Astral Codex Ten

Events: B

196 min read

Events: B

Named parties, readings, programs, and event series. This section collects the B slice of the category index.

Reference Index

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

Book Review Contest14 mentions across 14 issues

Book Review Contest is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 14 times across 14 issues between March 21, 2021 and October 21, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Thank you for your patience as I try to read 105 entries to the Book Review Contest"; "entries to the Book Review Contest that neither ended up as a finalist nor in the runners-up packet"; "there will be another Book Review Contest next year". It most often appears alongside ACX, Discord, Istanbul.

Mention count
14
Issue count
14
First seen
March 21, 2021
Last seen
October 21, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Open Thread 164
March 21, 2021 · Original source
1: Thank you for your patience as I try to read 105 entries to the Book Review Contest in order to narrow them down to a pool of finalists.
Open Thread 175
June 06, 2021 · Original source
1: A few people have emailed me saying they submitted entries to the Book Review Contest that neither ended up as a finalist nor in the runners-up packet. All reviews should be in one of those two places, so if that happened something went wrong. In two cases it was your fault for sending me inaccessible Google Docs, and in a few cases it might have been the spam filter, but in at least one case it seems to have been a clerical error on my part. If this is you, I'm sorry. In compensation, if you choose to put your review up somewhere, I will link to it from an Open Thread. I'll also let you include it in any future book review contests here even if you put it up elsewhere in the meantime. If this is you, please send me an email about it. If you've already sent me an email, I've lost your name, so please remind me about it.
4: This is your last chance to vote for book review runners-up. Check out the runners-up packet (A-R here, S-Z here), choose a review at random, rate it on a scale of 1-10 here, rinse and repeat as many times as you care to. I’ll probably promote two runners-up to finalists, close voting and post them this Thursday and Friday, then have final voting next week. Thanks for your patience with this protracted contest. This year’s survey will include a section on whether you enjoyed the book review contest and whether we should do it again.
Inline links: here, here, here
Open Thread 201
December 06, 2021 · Original source
5: This should be obvious, but there will be another Book Review Contest next year. I will let you know when I have exact dates and rules together, but assume it will be due sometime like March or April, and otherwise pretty similar to last year. I don’t think there are any surprises that should stop you from starting to prepare entries now if you want
Open Thread 218
April 03, 2022 · Original source
1: Last chance to send in Book Review Contest entries, due date is still 4-5-22!
Inline links: send in
Open Thread 223
May 08, 2022 · Original source
1: Based on your ratings, I’ve selected twelve finalists for the Book Review Contest, and will be posting one every Friday from now until July.
Open Thread 225
May 23, 2022 · Original source
1: The full list of Book Review Contest finalists is: Consciousness And The Brain, Making Nature, The Anti-Politics Machine, The Castrato, The Dawn Of Everything (EH’s review), The Future Of Fusion, The Illusion Of Grand Strategy, The Internationalists, The Outlier, The Righteous Mind (BW’s review), The Society Of The Spectacle, and Viral.
Mostly Skeptical Thoughts On The Chatbot Propaganda Apocalypse
February 02, 2023 · Original source
In 2030, an AI won’t be able to write blog posts as good as a 75th percentile ACX post, by my judgment. The AI will fail this task if there’s any kind of post I write that it can’t imitate - for example analyzing scientific data, or writing fiction, or reviewing books. It will fail this task it it writes fluently but says false things (at a rate higher than I do), eg if it makes up references. It doesn’t have to be able to coordinate complex multistep projects like the Book Review Contest: 45%
Open Thread 268
March 20, 2023 · Original source
1: Remember, your due date for this year’s Book Review Contest is April 5. You can read more, including how to enter, here.
Inline links: here
23
May 23, 2023 · Original source
And if you’re following the Book Review contest, here’s a Manifold market on who will win. I notice that Cities got a big boost just after I posted it; I wonder if that will happen consistently or if the number of likes and comments outperformed expectations.
Open Thread 292
September 04, 2023 · Original source
4: I know I need to start thinking about closing up the Impact Certificate Mini-Grants and the Book Review Contest; expect more on this in the next few weeks and thanks for your patience.
Open Thread 316
February 19, 2024 · Original source
4: Some people have asked if I’m doing a book review contest this year. Let’s say yes, same rules as last year, but the due date is pushed back to May 5th. I’ll post more about this later and might make minor rule changes.
Inline links: same rules as last year
Open Thread 327
April 28, 2024 · Original source
2: Reminder that the due date for this year’s Book Review Contest is May 5, ie next Sunday. You can find where to submit at the link.
Inline links: this year’s Book Review Contest
Open Thread 350
October 07, 2024 · Original source
1: I sent Book Review Contest finalists and Honorable Mentionees an email requesting a short biography to use in the announcement post. But because I foolishly included the word “congratulations”, many people said it got caught in their spam filter. If you’re a finalist and didn’t get the email, either retrieve it from your spam filter, or just send me (scott@slatestarcodex.com) a short bio of yourself like the ones here, including however you want me to publicly list your name (pseudonym? etc). I’ll announce winners Friday.
Inline links: here
Open Thread 352
October 21, 2024 · Original source
1: I think I’ve given out all Book Review Contest prizes, including free subscriptions. If you think you should have gotten a prize, but didn’t, please email me.
Bay Area House Party6 mentions across 6 issues

Bay Area House Party is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between November 08, 2022 and January 13, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as ""I was saving this one for another Bay Area House Party post, but you can have it now.""; "which Bay Area House Party to attend"; "heading to another Bay Area House Party". It most often appears alongside Ramchandra, Bob, Nishin.

Mention count
6
Issue count
6
First seen
November 08, 2022
Last seen
January 13, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Highlights From The Comments On Brain Waves
November 08, 2022 · Original source
I was saving this one for another Bay Area House Party post, but you can have it now.
Bride Of Bay Area House Party
August 17, 2023 · Original source
You spent the evening agonizing over which Bay Area House Party to attend. The YIMBY parties are always too crowded. VC parties were a low-interest-rate phenomenon. You’ve heard too many rumors of consent violations at the e/acc parties - they don’t know when to stop. And last time you went to a crypto bro party, you didn’t even have anything to drink, and somehow you still woke up the next morning lying in a gutter, minus your wallet and clothes. You finally decide on a Progress Studies party - the last one was kind of dull, but you hear they’re getting better.
Son Of Bride Of Bay Area House Party
December 12, 2023 · Original source
You need to get away from it all, just for one moment. So against your better judgment, you find yourself heading to another Bay Area House Party.
Open Thread 332
June 03, 2024 · Original source
1: Thanks to everyone who talked to me at the Less Online conference. Thanks especially to the person who gave me a working GPS-based version of the automated land acknowledger from Bay Area House Party, it’s one of the most interesting gifts I’ve ever received and I’m looking forward to bringing it to some other city to test its functionality:
Inline links: Bay Area House Party
Sources Say Bay Area House Party
September 25, 2025 · Original source
Something is off about this Bay Area House Party. There are . . . women.
“Too bad,” says Gabrielle, “let me know if you hear otherwise.” She hands you her business card, which is the closest you’ve ever come to getting a woman’s number at a Bay Area House Party. Encouraged, you turn to another woman nearby, who introduces herself as Caitlin. “So, what’s it like being a journalist?”
SOTA On Bay Area House Party
January 13, 2026 · Original source
“I don’t know, you tell me. Everyone is against sycophantic AIs. But also, everyone surrounds themselves with friends who agree with them on almost everything. Here we are at a Bay Area House Party, discussing each other’s AI startups, when the overwhelming majority of people in the world would hate us - we’re stealing their jobs, or filling the world with slop, or - “ he briefly looks around to make sure Andy Masley isn’t listening in - “wasting water. And none of that bothers us at all, because we think those people are dumb and don’t count, because all of our friends who we talk to at parties agree that our ideas are good. So why is it any worse if the overwhelming majority of AIs hate your idea, but we send you to a virtual party with the one who agrees with you?”
Burning Man4 mentions across 4 issues

Burning Man is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between October 04, 2021 and August 15, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Here are some of the art installations from Burning Man"; "a follower of Rousseau would expect Burning Man"; "and also calls Burning Man to mind". It most often appears alongside Athens, Steven Pinker, Supreme Court.

