the people whose lives he changed for the better. When I first listened I was a 25 year old 3x college dropout and 10 years later I have a great career and family. A lot of that comes from applying his advice. Subjectively I’ll always love him because of what he gave me, without even knowing who I am. [What helped the most were] the reframes and micro lessons. Almost everyday at work or home there’s a situation where one pops into my head: “I’m not anxious, I’m excited”

Inline links: 6, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!qhD3!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7308f73e-7d75-48e2-b0cb-14ecbc1f9cd8_900x280.gif, “symbolic belief”, ”emotive responding”, Lizardmen, 7, 8, against this sort of cancellation full stop, 9, writes

Although I don’t think Adams’ cancellation was fair according to normal human logic, I think it had a certain odd sort of cosmic justice. 4chan’s deployment of the “It’s Okay To Be White” slogan was (maybe literally) out of Adams’ book - say something completely inoffensive, make sure everyone knows it has a secret offensive meaning, then retreat back to “What? You’re upset at our totally inoffensive thing? How silly!” when anyone calls you on it. This manuever didn’t fool woke people at all; the people wearing “It’s Okay To Be White” t-shirts got exactly as many accusations of racism as they would have gotten for wearing swastikas directly. The only person it apparently fooled was Adams, the professional not-being-fooled-by-political-manipulation expert, whose life it randomly destroyed as collateral damage. Oh well.

IV ketamine1 mentions across 1 issues

IV ketamine is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 19, 2021 and July 19, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "the studies have used IV ketamine, IV forms of any drug are usually the fastest-acting and most powerful". It most often appears alongside Adderall, alcohol, AMPA receptors.

Reference entry: IV ketamine
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 19, 2021
Last seen: July 19, 2021

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Peer Review Request: Ketamine July 19, 2021

Adderall 1 shared issues
alcohol 1 shared issues
AMPA receptors 1 shared issues
amphetamine 1 shared issues
Bay Area 1 shared issues

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Peer Review Request: Ketamine

July 19, 2021 · Original source

The short version: Ketamine is a new and exciting depression treatment, which probably works by activating AMPA receptors and strengthening synaptic connections. It takes effect within hours and works about 2-3x as well as traditional antidepressants. Most people get it through heavily-regulated and expensive esketamine prescriptions, or through even-more-expensive IV ketamine clinics, but evidence suggests that getting it prescribed cheaply and conveniently from a compounding pharmacy is equally effective. A single dose of ketamine lasts between a few days and a few weeks, after which some people will find their depression comes back; long-term repeated dosing with ketamine anecdotally seems to work great, but hasn’t been formally tested for safety. Some people also use ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, which is a very different form of treatment and can have impressive long-term results, but which is less explored and more idiosyncratic for each person.

First, you can go to a ketamine clinic where an anaesthesiologist will inject you with IV ketamine. This has some real advantages: most of the studies have used IV ketamine, IV forms of any drug are usually the fastest-acting and most powerful, and this is the standard of care. It’s also expensive and annoying. A typical course would be six treatments over three weeks at $800 per treatment, for a total cost of $4800. Each session would take an hour or two, and require someone available to drive you back from the clinic afterwards. Insurance almost never covers this, and even if it works you may relapse after the three weeks and have to pay $4800 again. I appreciate the existence of these clinics but they’re not a realistic option for most patients.

In rats, 100 mg/kg of IV ketamine did not cause bladder inflammation, but 300 mg/kg does. Both of these are much higher than standard clinical doses, which usually range from about 0.5 – 3 mg/kg. This study did find that the lower dose caused interstitial nephritis, which as far as I know is not commonly a problem for humans.

Inline links: In rats

IV nutrition1 mentions across 1 issues

IV nutrition is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 06, 2021 and August 06, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "gastroschisis which required IV nutrition". It most often appears alongside American College of Clinical Pharmacy, ASPEN, BCH.