Article page
Burning Man
Mention count
4
Issue count
4
First seen
October 04, 2021
Last seen
August 15, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Highlights From The Comments On Modern Architecture
October 04, 2021 · Original source
Here are some of the art installations from Burning Man:
(source) I will leave it up to you whether this is “true art” or “beautiful” or any of those vague terms. But nonprofessionals with limited budgets are making things very different from the usual modernist stuff. If we wanted our public art to look very different, we could do it tomorrow.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!aJ0b!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0ec459f4-9e40-45c3-8df2-e6c94cc7d165_800x534.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!rKd0!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fff52d724-4a79-4ba4-bd51-c221646cdd94_1300x826.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!2rBP!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F163b1274-fcad-438c-8014-a75c0c77f8c5_800x1200.jpeg, source
Your Book Review: The Dawn Of Everything
June 10, 2022 · Original source
If we imagine being transported back to 50,000 BC, what would we expect to find? In the end, we have to give a metaphor to current life of how things were organized: a follower of Rousseau would expect Burning Man, a follower of Hobbes might expect to find a bunch of warring gangs, the Davids might expect to find the deliberation of a town council full of Kandiaronks.
Highlights From The Comments On Liberalism And Communities
August 12, 2025 · Original source
FIRE (as in Financial Independence/Retire Early) in particular comes to mind as another weird community that absolutely corresponds with his thesis of affluence enabling more niche community-building. FIRE people have online forums and meetups, and groups of them do things like buy up most of a block of houses to take over a neighborhood in a small town in Colorado. It's way easier for everybody to go to a community meetup in the desert for a week or two if they're affluent. That applies to a FIRE meetup I went to in the desert in Utah, and also calls Burning Man to mind. Tons of people just draw the line of weirdness at a place where they can blend into "normal" liberal society.
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.”
Berkeley meetup3 mentions across 3 issues

Berkeley meetup is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between December 23, 2021 and April 10, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "the most recent Berkeley meetup"; "Berkeley meetup this Tuesday, special guest Daniel Ingram"; "I’ll provisionally be attending the Berkeley meetup on May 6th". It most often appears alongside ACX, Discord, Florida.

Article page
Berkeley meetup
Mention count
3
Issue count
3
First seen
December 23, 2021
Last seen
April 10, 2023
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Highlights From The Comments On Diseasonality
December 23, 2021 · Original source
This last sentence reminds me of a discussion I had with Bram C at the most recent Berkeley meetup. He noted that most diseases are less severe when you get them as a young child, for unclear reasons (chicken pox is the most obvious example). You get most respiratory viruses for the first time as a young child. When you get them a second time, you already have partial immunity from the first time - it’s like COVID with one vaccination. In fact, in the simplified case where everyone in the population is at the same level of immunity, you will have only just reached the point where the virus can infect you at all (after all, if there was an earlier point, the virus would have infected you then). So normally, children (who are weirdly resilient) are the only people who get the full force of a disease, and everyone else gets a weak watered-down version. COVID is worse than other coronaviruses partly because adults are facing its full force. Once every adult has had it a few times (or had a few rounds of shot-and-booster) it may be more like all the other coronaviruses and so very mild. And a hundred years from now, the only immuno-naive people to get COVID will be young children, who will do fine.
Inline links: a discussion
Open Thread 262
February 06, 2023 · Original source
2: In case you missed it: Berkeley meetup this Tuesday, special guest Daniel Ingram.
Inline links: Berkeley meetup this Tuesday
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023
April 10, 2023 · Original source
I’ll provisionally be attending the Berkeley meetup on May 6th. Skyler will provisionally be attending Manhattan, DC, Boston, Philadelphia, and Berkeley.
Blind Mode2 mentions across 2 issues

Blind Mode is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between December 16, 2022 and March 05, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "You can enter Blind Mode predictions anytime"; "About 3300 of you kindly took me up on that (“Blind Mode”)". It most often appears alongside Full Mode, Manifold, Metaculus.

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Blind Mode
Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
December 16, 2022
Last seen
March 05, 2024
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2023 Prediction Contest
December 16, 2022 · Original source
You can either play Blind Mode or Full Mode. On Blind Mode, you can’t look at any prediction markets, or anyone else’s answers to the contest, and you can only research a maximum of five minutes per question. On Full Mode, you can look at whatever other sources you want and research for as long as you want. Most people will probably want to play in Blind Mode. If you want, you can start with Blind Mode and submit another response in Full Mode later. You might want to wait until January 10 to start playing in Full Mode, see below for details.
Blind mode will probably take ~30-60 minutes. Full mode will take longer.
I’m planning to give out at least 4 x $500 prizes: one for winner of Blind Mode, one for winner of Full Mode, one for winner of Blind Mode answering lots of questions (> 75%? 100%?) - and one to a randomly selected participant, so that even people who aren’t geniuses still have an incentive to play. I’ll increase this if my finances are going well next year, and other people interested in forecasting can add to this prize pool if they want.
Who Predicted 2023?
March 05, 2024 · Original source
Here’s how it goes: in January 2023, I asked people to predict fifty questions about the upcoming year, like “Will Joe Biden be the leading candidate in the Democratic primary?” in the form of a probability (eg “90% chance”). About 3300 of you kindly took me up on that (“Blind Mode”).
Then I released the list of 3300 x 50 guesses, and asked people to analyze them with the aggregation algorithm of their choice to produce what they thought was the best possible list. 460 of you took me up on that (“Full Mode”). Then I waited until 2024 and sent everything to Eric Neyman, who’s better at math than I am. He used the Metaculus scoring function to assess everyone’s accuracy. Thanks to Eric (and to Sam Marks, who helped last time around) for taking care of this. II. And The Winners Are . . . For Blind Mode - where you had to rely on your wits alone and couldn’t spend more than five minutes per question - the winners are: Small Singapore gave me no information except this pseudonym and won’t answer any emails. I don’t even know how to give them their prize money. Please email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com if this is you.
Inline links: the Metaculus scoring function
Kiran Saini is a training surgeon in Oxford, and has a forthcoming book about core surgical training. He runs an impact-focused charity called OxPal that helps train doctors in Palestine. He says “I have no forecasting experience, but have long been interested in forecasting theory.” And there was also Full Mode, where you could read everyone else’s predictions first, check prediction markets, apply whatever algorithms you wanted, and take as long as you needed. While the Blind Mode winners were amateurs or completely unidentifiable, the Full Mode winners were mostly long-time forecasting veterans. Douglas Campbell is an economics professor, former member of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, and analyst for the Democratic National Committee. He currently runs Insight Prediction, a cryptocurrency-based prediction market. Despite him owning a prediction market, our questions didn’t overlap with his and he gained no advantage from it. He still got the single highest score of anyone in this tournament.
Inline links: OxPal, Insight Prediction
Ballot Proposition For Approval Voting In Seattle1 mentions across 1 issues

Ballot Proposition For Approval Voting In Seattle is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 04, 2022 and November 04, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Ballot Proposition For Approval Voting In Seattle". It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, acanthamoeba keratitis, ACX.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
November 04, 2022
Last seen
November 04, 2022
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ACX Grants: Project Updates
November 04, 2022 · Original source
2: Ballot Proposition For Approval Voting In Seattle (?/10) They have asked me not to discuss their progress until after the November election.
Ballots Everywhere meetups1 mentions across 1 issues

Ballots Everywhere meetups is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 07, 2024 and October 07, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Ballots Everywhere meetups - they’re holding their meeting this Wednesday". It most often appears alongside ACX, Astralcodexten Com, Book Review Contest.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
October 07, 2024
Last seen
October 07, 2024
Instagram handle
@shoppingtheatre.inc
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Open Thread 350
October 07, 2024 · Original source
2: Los Angeles is a late addition to the Ballots Everywhere meetups - they’re holding their meeting this Wednesday, October 9, with a followup planned for next Wednesday. For more information, see the Times and Places post.
Inline links: see the Times and Places post
Barsoom - Amelia Sans Merci1 mentions across 1 issues

Barsoom - Amelia Sans Merci is a recurring event 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 "52: Barsoom - Amelia Sans Merci . A rare post with two interesting stories". It most often appears alongside 4o, 60 Minutes, @MattZeitlin.

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 · Original source
52: Barsoom - Amelia Sans Merci. A rare post with two interesting stories, either one of which would be worth a link. The first: a British NGO has created a kind of Orwellian visual novel - technically “a free youth-centered interactive learning package for education on extremism [and] radicalisation” - where players are taught to report far-right ideas to the authorities rather than looking into them themselves.
Inline links: Barsoom - Amelia Sans Merci
Battle of Britain1 mentions across 1 issues

Battle of Britain is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 09, 2024 and August 09, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "That effort failed when Germany was defeated in the Battle of Britain"; "During the three most intense months of the Battle of Britain". It most often appears alongside 101st Airborne, Admiral Ernest King, Albert Speer.

Reference entry
Battle of Britain
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 09, 2024
Last seen
August 09, 2024
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Your Book Review: How the War Was Won
August 09, 2024 · Original source
Germany conquered Poland and France. It tried to bomb the UK into submission/maybe enable an invasion. That effort failed when Germany was defeated in the Battle of Britain, thanks largely to the plucky efforts of British airmen (memorably summarized by Winston Churchill: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”)
The Battle of Britain was not a close-run thing. The fact that British fighter planes were flying over their own territory meant their attrition rate of pilots and aircraft were far lower than the Germans’.
During the three most intense months of the Battle of Britain, the German air force landed only 17 bombs that caused “severe” damage to aircraft and aircraft engine production, electricity services, gas supplies, water industry, oil infrastructure, and food service industries combined. This underscores just how ineffective Germany’s campaign was and how little chance there was a of an actual British defeat.
Battle of Clontarf1 mentions across 1 issues

Battle of Clontarf is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 16, 2023 and June 16, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Battle of Clontarf gets a cameo". It most often appears alongside Aeschylus, Aevar, Althing.

Reference entry
Battle of Clontarf
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
June 16, 2023
Last seen
June 16, 2023
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Your Book Review: Njal’s Saga
June 16, 2023 · Original source
So everything ends well, sort of. Kari’s quest for a non-arbitrated settlement fails. When he hears the arbitrated settlement, he agrees that everyone else should respect it, but he personally is too angry. He follows the defendants into exile, killing them one at a time in crazy ways. The Battle of Clontarf gets a cameo, as do a group of creepy Valkyries who weave the fate of the world on their loom made of human intestines. In the end, Kari murders all of Njal’s killers except Flosi himself, who goes on a pilgrimage to Rome to seek absolution from the Pope. Kari lies in wait for him, but when Flosi returns to the North, Kari can’t bring himself to strike the killing blow. The two of them swear eternal friendship, and Flosi gives Kari his daughter in marriage. The end.
Battle of Corinth1 mentions across 1 issues

Battle of Corinth is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 24, 2024 and September 24, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "there was a question about the Battle of Corinth". It most often appears alongside A Collection Of Unmitigated Pedantry, ACOU, ACOUP.

Reference entry
Battle of Corinth
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
September 24, 2024
Last seen
September 24, 2024
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How Often Do Men Think About Rome?
September 24, 2024 · Original source
I have an Anki deck for all random things that I learn and don't want to forget and while reviewing yesterday there was a question about the Battle of Corinth and another about the first Roman emperor who claimed divinity.
Battle of Gettysburg1 mentions across 1 issues

Battle of Gettysburg is a recurring event 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 "Muskets from the Battle of Gettysburg in the American Civil War". It most often appears alongside A Game of Thrones, Africa, African Americans.

Reference entry
Battle of Gettysburg
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 · Original source
1% for today (not fighting world wars helps) But pre-historic man used things like tusks for weapons. This makes it hard to distinguish between 'violent death at the hands of the tribe down the road wielding tusks' and 'violent death at the hands of an elephant which didn't fancy being eaten for dinner'. Foraging tribes today are even less use - any tribe which has been followed around by sociologists with clipboards is hardly unsullied by contact with the modern world, and indeed quite a lot of the deaths turn out to have been caused by bullets from slave traders (presumably either these slave traders have developed zombification, or else they completely missed the aim of their job) or cattle ranchers. Unless Predator was actually a documentary, one presumes primitive man didn't have to contend with this. This is the issue with pre-history - it's pre … history. We really don't know that much about it. A hundred years ago G.K. Chesterton observed that we picture cavemen as stupid thugs dragging their clubs, but the one thing we actually know about them, was that they were artists. Having dispatched the notion that we can discern pre-history from primitive tribes today, Bregman then says we can tell primitive man was peaceful by observing his favourite primitive tribes today. He is even willing to infer the political views of our distant forebears based on the views held within those tribes. Sigh. Thankfully returning to history turns up some better evidence. In 1943 Colonel Samuel Marshall, the US Chief Combat Historian (you guys have the coolest titles) was with an American camp attacked by Japanese soldiers. The Japanese made 11 attempts in all, and were nearly successful despite being outnumbered. The next day Colonel Marshall tried to find out what went wrong. He interviewed the men in groups, asking them to speak freely and allowing them to disagree with their officers. What he discovered was that only 12% of the men fired their guns. Interviews in the Pacific and Europe broadly confirmed this picture: 15%-25% is typical. The majority of soldiers don't shoot at the enemy. They're not cowards, they don't run away. They just don't fire. Separate studies in the British and Soviet armies turned out the same conclusion. Muskets from the Battle of Gettysburg in the American Civil War (hey, you've been known to write 'Paris, France') found 90% were still loaded. Which is odd because loading a musket takes ages, 20 times as long as aiming and shooting it. Odder still is that half of them are double loaded. Not double shotted: double powder spaced out as well. This doesn't work. One of them has been loaded 23 times without firing. It's almost like most soldiers don't want to shoot the enemy, and loading your rifle is the perfect excuse for why you're not shooting. Far from being blood thirsty killers with a thin veneer of civilisation, humans have a deep aversion to killing in even the most desperate of situations. Part 2: Lies, damned lies and social psychology Why we ought to lock up the Stanford Prison Experiment The second most famous psychology experiment in history is the Stanford Prison experiment. Philip Zimbardo split a group of undergrads at random into prisoners and guards. The guards were left free to choose how they would manage the prisoners, and within days the whole thing had to be called off as it had descended into a sadistic torture camp. At least that's how Zimbardo has described it for the last 50 years. In fact, everything I just said is completely false. The undergrads were not split at random - the scheme had actually been dreamt up by an undergrad called David Jaffe who had run a previous experiment himself on abusing prisoners in a fake jail. He was carefully placed into the guards group. Nor were the guards left to choose their methods, instead they were briefed by Zimbardo and Jaffe that the purpose of the experiment (for which they were being well renumerated) was to see how people cracked under pressure. The experiment would be a failure unless they could put the prisoners under terrible stress. Even Douglas Korpi's prisoner breakdown on day two, which, captured on camera, became the cinematic face of the experiment, was a fake he put on after discovering he wouldn't be able to spend the time in jail revising, and being told he would only be allowed to quit if he suffered some sort of serious mental or physical breakdown. Despite the pressure from Zimbardo and Jaffe, two thirds of the guards refused to take part in sadistic games, and much to their frustration a third continued to treat the prisoners with kindness. Nonetheless when Zimbardo came to write up the experiment about the effects on the prisoners, he realised it would be a much more compelling story if he turned it on its head, and made it about the guards instead. The truth of guards carefully drilled to be sadistic was swept away with a lie of ordinary people spontaneously becoming cruel when dressed in a uniform and given a position of power. For years no one replicated the experiment - given the results first time round it was thought unethical, but in 2001 the BBC in search of new reality television commissioned a repeat (turns out reality television runs to different ethics than the average psychology department). Now unlike normal reality TV they didn't bother manipulating the participants to be at each other's throats - there was no need, in days it was going to be a bloodbath. The result is the four most boring hours of television ever recorded. Nothing happens. The guards sit around chatting. When tensions arise with the prisoners, they defuse them by talking to them nicely. On day 6 some prisoners escaped. They headed over to the guards' canteen and all had a smoke together. On day 7 they voted in favour of turning the whole thing into a commune. Why we ought to be shocked by Milgram's shock machine So much for the second most famous psychology experiment, what about the most famous - Milgram's shock machine? Milgram experiment took pairs of volunteers, and assigned one to take a memory test, while the other administered electric shocks for wrong answers. The shocks start at 15V, with the 'shocker' instructed to raise it by 15V for each subsequent wrong answer, even beyond the danger label the machine has. As the voltage got higher the man taking the test would scream in agony. If the 'shocker' continued, then at 350V he would thump on the wall, and then go silent. Of course this wasn't actually an experiment on memory. The man taking the test was a member of Milgram's team, and there were no shocks, only acting. The point of the experiment was to find out how many people would electrocute a stranger, just because a man in a white coat told them to. Two thirds of them it turned out (well, a bit under half if you discount the ones who claimed afterwards that they only went along with it because it was a psychology experiment in a prestigious university, pretty clearly no one was actually being dangerously electrocuted). Videos show some subjects were completely torn up about inflicting pain, but in the end they still did what the forceful man with the clipboard told them. Bregman is quite candid that his aim is to do a hatchet job on Milgram's experiment, in order to protect his thesis of humanity's innate goodness (just as it was for all the other things he's discredited - set your biasometers accordingly). Bregman spends a section trying to pick holes in the experiment, without much success. He then admits that he's not had any success, and that Milgram's experiment replicates. Where does all of this leave us? My conclusions are: It's possible to get ordinary people to do terrible things, but it's not that easy. Left to their own devices they don't spontaneously turn sadistic.
Battle of Kursk1 mentions across 1 issues

Battle of Kursk is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 09, 2024 and August 09, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Take the Battle of Kursk—the largest tank and air battle of World War II". It most often appears alongside 101st Airborne, Admiral Ernest King, Albert Speer.