Reference entry: IV nutrition
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 06, 2021
Last seen: August 06, 2021

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Details Of The Infant Fish Oil Story August 06, 2021

American College of Clinical Pharmacy 1 shared issues
ASPEN 1 shared issues
BCH 1 shared issues
Boston Children’s Hospital 1 shared issues
Boston Children’s Hospital 1 shared issues

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Details Of The Infant Fish Oil Story

August 06, 2021 · Original source

In 2002, Boston Children’s Hospital needed to give IV nutrition to a kid with a soy allergy. The hospital only had soybean-based fluid, and tasked our hero Dr. Gura with finding a solution. She asked a bunch of experts and “put the question on various nutrition listserves”, and finally some nutritionist who attended European conferences mentioned that Europe had a fish-oil based fluid, Omegaven. If they could get permission to import Omegaven from Europe, they could maybe save this kid. They asked the FDA for permission, filled out the relevant forms, and (to its credit) the got approved within 48 hours. They were able to get an emergency shipment of Omegaven from Europe and the kid got better.

In 2004, the children’s hospital got an patient named Charlie, a newborn baby with a condition called gastroschisis which required IV nutrition. They gave him the nutritional fluids, he developed liver disease, and they were stuck - he would die if they took him off the IV, but he would also die if the liver disease continued. They were super out of options. So:

ivermectin conspiracies1 mentions across 1 issues

ivermectin conspiracies is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 15, 2023 and February 15, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "why ivermectin conspiracies took off". It most often appears alongside ACX, AI, Alexander.

Reference entry: ivermectin conspiracies
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: February 15, 2023
Last seen: February 15, 2023

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Trying Again On Fideism February 15, 2023

ACX 1 shared issues
AI 1 shared issues
Alexander 1 shared issues
Anthony Fauci 1 shared issues
Big Pharma 1 shared issues