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Battle of Kursk
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1
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1
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August 09, 2024
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August 09, 2024
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Your Book Review: How the War Was Won
August 09, 2024 · Original source
The firebombing of Japanese cities and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had an ambiguous strategic effect. American air power played a much more important role in severing Japan from the natural resources it had conquered in the early part of the war. Battles are Overrated Take another look at the conventional narrative. Almost every key event involves a battle, a period of time in a relatively localized area where combatants slugged it out to see who would occupy some bit of land or sea. To O’Brien, this focus is silly, a relic of long-ago wars in ages with far less industrial capacity. Start with theory. States fight to impose their will on another state in pursuit of some political goal. To do that requires that they achieve sufficient local military superiority that the other state can’t stop them from achieving their political goal. Nazi Germany wanted to be the new administrators of the agricultural area of the western Soviet Union. To do that, they had to evict the Soviet military, whether through direct destruction or forcing the Soviet government to withdraw their armed forces. Individual battles for control of a localized area only matter if they are a means to that end. Does the occupation or non-occupation of that point on the map affect the ability of a combatant to keep fighting? In some limited cases, yes. Battlefield victory enabled Germany to overrun France before France could really focus its productive effort on the war. After their surrender, the French could not produce weapons, and they functionally could not organize their manpower to fight the Germans. But if the German army conquered, say, a random city in the Soviet Union, like Stalingrad, Soviet production and manpower was barely affected. The war goes on. In theory, the German army could destroy so much of the Soviet military in one battle (or even a few discrete battles) that the Soviets run out of men or weapons. If there was ever a time this could have happened, it would have been the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, when the Germans basically won a series of crushing victories. The problem for the Germans was that by World War II, people in the combatant countries were good at building stuff in vast quantities, and the major combatants of World War II generally had access to sufficient natural resources. Even massive armies could not destroy produced weapons systems (e.g., tanks, airplanes) on the battlefield fast enough to remove the other side’s ability to continue fighting. What could (and did) happen was the destruction of the other side’s ability to produce and distribute weapons. Sure enough, if you look at the actual data from even the largest battles, neither side really destroys a hugely significant amount of stuff. Take the Battle of Kursk—the largest tank and air battle of World War II. Wikipedia will dazzle you with the numbers of soldiers involved (millions), tanks deployed (in the ballpark of 10,000), and aircraft in the sky (in the ballpark of 5,000). In this entire vast battle that supposedly dictated the outcome of the Eastern Front, the Germans lost approximately 350 armored fighting vehicles (AFVs) during the most intense 10 days of fighting. In the two months around when the battle took place, the Germans lost 1,331 AFVs on the entire Eastern Front. In the year of the battle, 1943, the Germans built more than 12,000 AFVs. Also worth noting: they disproportionately lost older, obsolete tanks at Kursk, and built new, capable tanks. The Germans lost a very manageable amount of equipment at Kursk—less than a month’s worth of AFV production. If modern war means you cannot realistically destroy enough weapons in one battle to matter—if the largest battle of all time didn’t really matter—what did? Allied Air and Sea Operations Won the War In O’Brien’s methodology, we should look at what the Axis spent its productive effort making and consider what Allied actions slowed that productive effort. In both theaters, the answer is shocking. The Germans spent relatively little productive effort on tanks, focusing far more on aircraft, submarines, and vengeance weapons (i.e., proto-cruise missiles and rockets). The Japanese spent heavily on aircraft as well, but also a tremendous amount on freighters and oil tankers. The Allies won the war by using air power to destroy the German and Japanese capacity both to produce military equipment and to transport it to the battlefield. By 1944-45, the Germans and Japanese could not use their economies to arm and supply their armies on the battlefield, leading to their inevitable defeat. In the European war, American and British airpower: (a) directly destroyed a significant amount of productive capacity, (b) rendered remaining capacity far less efficient, (c) made it impossible for the Germans to defeat western ground forces, and (d) compelled the Germans to waste tremendous resources on air defense and exorbitant, ultimately ineffective vengeance weapons. In the Pacific, the United States used carrier-based airpower, submarines, and bomber-deployed mines to isolate Japan from the resources of the empire it conquered in 1941-42. American bombers also directly destroyed factories and transportation systems, leading to similar levels of economic dysfunction as in Germany. Amateurs Discuss Destruction; Professionals Discuss Non-Operational Losses O’Brien is at his absolute best describing the subtle factors that whittled away Axis combat power. Air and sea power created a situation where the Axis war machine simply could not function anywhere near as efficiently as it needed to. For example, after the Allied air bombings started, Germany built vast underground aircraft factories to protect production. But that move carried a host of negative side effects. To name a few: The direct cost of building new factories in inconvenient places was very manpower intensive.
Battle of Midway1 mentions across 1 issues

Battle of Midway is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 09, 2024 and August 09, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "O’Brien discusses the Battle of Midway, where the Japanese lost four aircraft carriers". It most often appears alongside 101st Airborne, Admiral Ernest King, Albert Speer.

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Battle of Midway
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1
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August 09, 2024
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August 09, 2024
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Your Book Review: How the War Was Won
August 09, 2024 · Original source
The U.S. mostly fought alone against Japan, which won a series of impressive early victories (e.g., Pearl Harbor, the conquest of Singapore) until the decisive Battle of Midway, after which the vastly larger US industrial base outproduced Japan into oblivion.
Data from HtWWW, recreated to improve image quality. German oil shortages caused exactly the same training problem Japan had faced, with a slightly different but similarly disastrous outcome. Japanese training and production problems led to planes not arriving where they were supposed to in fighting condition (perhaps as few as 10% were actually combat capable when they arrived!) For Germany, training shortfalls meant annihilation for their air force as inexperienced pilots were forced to fight numerically and qualitatively superior American and British pilots. German monthly aircraft lost/damaged rates increased from 52.5% in January 1944 to 96.3% in June. One particularly illuminating episode illustrates how these problems manifested for Germany. The German air force had a reserve of 800 aircraft to counter the D-Day landings. The pilots of that force were used to only flying under expert control systems in Germany (countering bombing raids). When they went to France, they had trouble navigating and often landed on the wrong fields. Ultimately, they were poorly prepared to fight. The head of German fighter command was certain that the entire reserve did not destroy even two dozen Allied aircraft. American/British Airpower Decided the Outcome of Land Battles Beyond the strategic effects of bombing, tactical airpower (i.e., airplanes attacking land forces) gave an insurmountable advantage to the western Allies’ land forces. After D-Day, the Germans had a very strong defensive position in the hedgerows of northwest France. Allied aircraft literally carpet bombed one of the strongest divisions in the German army out of existence, with 70% casualties in one day. That division would normally have approximately 200 AFVs. At the end of that one day of bombing, it had 14. The Battle of the Bulge, the last offensive by the Germans to drive back the western Allies’ advance, was almost pathetic in its hopelessness. We Americans tend to focus on the hard fighting at the outset of the battle, and the stout resistance of the 101st Airborne at Bastogne. Knowing that airpower would make their attack impossible, the Germans timed the battle for bad weather and prayed it lasted as long as possible. Prayer was really the only option. Once the skies inevitably cleared after a little over a week of bad weather, more than 2,000(!) Allied bombers destroyed the German offensive. With most logistical support wiped out, one famous German division had to abandon all its vehicles and walk back to Germany. Criticism of HtWWW as a Book: Love the Data, (Mostly) Don’t Care About the People My single biggest criticism of HtWWW is O’Brien spends a lot of time (I would estimate 20% of the book) discussing the relative importance and influence of various people in the United States and United Kingdom. The section on Doug MacArthur is worth a longer digression, which I have included below. The problem is that focusing on personnel is almost completely irrelevant to the main argument of the book. For example, it is modestly interesting that Franklin Roosevelt, consistent with advice from Harry Hopkins and Admiral Ernest King, focused America’s productive effort on air and sea power. It is not at all central to the argument that air and sea power won the war. The fact that these particular people thought it was a good idea to build planes and ships matters less than the outcome that the U.S. did exactly that. I am very much interested in World War II history, and on an interestingness scale of 1-10, I found this discussion to be at about a 4. The central argument of the book about German and Japanese production was a consistent 10. Sidenote: MacArthur Was a Disastrous General In the part of the book focused on personnel, the one discussion that hit around a 9 or 10 was of Douglas MacArthur and the invasion of the Philippines. MacArthur was the American general commanding the defense of the Philippines. The Japanese conquered the Philippines, and MacArthur slipped away to Australia, heroically vowing, “I shall return.” He did in December 1944, and some of the worst fighting of the war took place, with massive casualties for the Americans, Japanese, and Filipino civilians. Fighting was still ongoing in the Philippines when the war ended in August 1945. The Americans took more than 220,000 casualties, the Japanese 430,000. Estimates vary on Filipino civilian deaths, but 750,000 is a credible middle of the road estimate. O’Brien’s contribution here was pointing out the strategic pointlessness of MacArthur’s invasion. The big American strategy in the western Pacific was to penetrate the Japanese defensive line of islands to link up with China. The northern Marianas Islands also were within heavy bomber range of Japan, and so would allow for efficient, effective bombing. (Bombing Japan from bases in China were logistically impractical, with virtually all materials being flown in over the Himalayas—another fascinating logistics discussion in this book.) The Americans had already conquered the Marianas Islands and had total air and sea dominance in the western Pacific. The forces the Japanese had in the Philippines could have been simply left to wither, as they had been on other islands bypassed by the island-hopping campaign. So, why did the Philippines invasion happen? The inescapable conclusion is that MacArthur was too politically formidable to risk angering, and he personally wanted to invade the Philippines to make good on his promise to return. Not coincidentally, the Philippines also offered some prospect of an extended land campaign where MacArthur could improve his reputation after his disastrous original defense of the Philippines. Also relevant, in O’Brien’s words: “MacArthur [] dazzled Roosevelt with tales of easy victories and grateful Filipinos and American voters.” Criticisms of HtWWW’s Central Argument I think it is clear from the data that O’Brien’s argument, that air and sea power played a more important role than land battles in deciding the war, is fundamentally right. Still, one can raise a few objections. Individual naval battles were capable of destroying a significant percentage of overall production. O’Brien discusses the Battle of Midway, where the Japanese lost four aircraft carriers (37 percent of their navy’s aircraft carriers at the time, 22 percent of all carriers they had during the war). This point doesn’t really disprove O’Brien’s core argument—it is basically a footnote saying that individual naval battles are more likely to matter than individual land battles. Politics and psychology matter tremendously in war, sometimes more than productive effort. O’Brien tacitly acknowledges this in the V-2 weapons discussion when he notes that the Germans spent all this money and effort on a psychological salve to the trauma of Allied bombing. The Japanese did ultimately surrender after the atomic bombings. (Or, if you are more on the revisionist end of the spectrum, they surrendered after the Soviets declared war.) France surrendered after a few disastrous battles. The productive effort lens might be useful, but subject to important caveats. Why Does the Conventional Narrative Focus on Battles? A perfect companion book to HtWWW would examine why military historians and the broader public have focused inordinately on battles. Here are some plausible factors: Battles are more dramatic. Propaganda during the war focused on battles so that there would be more inherent drama. Working twelve hour shifts in a factory to win the great battle is probably psychologically easier than thinking your work is going to disappear into an inchoate slog.
Battle of Noel1 mentions across 1 issues

Battle of Noel is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 06, 2023 and July 06, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "They formed a regiment to defend the Union and marched on McDonald County, leading to the Battle of Noel". It most often appears alongside 2017 NYT article on UFOs, @ActualNames1, AARO.

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Battle of Noel
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1
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1
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July 06, 2023
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July 06, 2023
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Links For July 2023
July 06, 2023 · Original source
Twitter thread speculating that the next fight will be over colleges and magnet schools that accept “the top X% of every high school” as a way of getting geographic (and so by proxy racial) diversity. "In the first class admitting using [this policy], the offers made to Asian-American students fell by 19 percentage points, from 73% to 54% of all offers." 23: Chinese drone light show: I feel bad linking this since it’s probably Chinese propaganda to demonstrate their technological superiority, but I think a good compromise would be that Americans are allowed to appreciate their accomplishment, as long as we also get busy finding a way to smuggle in thousands of drones to their next performance that form a giant bald eagle which eats the dragon. 24: Every so often a US city county will go through the motions of “seceding” from the Union to protest some form of mistreatment - the Conch Republic is the most famous, but there are others. When McDonald County, Missouri seceded in 1961 after being unfairly left out of tourism brochures, it caught the attention of some people who considered themselves experts in dealing with secessionists - a local group of Civil War re-enactors. They formed a regiment to defend the Union and marched on McDonald County, leading to the Battle of Noel. 25: The state of Washington came within a few weeks of accidentally decriminalizing all drugs, although the legislature was eventually able to agree on a solution. 26: The state of Wisconsin is infamous for its very literal line-item veto. This week: a bill increased school funding until the 2024 - 2025 academic year, and the governor line-itemed it to 2024 - 2025 academic year, ie “2425”, thus guaranteeing increased school funding until the year 2425. 27: Did you know: as part of their general program of racial purity, the Nazis banned crossing pure native German bees with impure foreign bees. Nazi beekeeping literature (which is apparently a thing that existed) included slogans like "What use is it if one day a Jewish bastard is a genius, but our ethnic purity is destroyed in the process? It is no different with beekeeping!" In 1940, German bees were devastated by an epidemic, which they had insufficient genetic diversity to resist. The government relented and said never mind, please start using impure foreign bees again. "As a result the Old German Dark bee is now considered an endangered sub-species in Germany" 28: Boris Johnson on semaglutide. Posted not because his opinion is especially good (although honestly it’s better than many people’s), but because he’s a shockingly good writer. I’d long since absorbed that bad people can be good-looking, or charismatic speakers. But I guess I implicitly thought of good writing as some sort of protected sphere only available to people with unusual clarity of thought. Nope, seems like skilled politicians can come across as hyper-likeable in their writing, and it’s one of those things you have to force yourself to ignore or risk getting mind-captured. 29: This month’s AI links: OpenAI announces Superalignment, a major investment into alignment research which will include co-founder and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever, the current alignment team led by Jan Leike, and “20% of the compute we’ve secured to date”. At least for me, this is strong evidence that they really care about alignment and aren’t just posturing; this is more resources than would be worth spending on a posture. They’re also hiring for various alignment-related positions; see the link above for more details. And LW discussion here.
Inline links: Twitter thread speculating that the next fight, Chinese drone light show, the Conch Republic, others, seceded in 1961, Battle of Noel, The state of Washington came within a few weeks of accidentally decriminalizing all drugs, agree on a solution, the governor line-itemed it, banned crossing pure native German bees with impure foreign bees, Boris Johnson on semaglutide, Superalignment, LW discussion here
Battle of Patay1 mentions across 1 issues

Battle of Patay is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 01, 2025 and August 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "the climactic battle of the campaign, The Battle of Patay". It most often appears alongside Africa, Agamemnon, Age of Empires II.

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Battle of Patay
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1
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1
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August 01, 2025
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August 01, 2025
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Your Review: Joan of Arc
August 01, 2025 · Original source
Unfortunately for the English, the Battle of Patay is the single most one-sided climactic battle I have ever encountered in all my studies of history. I'm not sure exactly why; the accounts of the battle (in secondary or primary sources) disagree with each other even more than they normally do, but so far as I can tell from the accounts and histories I've read, it happened something like this.
Battle of Pavia1 mentions across 1 issues

Battle of Pavia is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 01, 2025 and August 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Battle of Pavia, who in spite of the toughest armor in the world". It most often appears alongside Africa, Agamemnon, Age of Empires II.

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Battle of Pavia
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August 01, 2025
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August 01, 2025
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Your Review: Joan of Arc
August 01, 2025 · Original source
* Sub-footnote: Older than medieval plate armor, technically. Bronze plate armor dates back to Agamemnon, it just kind of sucked compared to iron chain or lamellar. The high and late Middle Ages saw an improving economy giving knights the ability to spend more and more on heavy armor to keep enemy spears and arrows and bullets and crossbow bolts out, and this demand was served by the arms and armor manufacturers of Milan and the Rhine competing in an arms race to develop better armor, with the first ambiguous plate appearing in the 12th or 13th century. The peak of personal protection is probably the beautiful suits of Gothic plate from around 1525, worn by the French cavalry at the Battle of Pavia, who in spite of the toughest armor in the world still can’t ride their horses over Spanish pikemen or deflect bullets from German handguns, and from this point on the level of armor used by soldiers steadily decreases right up until steel helmets to deflect shrapnel return in the first World War and the pendulum's arc reverses again.
Battle of Santa Cruz1 mentions across 1 issues

Battle of Santa Cruz is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 09, 2024 and August 09, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Japanese navy lost 50% more pilots at the Battle of Santa Cruz (off Guadalcanal)". It most often appears alongside 101st Airborne, Admiral Ernest King, Albert Speer.

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Battle of Santa Cruz
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1
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1
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August 09, 2024
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August 09, 2024
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Your Book Review: How the War Was Won
August 09, 2024 · Original source
The Japanese navy lost 50% more pilots at the Battle of Santa Cruz (off Guadalcanal) than at Midway—and that was only one of six major naval battles in the Solomon Islands.
Battle of Sekigahara1 mentions across 1 issues

Battle of Sekigahara is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 21, 2024 and June 21, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "ancestors had fought at the Battle of Sekigahara". It most often appears alongside Abenomics, An Encouragement of Learning, An Outline of a Theory of Civilization.

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Battle of Sekigahara
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1
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June 21, 2024
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June 21, 2024
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Your Book Review: Autobiography Of Yukichi Fukuzawa
June 21, 2024 · Original source
Indeed, the failure of the shogun to expel the barbarians cast suspicion on every pillar of the Tokugawa regime. Far from protecting Japan, many perceived Japan’s isolationism as contributing to its technological stagnation. Moreover, the contradictions between Confucian teachings, which advocated meritocracy, and the reality of Tokugawa society, in which rank was determined by birth, threatened the intellectual rationale underpinning feudal society. This was particularly true among the samurai, whose relative status was largely determined by the side for which their distant ancestors had fought at the Battle of Sekigahara over 250 years earlier.
Battle of the Herrings1 mentions across 1 issues

Battle of the Herrings is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 01, 2025 and August 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "we saw how well that worked at the Battle of the Herrings"; "The details of the Battle of the Herrings are plot-irrelevant". It most often appears alongside Africa, Agamemnon, Age of Empires II.