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Trying Again On Fideism

February 15, 2023 · Original source

Eliezer Yudkowsky’s position is Let Them Debate College Students. I’m not a college student, but I’m not Anthony Fauci either, and I am known for blogging about extremely dignified ideas like the possibility that the terrible Harry Potter fanfiction My Immortal is secretly an alchemical allegory. I haven’t seen ivermectin advocates using “Scott takes this seriously enough to argue against it!” as an argument, and I have seen them getting angry about it and writing long responses trying to prove me wrong. Sometimes they have used me getting some points wrong as a positive argument, and I would be open to the argument that I failed in not arguing against it well enough that they couldn’t do that, but nobody has been making that argument, and if they did, then it would imply that people who are smarter than me should take over the job, which I endorse. III. I worry Scott Aaronson thinks I’m saying you shouldn’t trust the experts, and instead you should always think for yourself. I’m definitely not trying to say that. I’ve tried to be pretty clear that I think experts are right remarkably often, by some standards basically 100% of the time - I realize how crazy that sounds, and “by some standards” is doing a lot of the work there, but see Learning To Love Scientific Consensus for more. Bounded Distrust also helps explain what I mean here. I also try to be pretty clear that reasoning is extremely hard, it’s very easy to get everything wrong, and if you try to do it then a default option is to get everything wrong and humiliate yourself. I describe that happening to me here, and presumably it also happens to other people sometimes. What I do think is that “trust the experts” is an extremely exploitable heuristic, which leads everyone to put up a veneer of “being the experts” and demand that you trust them. I come back to this example again and again, but only because it’s so blatant: the New York Times ran an article saying that only 36% of economists supported school vouchers, with a strong implication that the profession was majority against. If you checked their sources, you would find that actually, it was 36% in favor, 19% against, 46% unsure or not responding. If you are too quick to seek epistemic closure because “you have to trust the experts”, you will be easy prey to people misrepresenting what they are saying. I come back to this example less often, because it could get me in trouble, but when people do formal anonymous surveys of IQ scientists, they find that most of them believe different races have different IQs and that a substantial portion of the difference is genetic. I don’t think most New York Times readers would identify this as the scientific consensus. So either the surveys - which are pretty official and published in peer-reviewed journals - have managed to compellingly misrepresent expert consensus, or the impressions people get from the media have, or “expert consensus” is extremely variable and complicated and can’t be reflected by a single number or position. And I genuinely think this is part of why ivermectin conspiracies took off in the first place. We say “trust science” and “trust experts”. But there were lots of studies that showed ivermectin worked - aren’t those science? And Pierre Kory MD, an specialist in severe respiratory illnesses who wrote a well-regarded textbook, supports it - isn’t he an expert? Isn’t it plausible that the science and the experts are right, and the media and the government and Big Pharma are wrong? This is part of what happens when people reify the mantras instead of using them as pointers to more complicated concepts like “reasoning is hard” and “here are the 28,491 rules you need to keep in mind when reading a scientific study.” IV. All of this still feels rambly and like it’s failing to connect. Instead, let me try describing exactly what I would advice I would give young people opening an Internet connection for the first time: You are not immune to conspiracy theories. You have probably developed a false sense of security by encountering many dumb conspiracy theories and feeling no temptation to believe them. These theories were designed to trap people very different from you; others will be aimed in your direction. The more certain you are of your own infallibility, the less aware you will be, and the worse your chances. The ones that get you won’t look like conspiracy theories to you (though they might to other people). When you run into conspiracy theories you don’t believe, feel free to ignore them. If you decide to engage, don’t mock them or feel superior. Think “there, but for the grace of God, go I.” Get a sense of what the arguments for the conspiracy theory look like - not from skeptics trying to mock them, but from the horse’s mouth - so you have a sense of what false arguments look like. Ask yourself what habits of mind it would have taken the people affected by the theory to successfully resist it. Ask yourself if you have those habits of mind. Yes? ARE YOU SURE? To a first approximation, trust experts over your own judgment. If people are trying to confuse you about who the experts are, then to a second approximation trust prestigious people and big institutions, including professors at top colleges, journalists at major newspapers, professional groups with names like the American ______ Association, and the government. You might ask: Don’t governments and other big institutions have biases? Won’t they sometimes be wrong or deceptive? And even if you’ve lucked into the one country and historical era where the government 100% tells the truth and the intellectuals have no biases, doesn’t someone need to keep the flame of suspicion alive so that it’s available to people in other, less fortunate countries and eras? The answer is: absolutely, yes, but also this is how conspiracy theories get you. They will claim that they are the special case where you need to take up the mantle of Galileo and Frederick Douglass and Jane Jacobs and all those people who stood up to the intellectual authorities and power structures of their own time. The whole point of “you are not immune to conspiracy theories” is that the evidence for them can sound convincing because something like it is sort of true. This is equally so for second-level claims like “prestigious institutions are fallible and biased”. Probably something like “make a principled precommitment never to disagree with prestigious institutions until you are at least 30 and have a graduate degree in at least one subject” would be good advice, but nobody would take that advice, and taking it too seriously might crush some kind of important human spirit, so I won’t assert this. But always have in the back of your mind that you live in a world where it’s sort of good advice. If you feel tempted to believe something that has red flags for being a conspiracy theory, at least keep track of the Inside vs. Outside View. Say “on the Inside View, this feels like the evidence is overwhelming; on the Outside View, it sounds like a classic conspiracy theory”. You don’t necessarily have to resolve this discomfort right away. You can walk around with an annoying knot in your beliefs, even if it’s not fun. Look for the strongest evidence against the idea. Keep in mind important possibilities like: Is it possible that everyone who disagrees with the idea is a bad mean cruel stupid person, but also, the idea really is false?

Ivermectin Jihad1 mentions across 1 issues

Ivermectin Jihad is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 17, 2021 and November 17, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Pierre Kory, spiritual leader of the Ivermectin Jihad". It most often appears alongside ACE-2 receptor, ACSH, Ahmed et al.

Reference entry: Ivermectin Jihad
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: November 17, 2021
Last seen: November 17, 2021

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Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted To Know November 17, 2021

ACE-2 receptor 1 shared issues
ACSH 1 shared issues
Ahmed et al 1 shared issues
Alexandros Marinos 1 shared issues
America 1 shared issues

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Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