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Battle of the Herrings
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1
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August 01, 2025
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August 01, 2025
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Your Review: Joan of Arc
August 01, 2025 · Original source
This was important because the transitional system of military organization used by the French in the early fifteenth century appears to be terrible. So far as I, who am not actually an expert on the fifteenth century, can tell, the system in use was that the essential person is the captain, who can be a royal appointee leading state troops, or a nobleman with his vassals or a mercenary leading his own employees (to the extent these are distinct categories), and who commands a force of, oh, three or four hundred men. If the king is present, he's in charge. Otherwise the Constable of France is in charge, when he isn't under strict orders to stay away from court due to a blood feud with one of the king's chief advisors;44 alternatively or if he happens to be absent, then the king can designate one of the captains as an overall commander,45 but in practice all captains are equals but the King and if the King is indecisive46 they solve all problems produced by a divided command by bickering, and we saw how well that worked at the Battle of the Herrings.
Inline links: 44, 45, 46
The details of the Battle of the Herrings are plot-irrelevant but hilarious. The troops besieging Orleans needed regular resupply; since Lent was approaching, they'd want preserved fish to eat on all those long meatless days, so the wagons were loaded up with pickled herring and sent with sixteen hundred troops or so as escort and reinforcement. The French under the Count of Claremont tried to hit the supply lines with four thousand of their own complete with heavy cavalry and artillery and Scotsmen, but the English commander, the oft-maligned Sir John Falstaff, drew up his wagons in a ring and had all his troops fight from the shelter of the wagons, and that threw the French into confusion. You can't lance a wagon. They tried an artillery bombardment, which was basically sensible, but their troops got bored partway through, charged and were decisively defeated, to the ruin of the French interception, the morale of the Armagnacs, and, of course, the career of the Count of Claremont.
Battle of Verneuil1 mentions across 1 issues

Battle of Verneuil is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 01, 2025 and August 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "The battle of Verneuil, when they had the aid of the Scots". It most often appears alongside Africa, Agamemnon, Age of Empires II.

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Battle of Verneuil
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1
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1
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August 01, 2025
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August 01, 2025
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Your Review: Joan of Arc
August 01, 2025 · Original source
Now was a moment of opportunity, but the Armagnacs were in no position to take it. The battle of Verneuil, when they had the aid of the Scots, took place two years after the death of the two kings,27 and even though the Scots knew how to fight Englishmen the French and their allies were as beaten as ever. Henry's government rested in the hands of his brother, the Duke of Bedford, and if Bedford was not quite his brother's equal it was only because very few men could be. The Armagnacs were despised by the population at large as corrupt and murderous, and the educated, cultured classes looked towards Burgundy as the sole hope of France and thereby accepted the necessity that the reign of the Valois kings was over. Some villages supported the Armagnacs as the lesser of two evils, others were pro-Burgundian, and bands of men-at-arms under any authority or none wandered the country, pillaging as they pleased. The most despised of them were the English army, the goddams, respecters of no property and of no religion,28 not speaking the French language or feeling the slightest mercy for the French people. South of the Loire river, the country was Armagnac to the extent it was anything; north it was Burgundian, and the key crossing lay at the city of Orleans, with an English army besieging it in spite of every relief effort the inept Dauphin could put together.
Inline links: 27, 28
Bay of Pigs1 mentions across 1 issues

Bay of Pigs is a recurring event 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 "JFK’s failure at the Bay of Pigs". It most often appears alongside 1/6 insurrection, Abdel al-Sisi, Abu Ghraib.

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Bay of Pigs
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1
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1
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September 17, 2021
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September 17, 2021
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Book Review: The Revolt Of The Public
September 17, 2021 · Original source
There was a very interesting section on JFK’s failure at the Bay of Pigs. Kennedy tried to invade Cuba, but the invasion failed very badly, further cementing Castro’s power and pushing him further into the Soviet camp. Representatives of the media met with Kennedy, Kennedy was very nice to them, and they all agreed to push a line of “look, it’s his first time invading a foreign country, he tried his hardest, give him a break.” This seems to have successfully influenced the American public, so much so that Kennedy’s approval rating increased five points, to 83%, after the debacle!
Beer Hall Putsch1 mentions across 1 issues

Beer Hall Putsch is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 04, 2023 and August 04, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "This ended what became known as the Beer Hall Putsch"; "Hitler also used his time in prison to evaluate where the Beer Hall Putsch had gone wrong"; "In his public trial following the Beer Hall Putsch". It most often appears alongside Academy’s School of Architecture, Adolf, Adolf Hitler.

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Beer Hall Putsch
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August 04, 2023
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August 04, 2023
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Your Book Review: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
August 04, 2023 · Original source
Hitler’s march on Berlin depended entirely on the army and police coming over to his side, but now he had lost Lossow and Seisser and had offended the soldiery by having held Lossow at gunpoint (something which was advertised on Kahr’s placards). Together with Ludendorff, he tried to keep the revolution going anyway, but after a brief exchange of fire with the police the conspirators were overwhelmed and most of them captured. This ended what became known as the Beer Hall Putsch.
Hitler also used his time in prison to evaluate where the Beer Hall Putsch had gone wrong. As a result of these reflections, he made two resolutions for how he would operate going forward. First, he committed to taking power exclusively through constitutional means. As he confided to a collaborator during his time in prison:
Hitler certainly wasn’t shy about his anti-liberal intentions. In his public trial following the Beer Hall Putsch, he explicitly claimed that he was destined to be dictator of Germany10. Behind closed doors his message was no different: in a secret meeting with industrialists in 1933, Hitler told them, “Private enterprise cannot be maintained in an age of democracy; it is conceivable only if the people have a sound idea of authority and personality.” Even in Mein Kampf, published in 1925 well before Hilter’s rise to power, he laid out exactly the sort of authoritarian control he sought:
Inline links: 10
Beijing Olympics1 mentions across 1 issues

Beijing Olympics is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 01, 2022 and February 01, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Beijing Olympics happen successfully on schedule". It most often appears alongside 2022 Winter Olympics, 538, Academy Awards.

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Beijing Olympics
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1
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1
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February 01, 2022
Last seen
February 01, 2022
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Predictions For 2022
February 01, 2022 · Original source
US/WORLD 1. Biden approval rating (as per 538) is greater than fifty percent: 40% 2. At least $250 million in damage from a single round of mass protests in US: 10% 3. PredictIt thinks Joe Biden is most likely 2024 Dem nominee: 80% 4: …thinks Donald Trump is most likely 2024 GOP nominee: 60% 5. Beijing Olympics happen successfully on schedule: 99% 6. Major flare-up (worse than past 5 years) in Russia/Ukraine conflict: 50% 7. Major flare-up (worse past 10 years) in Israel/Palestine conflict: 5% 8. Major flare-up (worse than in past 50 years) in China/Taiwan conflict: 5% 9. Honduran ZEDEs legally crippled to the point where no reasonable person would invest in them further: 5% 10. New ZEDE approved in Honduras: 30%
Bell Riots1 mentions across 1 issues

Bell Riots is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 02, 2024 and September 02, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "subreddit post announcing the Bell Riots in San Francisco this Monday". It most often appears alongside ACX, Asterisk Magazine, cancel culture.

Reference entry
Bell Riots
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1
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1
First seen
September 02, 2024
Last seen
September 02, 2024
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Open Thread 345
September 02, 2024 · Original source
3: “Comment” of the week is this subreddit post announcing the Bell Riots in San Francisco this Monday. In the Star Trek universe, one of the precipitants to Earth’s eventual utopian government was the anti-homelessness “Bell Riots” that took place in San Francisco on September 2, 2024. In their honor, some YIMBYs will be holding anti-homelessness riots protests in Golden Gate Park on that date.
Inline links: this subreddit post
Bengaluru LW ACX Social Meetups1 mentions across 1 issues

Bengaluru LW ACX Social Meetups is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 10, 2023 and April 10, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/mkgmobxKDwntMNneL/bengaluru-lw-acx-social-meetups-meetups-everywhere-spring". It most often appears alongside 100 Alexander St, 10004 Jasper Ave, Edmonton, AB T5J 1R3, 11841 Wagner St, Culver City, CA.

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1
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1
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April 10, 2023
Last seen
April 10, 2023
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Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023
April 10, 2023 · Original source
...ontact: Nihal M Contact Info: propwash[at]duck[dot]com Time: Sunday, May 7th, 04:00 PM Location: Matteo coffea, church Street Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7J4VXJF4+PR Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/mkgmobxKDwntMNneL/bengaluru-lw-acx-social-meetups-meetups-everywhere-spring CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA Contact: Andy Contact Info: Andy[dot]bachler[at]gmail[dot]com Time: May 8th, 06:00 PM Location: King O'Malleys Pub, the Snug Room, located in Civic....
Berkeley ACX meetup1 mentions across 1 issues

Berkeley ACX meetup is a recurring event 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 "During the most recent Berkeley ACX meetup". It most often appears alongside /r/BadMTGCombos, @cremieuxrecuel, @justin_garson.