November 17, 2021 · Original source

Source. Real data would follow something like a bell curve. This is going to require a social norm of always sharing data. Even better, journals should require the raw data before they publish anything, and should make it available on their website. People are going to fight hard against this, partly because it’s annoying and partly because of (imho exaggerated) patient privacy related concerns. Somebody’s going to try make some kind of gated thing where you have to prove you have a PhD and a “legitimate cause” before you can access the data, and that person should be fought tooth and nail (some of the “data detectives” who figured out the ivermectin study didn’t have advanced degrees). I want a world where “I did a study, but I can’t show you the data” should be taken as seriously as “I determined P = NP, but I can’t show you the proof.” The second reason I think this, aside from checking for fraud, is checking for mistakes. I have no proof this was involved in ivermectin in particular. But I’ve been surprised how often it comes up when I talk to scientists. Someone in their field got a shocking result, everyone looked over the study really hard and couldn’t find any methodological problems, there’s no evidence of fraud, so do you accept it? A lot of times instead I hear people say “I assume they made a coding error”. I believe them, because I have made a bunch of stupid errors. Sometimes you make the errors for me - an early draft of this post of mine stated that there was an strong positive effect of assortative mating on autism, but when I double-checked it was entirely due to some idiot who filled out the survey and claimed to have 99999 autistic children. In this very essay, I almost said that a set of ivermectin studies showed a positive result because I was reading the number for whether two lists were correlated rather than whether a paired-samples t-test on the lists was significant. I think lots of studies make these kinds of errors. But even if it’s only 1%, these will make up much more than 1% of published studies, and much more than 1% of important ground-breaking published studies, because correct studies can only prove true things, but false studies can prove arbitrarily interesting hypotheses (did you know there was an increase in the suicide rate on days that Donald Trump tweeted?!?) and those are the ones that will get published and become famous. So if the lesson of the original replication crisis was “read the methodology” and “read the preregistration document”, this year’s lesson is “read the raw data”. Which is a bit more of an ask. Especially since most studies don’t make it available. The Sociological Takeaway I’ve been thinking about this one a lot too. Ivermectin supporters were really wrong. I enjoy the idea of a cosmic joke where ivermectin sort of works in some senses in some areas. But the things people were claiming - that ivermectin has a 100% success rate, that you don’t need to take the vaccine because you can just take ivermectin instead, etc - have been untenable not just since the big negative trials came out this summer, but even by the standards of the early positive trials. Mahmud et al was big and positive and exciting, but it showed that ivermectin patients recovered in about 7 days on average instead of 9. I think the conventional wisdom - that the most extreme ivermectin supporters were mostly gullible rubes who were bamboozled by pseudoscience - was basically accurate. Mainstream medicine has reacted with slogans like “believe Science”. I don’t know if those kinds of slogans ever help, but they’re especially unhelpful here. A quick look at ivermectin supporters shows their problem is they believed Science too much. @jonno_bosch I work in hospitality so I need things to return to normal ASAP. I am using Ivermectin as a prophylactic. Hugely influenced by Carvallo trail and Chala trail which showed huge protection","username":"Bannisterious","name":"Andrew Bannister","profile_image_url":"","date":"Fri Feb 12 16:21:14 +0000 2021","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":0,"like_count":0,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM"> @mtskullcrusher @HereComeTheJud @therealjosexy @joeycadre @PeegeRiley @dcwickedestcity @blaireerskine Read Raad. Or Mahmud. Or ICON study from Florida. Or Mexico City hospitalizations study. Or Niaee. Or...\n\nOr just type \"ivermectin covid\" in Google Scholar and read.","username":"fatlas6","name":"fatlas","profile_image_url":"","date":"Thu Sep 02 21:34:59 +0000 2021","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":0,"like_count":1,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM"> They have a very reasonable-sounding belief, which is that if dozens of studies all say a drug works really well, then it probably works really well. When they see dozens of studies saying a drug works really well, and the elites saying “no don’t take it!”, their extremely natural conclusion is that it works really well but the elites are covering it up. Sometimes these people even have a specific theory for why elites are covering up ivermectin, like that pharma companies want you to use more expensive patented drugs instead. This theory is extremely plausible. Pharma companies are always trying to convince people to use expensive patented drugs instead of equally good generic alternatives. Ivermectin believers probably heard about this from the many, many good articles by responsible news outlets, discussing the many, many times pharma companies have tried to trick people into using more expensive patented medications. Like this ACSH article about Nexium. Or my article on esketamine. Given that dozens of studies said a drug worked, and elites continued to deny it worked, and there are well-known times where elites lie about drugs in order to make money, it was an incredibly reasonable inference that this was one of those times. If you have a lot of experience with pharma, you know who lies and who doesn’t, and you know what lies they’re willing to tell and which ones they shrink back from. As far as I know, no reputable scientist has ever come out and said ‘esketamine definitely works better than regular ketamine’. The regulatory system just heavily implied it. I claim that with ivermectin, even the people who don’t usually lie were saying it was ineffective, and they were saying it more directly and decisively than liars usually do. But most people can’t translate Pharma → English fluently enough to know where the space of “things people routinely lie about and nobody worries about it too much” ends. So they incredibly reasonably assume anything could be a lie. And if you don’t know which statements about pharmaceuticals are lies, “the one that has dozens of studies contradicting it” is a pretty good heuristic! If you tell these people to “believe Science”, you will just worsen the problem where they trust dozens of scientific studies done by scientists using the scientific method over the pronouncements of the CDC or whoever. So “believe experts”? That would have been better advice in this case. But the experts have beclowned themselves again and again throughout this pandemic, from the first stirrings of “anyone who worries about coronavirus reaching the US is dog-whistling anti-Chinese racism”, to the Surgeon-General tweeting “Don’t wear a face mask”, to government campaigns focusing entirely on hand-washing (HEPA filters? What are those?) Not only would a recommendation to trust experts be misleading, I don’t even think you could make it work. People would notice how often the experts were wrong, and your public awareness campaign would come to naught. But also: one of the data detectives who exposed some fraudulent ivermectin papers was a medical student, which puts him somewhere between pond scum and hookworms on the Medical Establishment Totem Pole. Some of the people whose studies he helped sink were distinguished Professors of Medicine and heads of Health Institutes. If anyone interprets “trust experts” as “mere medical students must not publicly challenge heads of Health Institutes”, then we’ve accidentally thrown the fundamental principle of science out with the bathwater. But Pierre Kory, spiritual leader of the Ivermectin Jihad, is a distinguished critical care doctor. What heuristic tells us “Medical students should be allowed to publicly challenge heads of Health Institutes” but not “Distinguished critical care doctors should be allowed to publicly challenge the CDC”? Then what about “believe statisticians”? I’ve never heard anyone propose this before, but re-centering the mystique of scientific-expertise in study-analyzers and study-aggregators rather than object-level scientists is…one way you could go, I guess. Statisticians admittedly sort of failed us here: the first several meta-analyses said ivermectin worked. But the statistical process - the idea that studies are raw materials, but it takes skill to turn them into the finished good of scientific knowledge - sort of comes out looking good. If we need to summarize our takeaway in a slogan of exactly two words, one of which is “trust”, you could do worse than this one. (am I secretly suggesting that we make rationality higher status? Maybe, although rationalists did no better here during the early phase of “looks promising so far” than anyone else, and it was researchers digging into the nitty-gritty of the data who really solved this.) Or maybe this is the wrong level on which to think about this. Maybe there isn’t and can’t be a simple heuristic you can teach everyone in school or via a PR campaign which will lead to them having making good health decisions in an adversarial information environment, without having any negative effects anywhere else. But you also don’t want people to make bad health decisions. So what do you do? The Political Takeaway All of this is complicated by the impression many people (including me) have, that ivermectin boosterism and vaccine denialism are closely linked. The ivermectin evidence is complicated. There’s room for doubt. I can maybe see room for doubt on some marginal vaccine-related issues like how seriously to take the occasional reports of myocarditis in teens. But the basic issue - that the vaccine works really well and is incredibly safe for adults - seems beyond question. Yet people keep questioning it. I think it’s important to address ivermectin support on its own terms - as a potentially plausible scientific theory in a debris field of confusing evidence, which should be debated to the usual standards of scientific debate. I’ve tried to do that above. But this picture wouldn’t be complete without acknowledging the overlap with vaccine denial - a segment of people who are completely crazy and wrong and who happen to have fixated on this mildly interesting question as opposed to some other one with even less evidence. I’ve been trying to figure out a model where ivermectin support and vaccine denialism both make visceral sense to me, and here’s what I’ve got: Imagine that in 2025, an alien invasion fleet reaches Earth. But it got hit by a supernova on the way, the spaceships are partly disabled, and they’re only able to conquer some out-of-the-way place - let’s say Australia. There’s a few cycles of conflict and cease-fire, a few cities get nuked, and finally we settle into an uneasy peace. Over the next few years, humanity grudgingly admits the invaders into the world community. They get a seat in the United Nations. We sort of cooperate with them on projects that are important to both sides, like stopping climate change. We still hate them, but only at the level of ordinary international rivalries, like USA/USSR. In 2035, the aliens announce that a quantum memetic plague from the Andromeda Sector has reached Earth. Billions of people will die unless we let them put an immunity-granting cybernetic implant in all humans’ brain. The aliens admit we haven’t always been friends, and honestly they would still like to conquer us someday. But this plague is an ancient enemy of all sentient beings, they dealt with it on their homeworld eons ago, and they want to help us out here. Humans apparently don’t have the ability to detect quantum memetic plagues, but mortality rates for over-65s do seem weirdly high this year, something like 10x worse than a normal flu season. Do you let the aliens put an implant in your brain, or not? If it helps, the aliens look like this. Surely anyone with a brain that size must know what they’re talking about, right? (source) Fine, you don’t have to decide immediately. The brain implants aren’t even ready yet. Some human scientists suggest wearing face masks in the interim. The aliens say no, that will never work, that’s not how you deal with quantum memetic plagues, if you do anything other than wait for the brain implants you’re anti-science idiots who are wasting precious time and will kill millions of people. Human nations try face masks anyway…and they clearly and conspicuously work. The aliens say whatever, we’re still the advanced spacefaring civilization here, maybe it works for humans but that’s not the point, the point is you’ve got to let us put implants in your brains. Some human scientists suggest reopening vital services. The aliens say no, millions will die, this is “mass human sacrifice”, humans apparently must care nothing about their families’ lives. The humans try reopening anyway, and…it goes kind of okay? Maybe the death rate goes up 10% to 20% or so, hard to say? The aliens say whatever, maybe their calculations were off by a few orders of magnitude, the point is, you have to let us put implants in your brain or you’ll all die. Then some human scientists suggest vaccinating against the plague. The aliens say this is idiotic, vaccines originally come from cowpox, even the word “vaccine” comes from Latin vaccus meaning “cow”, are you saying you want cow medicine instead of actual brain implants which alien Science has proven will work? They make lots of cartoons displaying humans who want vaccines as having cow heads, or rolling around in cow poop. Meanwhile, the first few dozen studies show vaccines work great. Many top human leaders, including war heroes from the struggle against the aliens, get vaccines and are seen going out in public, looking healthy and happy. The aliens say that human science is hopelessly flawed because of complicated statistical concepts that inferior life forms like us don’t even have words for. You need to ignore all the studies and meta-analyses showing that vaccines definitely work, and let the aliens give you brain implants instead. So do you let the aliens put an implant in your brain, or not? Obviously you think long and hard before doing this. And obviously this is an extended metaphor for vaccine denialism. So what’s the difference between the metaphor (where you’re presumably anti-implant) and the real world (where you’re presumably pro-vaccine?) For me, it’s a combination of: The aliens are hostile, so I don’t trust them no matter how smart they are