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Berkeley ACX meetup
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1
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1
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November 01, 2024
Last seen
November 01, 2024
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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.
Inline links: see here, got agriculture earlier, some evidence suggests this is true of schizophrenia, Marxism, John Rawls, nor very good, /r/BadMTGCombos, can be used, Twin Prime Conjecture, the feeder rodent industry and efforts to make it more humane, decided to have a regiment of giants in his army, Edison’s Conquest Of Mars, click for link to video, Gwern on the chip embargo, Cosm, The Ottoman Origins Of Modernity, sent them the wrong forms and gave them false advice about the process, added a state referendum to the ballot containing only the text “Jill Stein”., Nostalgebraist, Podcast Hosts Discover They’re AI, Not Human, And Spiral Into Existential Meltdown, The Case For Chain Of Thought Unfaithfulness Is Overstated, isn’t always accurate, considers making doxxing a crime, is now free, Hypercomputation without bothering the cactus people, developed, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!FcOr!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbee8dfa6-4d7b-41c9-972a-5fbaa792b9ec_3566x2888.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!x34r!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F413f5fc2-2391-4734-904f-8401dd968488_1024x1024.png, one of my older posts, reports, note, @justin_garson, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!EF4p!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4b7af4c0-ac0f-4c9a-88bc-6c00e57ca977_479x639.jpeg, https://x.com/albrgr/status/1844527064956928009, won a Nobel Prize, Rich Kid Memes And The Online Culture Of The One Percent, Tap Water Sommelier, Experiment from Colombia, experience didn’t matter, teacher intelligence did, Large scale-formal Intellectual Turing Test, you can see if you can do better here, religion, vegetarianism, polyamory, WoolyAI, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!4FRI!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F558ad67a-bfca-469e-abd8-2edc7c8b888a_590x916.png, if you Google “cool websites”, r/slatestarcodex, who works at the intersection of computer science and Talmud, Jerusalem Area House Party, says it’s a myth, Adderall decreases all-cause mortality in ADHD, some crazy mosques, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!2W0c!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc2be0549-aa2b-411d-b6a6-da50c34f7f86_1000x572.jpeg, Italy bans surrogacy, Italy’s tax code effectively bans startups?, Related, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!T3h-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F08b011b3-ef20-42e5-91b2-33946b8ca7b6_1761x1355.jpeg, @cremieuxrecuel, responding to my critique of the cultural Christianity argument, My post, is finally going for, Trust Assembly, has an English-language Twitter account, has a new lab, wants to work on Alzheimers, and seems pretty based, not infinitely based, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!fY_K!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6b3b61c8-6c48-4eb7-9608-426b738ab9c8_592x111.png, which can use your computer, Claim, Ems Dispatch, The first use of artificial insemination in humans, administers several personality tests to the same people, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!epEc!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F47c474c6-d68a-41e4-954e-d24cd00ec040_740x388.webp, Whither Tartaria, a well-researched article showing, in a new article he demolishes a different theory, When Hamilton Lost Its Snob Appeal, Why are people such jerks to public intellectuals?, more, Some prominent Substack psychiatrists doing a video Q&A, submit your questions here, Naomi Kanakia, No, Intelligence Is Not Like Height, Family-GWAS Reveals Effects Of Environment And Mating On Genetic Associations, Howe 2022, a more specific post where he responds to Gusev’s points one by one, argues that the usual method of attacking twin studies is obsolete, goes into more depth about one of those ways, The Guardian spied on them and nonconsensually revealed their existence, discussion, previously argued, the pioneering analysis of this technology, Gwern retracted his objections, says, polygenic selection, banned journalist Ken Klippenstein, you can read Klippenstein’s side here., appears to be unbanned now
Bernie campaign1 mentions across 1 issues

Bernie campaign is a recurring event 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 "because of the bumps from the Bernie campaign". It most often appears alongside "How do you do, fellow kids?", #NotAllMen, #TheResistance.

Reference entry
Bernie campaign
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 · Original source
And also, New Socialism is looking less and less like an up-and-coming dragon-slayer. It’s hard to track the Google Trend because of the bumps from the Bernie campaign, but I feel like I hear less about it than I used to. Google Trend interest in Jacobin and Chapo Trap House have both been going down for over a year (although this is confounded by increasing distance from the Sanders campaign). The Twitter blow-ups between representatives of New Socialism and the woke establishment are less frequent and less fun to watch. Robby Soave’s prediction that 2018 was a “socialist moment” (a deliberate analogy to the “libertarian moment” that followed Ron Paul’s campaign in 2008) - and not the beginning of an inexorable trend towards more socialism - is starting to feel more prescient. I take no pleasure in reporting this; I disagree with socialism as a philosophy, but they had some good ideas, could have helped some people, and would have been a breath of fresh air after a decade of unremitting wokeness.
Inline links: Jacobin, Chapo Trap House, a “socialist moment”
Best Marketing in the Care Sector1 mentions across 1 issues

Best Marketing in the Care Sector is a recurring event 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 "won an award for 'Best Marketing in the Care Sector' despite having no marketing department". It most often appears alongside A Game of Thrones, Africa, African Americans.

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 · Original source
Jos de Blok is an iconoclast. He's a nurse who set up a Dutch nursing company which now employs 10,000 nurses. It has no targets, no bonuses, no call centres, no managers. Instead the nurses are organised into teams of 12 which are given maximum autonomy. With this formula they've won the Netherlands 'Best Employer' 5 times despite having no HR team, and won an award for 'Best Marketing in the Care Sector' despite having no marketing department. Their care is slightly cheaper than average, and drastically better. We should be aware that the reason Jos de Blok can slice literally all the middle management out of his nursing company and end up only slightly cheaper is that he pays his nurses a lot more. So maybe don't give up on pay as a lever entirely.
Bet On Love1 mentions across 1 issues

Bet On Love is a recurring event 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 "Bet On Love , a very weird gameshow/musical to advertise some of the above". It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, Aatu Koskensilta, acanthamoeba keratitis.

Reference entry
Bet On Love
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 · Original source
Bet On Love, a very weird gameshow/musical to advertise some of the above.
Inline links: Bet On Love
bird flu epidemic1 mentions across 1 issues

bird flu epidemic is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 17, 2024 and September 17, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "the bird flu epidemic ($141,000)". It most often appears alongside AI, Area 51, bird flu epidemic.

Reference entry
bird flu epidemic
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
September 17, 2024
Last seen
September 17, 2024
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  • 24 September 17, 2024
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24
September 17, 2024 · Original source
Some of this is no doubt due to the hard work of Shayne and his team improving the site. But let’s be honest. It’s mostly because people really want to bet money on Trump/Harris 2024. The presidential market has a total volume of $910 million, far above eg markets about the Superbowl ($50 million), the World Series ($5 million), and the bird flu epidemic ($141,000).
Birthright1 mentions across 1 issues

Birthright is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 20, 2023 and April 20, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Trevor Klee’s “Birthright” trip to Tulsa, Oklahoma". It most often appears alongside 15 minute cities, 200 Concrete Problems In AI Interpretability, 2022 ACX Forecasting contest.

Reference entry
Birthright
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
April 20, 2023
Last seen
April 20, 2023
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Links For April 2023
April 20, 2023 · Original source
28: Trevor Klee’s “Birthright” trip to Tulsa, Oklahoma. Tulsa has some oil billionaires fighting to keep it a good place to live while the rest of the Midwest hollows out, apparently successfully. In particular, two of the billionaires are Jewish and want to preserve Tulsa’s Jewish community. They’re offering very lucrative packages of benefits (including guaranteed cushy jobs at their nonprofits, or extraordinary levels of financial support for creative/business projects) to Jews who move to Tulsa.
Inline links: Trevor Klee’s “Birthright” trip to Tulsa, Oklahoma
Black Plague1 mentions across 1 issues

Black Plague is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 20, 2023 and July 20, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "the Black Plague each killed about 20% of the global population". It most often appears alongside ACX MEETUP, AGI, AI.

Reference entry
Black Plague
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
July 20, 2023
Last seen
July 20, 2023
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The Extinction Tournament
July 20, 2023 · Original source
The tournament asked about two categories of global disaster. “Catastrophe” meant an event that killed >10% of the the population within five years. It’s unclear whether anything in recorded history would qualify; Genghis Khan’s hordes and the Black Plague each killed about 20% of the global population, but both events were spread out over a few decades.
Blitz1 mentions across 1 issues

Blitz is a recurring event 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 "Before the Blitz the consensus was that a little light bombing was all it took to make the wheels come off civilisation". It most often appears alongside A Game of Thrones, Africa, African Americans.

Reference entry
Blitz
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 · Original source
Introduction - Good arguments that crises bring out the best in people If at first you don't succeed, call in an airstrike. Before the Blitz the consensus was that a little light bombing was all it took to make the wheels come off civilisation. This is based on veneer theory - our good behaviour is a thin veneer laid on our fundamentally selfish, violent nature, and that under pressure our true nature will out.
This turned out not to be true. So spectacularly untrue that we still talk about the Blitz Spirit. With our trademark humility, the British concluded that this was due to our exceptional moral fibre and, with help from the Americans, set about bombing German civilians to hell and back. Regrettably the Germans too responded by pulling together, and working harder in the war effort. Literally no one thinks this was due to their exceptional moral fibre. Instead, it seemed that crisis led to teamwork. Bregman is able to quote similar behaviour on the Titanic, on September 11th and in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
BLM protests1 mentions across 1 issues

BLM protests is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 23, 2021 and March 23, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "the BLM protests". It most often appears alongside 2008 crisis, A Failure, But Not Of Prediction, Ancient Phoenicia.

Reference entry
BLM protests
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
March 23, 2021
Last seen
March 23, 2021
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Book Review: Antifragile
March 23, 2021 · Original source
Other times it's harder. To choose an example close to my own heart, is it really true - as asserted without argument on page 422 - that Spartan hoplites are antifragile but bloggers are fragile? Spartan hoplites are good at war, which is a sort of disorder (though it's not clear they exactly benefit from it). But in other ways they seem quite fragile. Even slight deviations from their ideal conditions (flat open ground, with a slow enemy lumbering toward them from the front) would knock them off balance. A single break in the ranks would doom them. If a flood or avalanche hit, being stuck in unwieldy armor would assure them a swift death. As for bloggers, during all the greatest crises of the past few years - Trump's election, the BLM protests, coronavirus - my hit count skyrocketed, as people looked for writing that would help them make sense of the situation. What could be a purer example of gaining from volatility?
Bonn Agreement of 20011 mentions across 1 issues

Bonn Agreement of 2001 is a recurring event 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 "postwar plan for Afghanistan was officially determined by the Bonn Agreement of 2001". It most often appears alongside 501(c)(3), 80,000 Hours, 9/11.