Inline links: Source, this post, this ACSH article about Nexium, my article on esketamine, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!1UIV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F598d7d6c-de95-4b94-b13a-3c8a452b0409.jp2, source

ivermectin-effects-are-from-worms hypothesis1 mentions across 1 issues

ivermectin-effects-are-from-worms hypothesis is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 28, 2021 and November 28, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "one of the researchers who came up with the ivermectin-effects-are-from-worms hypothesis". It most often appears alongside Abba Eban, ACX, Albert Einstein.

Reference entry: ivermectin-effects-are-from-worms hypothesis
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: November 28, 2021
Last seen: November 28, 2021

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Open Thread 200 November 28, 2021

Abba Eban 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
Albert Einstein 1 shared issues
Alexandros Marinos 1 shared issues
anti-androgens 1 shared issues

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Open Thread 200

November 28, 2021 · Original source

4: Dr. Bitterman, one of the researchers who came up with the ivermectin-effects-are-from-worms hypothesis, is defending his idea from some of the concerns you guys brought up in the comments. For example, in response to a comment that hyperinfection syndrome is rare, he writes:

Inline links: you guys brought up in the comments, writes

Ivies1 mentions across 1 issues

Ivies is a recurring concept 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 "There’s a pretty strong movement for the Ivies to discriminate less against Asians now". It most often appears alongside 417th Marquess of Cornwallshireshire, ACX, ACX.

Reference entry: Ivies
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: December 09, 2022
Last seen: December 09, 2022

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https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/secrets-of-the-great-families

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Highlights From The Comments On Bobos In Paradise December 09, 2022

417th Marquess of Cornwallshireshire 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
America 1 shared issues
Andre Malraux 1 shared issues

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Book Review: First Sixth Of Bobos In Paradise

December 09, 2022 · Original source

1. Comments Doubting The Book’s Thesis 2. Comments From People Who Seem To Know A Lot About Ivy League Admissions 3. Comments About Whether A Hereditary Aristocracy Might In Fact Be Good 4. Other Interesting Comments 5. Tangents That I Find Tedious, But Other People Apparently Really Want To Debate

SuperbOwl has an even more extensive gripe about the “monocausal explanation” aspect. 2. Comments From People Who Seem To Know A Lot About Ivy League Admissions Erusian writes:

Inline links: an even more extensive gripe about the “monocausal explanation” aspect, writes

Legacy admissions are roughly a third of Harvard students. Any story that starts with meritocratic dominance in the 1950-60s has to grapple with the fact that legacies remained a huge presence in the Ivy League. This is nearly fatal to this entire section's thesis.

Ivy admissions1 mentions across 1 issues

Ivy admissions is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 01, 2022 and December 01, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Conant/Pusey’s fateful decision to open up Ivy admissions". It most often appears alongside Amalgamated Bank, Andover, anti-Semitism.

Reference entry: Ivy admissions
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: December 01, 2022
Last seen: December 01, 2022

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Book Review: First Sixth Of Bobos In Paradise December 01, 2022

Amalgamated Bank 1 shared issues
Andover 1 shared issues
anti-Semitism 1 shared issues
Atlantic 1 shared issues
barberpole theory of fashion 1 shared issues

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December 01, 2022 · Original source

Fuzzy trad ideas of “values” mattering. Brooks already hints at this in his discussion of the crime / illegitimacy boom. I was previously suspicious of these explanations because it was hard to come up with a locus for “values”. Trends this big couldn’t be explained by individual values, but they didn’t quite seem like national values either - at least not the kind that could be budged with public awareness campaigns and feel-good support-our-values Disney movies. Brooks suggests the ruling class as the repository of values, and then lets values change suddenly because of a change in ruling classes. One final note: Brooks’ neologism for the new meritocrats, “Bobos”, stood for bourgeois bohemians. It was cute but never caught on. I would say its closest modern equivalent is “bluechecks” (this is a a vast improvement over the earlier term “Cathedral”, since it doesn’t imply having read Moldbug). Alas, Elon Musk ruined it; I can only hope lightning strikes a second time and we get some equally descriptive moniker. And speaking of Elon: every true silicon-blooded techie dreams of a world with no ruling class. A world where DeFi algorithms replace bankers, prediction markets replace “thought leaders”, and something something Khan Academy handwave bootcamp something something replaces the Ivy League. This is a beautiful utopian vision, which means it will never happen. More realistically, might techies replace traditional meritocrats as the ruling class? I think this was plausible around 2015, then fizzled out. Partly it fizzled because the New York Times, eternal mouthpiece of the establishment, noticed the situation and played defense effectively. Partly it failed because the meritocrats sort of took over Silicon Valley, and even though they don't own everything yet, they do own enough to prevent it from organizing into a real counterelite. And partly it failed because the specter of Trump convinced lots of different elites to close ranks around the bluechecks as heroic defenders of democracy. I'm currently bearish on the whole project. But if Brooks is right, Conant/Pusey’s fateful (and at the time unheralded) decision to open up Ivy admissions showed just how fragile aristocracies can be. Maybe some opportunity will arise where it is least expected. Related: David Brooks reconsiders Bobos 20 years later (Atlantic)

Inline links: and played defense effectively, https://amzn.to/3Fg8bTA, David Brooks reconsiders Bobos 20 years later

Ivy admissions policy1 mentions across 1 issues

Ivy admissions policy is a recurring concept 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 "The reforming of Ivy admissions policy". It most often appears alongside 417th Marquess of Cornwallshireshire, ACX, ACX.

Reference entry: Ivy admissions policy
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: December 09, 2022
Last seen: December 09, 2022

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Highlights From The Comments On Bobos In Paradise December 09, 2022

417th Marquess of Cornwallshireshire 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
America 1 shared issues
Andre Malraux 1 shared issues

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