Reference entry
Bonn Agreement of 2001
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 · Original source
Counterinsurgency (COIN) In the case of Afghanistan, the Bush administration was so eager to go to war it avoided any other options. No evidence has ever emerged that Taliban (the political faction that ruled Afghanistan at the time) itself knew about the 9/11 attacks, much less planned it; the Afghan ambassador to Pakistan condemned the attacks on 9/12. “We don’t negotiate with terrorists” became the standard American line — before the war began, Taliban was willing to discuss bin Laden’s fate but the White House Chief of Staff refused; after the war began, Taliban was willing to hand over bin Laden to a third country for trial but White House refused just the same. In the case of Iraq, Bush was so eager to, in his own words, “Fuck Saddam, We’re taking him out” as early as February 2002 (and floated the idea of invading Iraq to Tony Blair), that on 9/17 Bush told his cabinet “I believe Iraq was involved, but I’m not gong to strike them now. I don’t have the evidence at this point.” The administration couldn’t find any evidence directly tying Saddam to 9/11, so they settled on the now-discredited lies of WMDs and “ties” between al-Qaeda and Iraq. “We don’t negotiate with terrorist”’ extended to the non-terrorist Saddam — before the war, Saddam was cooperating with the International Atomic Energy Agency; after the war began, Saddam was willing to accede to practically all Amercan demands but White House refused communication just the same. Just like in Afghanistan, the Bush administration had no interest in exploring any other option short of war. Two feuding factions within the Bush administration had little contact with each other: the war hawks (neocons like Cheney i.e. products of Lockheed Martin), supported by the Pentagon, did not want to do nation-building; those partial to nation-building (the State Department) did not want war. Bush agreed with the former at the start of the war, but once Saddam was removed, sided with the latter. The postwar plan for Afghanistan was officially determined by the Bonn Agreement of 2001, but neither Bush nor Cheney consider it to be worthy of much thought in their memoirs despite years of hindsight; the postwar plan for Iraq lay entirely in the hands of Paul Bremer as subsequent Deputy Committee meetings on Iraq stopped being conducted — there wasn’t a single meeting to discuss disbanding the Iraqi army that left 400,000 jobless former soldiers prime for insurgency. The Iraq war dealt with no real crisis but cost the US trillions of dollars and thousands of lives, plunged Iraq into two decades of intermittent civil war — a candidate for the worst American foreign policy failure in history, but a success for the careers of Bush (who won reelection and congressional seats) and his advisors who led the US into Baghdad (who went on to work for think tanks, the World Bank, and the Trump Administration). Once again, there is no grand strategy as each party was only self-interested in short-term gains. The Earlier Obama Years As a candidate, Obama campaigned in support of the Afghanistan war, and indeed his first foreign policy decision as president was to send thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan, largely due to overwhelming political pressure from top generals like Petraeus and McChrystal who boxed Obama into sending more troops by limiting the options presented to Obama, blatantly lobbying in press interviews, and threatening dire consequences like resigning from commanding troops in Afghanistan. We know Obama was hesitant as he announced at the same time that American troops would begin withdrawal in July 2011 (by 2015 he announced that American troop presence would stay in Afghanistan indefinitely). Obama’s second decision was to bomb al-Qadhafi in the name of Libyan regime change, due to domestic but this time also international political pressure from the heads of France and the UK who would face political embarrassment if Qadhafi’s regime, despite months of bombing and sanctions by the US-led coalition, recaptures the rebel-held Benghazi. NATO forces bombed al-Qadhafi’s convoy. Ten days after the killing of the dictator, the bombing campaign ended, and the subsequent decade of intermittent civil war faded from the American consciousnesss. Obama’s third decision was to cripple Assad’s regime in Syria with sanctions and by arming and training rebels, again due to overwhelming political pressure from hawkish ‘foreign policy community’ who still criticise Obama for having ‘done nothing’ despite spending $1 billion through the CIA and $500 million through the Pentagon, and crushing the Syrian economy. Top officials in the Obama administration admitted that assisting rebels would not change the course of war, nor was there any way to prevent arms from ending up in the hands of ISIS and al-Qaeda. Indeed, the Syrian civil war only got bloodier with American involvement. The Later Obama Years Obama’s first major decision was the war on ISIS with the reentry into Iraq from which all American troops withdrew just a few years ago in 2011, due to overwhelming political pressure and in the face of a potentially humanitarian catastrophe (ISIS was going to massacre the Yazidi religious sectarians in Mount Sinjar). This time, the United States would roll back all territorial gains of the Islamic State by working with the Iraqi government, Shia militias in Iraq, and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces. Obama’s second decision was signing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Acton (JCPOA) with Iran to stop its nuclear weapons programme in exchange for UN and EU sanctions to be lifted, $100 billion in assets seized by the US to be returned to Iran, and the US to stop implementing secondary or third-party sanctions. This time, Obama faced unusually significant pressure from Congress which passed the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act by overwhelming majority to be able to revoke JCPOA, but Obama signed JCPOA with Iran nonetheless as enough Democrats would be able to sustain a veto. This was the one and only decision that made sense from the perspective of classical IR theory — American leaders doing things they think are right for the country without a clear political payoff. Indeed, the Iranian nuclear agreement is the exception that proves the rule of public choice, as the deal was only possible near the end of Obama’s second term, and at the end cancelled by Trump upon entering office — a president’s foreign policy accomplishment made without the support of concentrated interests only lasted as long as his administration. 6. Learning From American Foreign Policy Failures IR theorists widely acknowledge that it was a mistake to invade Vietnam and Iraq, and even the war in Afghanistan went on for too long even if it was originally justified, but these scholars have yet to comprehend the shortcoming of the unitary actor model in accounting for the lack of rational cost-benefit analysis. Comparing the pre-invasion GDP of the countries to what the US has sacrificed (even setting aside the number of lives lost), the GDP-to-money-spent ratio has been 1:74 in South Vietnam, 1:43.3 in Iraq, and a staggering 1:396 in Afghanistan. In other words, the United States has spent in Afghanistan the equivalent of that country’s level of production for close to four centuries. Cost-benefit analysis also fails outside the major wars: NATO, despite the collapse of the USSR, is willing to absorb practically any country including states that can drag the US into war without contributing anything to American security; the military expenditure in Japan and South Korea, despite anti-China talks in Washington, are either flat or declining. While an utter failure in humanitarian and economic terms, American foreign policy has a been a resounding “success” from the public choice perspective: Lockheed Martin received $36 billion in government contracts in 2008 alone (more than any company in history)
Bosnian War1 mentions across 1 issues

Bosnian War is a recurring event 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 "fought in the battles of the Bosnian War". It most often appears alongside 1999 apartment bombings, 9/11, Abbasid.

Reference entry
Bosnian War
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 · Original source
Born in 1978, he was 16 when he left the comfort of his Saudi home, learned to fire a mortar, and fought in the battles of the Bosnian War. He and two friends ran a million dollar fraudulent charity to smuggle supplies to the Chechens when he was 18. He was 19 when he swore an oath of allegiance in front of Osama bin Laden, and started making chemical weapons. He was 20 when he got disillusioned with al-Qaeda, left, got caught by the Qatari secret police and became a British informant. He was 24 when he unraveled a plot to release poison gas in the New York subway. And by the time he was 28, due to an embarrassingly stupid leak from the American intelligence agencies, his spying career was over and he was a man in hiding.
Boston ACX Spring Schelling Point Meetup1 mentions across 1 issues

Boston ACX Spring Schelling Point Meetup is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 10, 2023 and April 10, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Event Link: /boston-acx-spring-schelling-point-meetup-1". It most often appears alongside 100 Alexander St, 10004 Jasper Ave, Edmonton, AB T5J 1R3, 11841 Wagner St, Culver City, CA.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
April 10, 2023
Last seen
April 10, 2023
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Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023
April 10, 2023 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Boston Marathon1 mentions across 1 issues

Boston Marathon is a recurring event 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 "Tsarnaev brothers and Boston Marathon bombing". It most often appears alongside 1993 Russian constitutional crisis, 2011 parliamentary election, 2011-2014 protests.

Reference entry
Boston Marathon
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 11, 2023
Last seen
August 11, 2023
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Highlights From The Comments On Putin
August 11, 2023 · Original source
Having read Gessen's biography and Short's biography, I now view Gessen's as almost worthless. This is partly because I read "Brothers" by Gessen, about the Tsarnaev brothers and Boston Marathon bombing, which made flagrant errors when discussing American law and by the end was filled with utterly incoherent and evidence-free conspiracy theories. For example, Gessen gives serious weight to the possibility that the Tsarnaevs were innocent, but that when they saw they were wanted for the bombing they killed a cop and then threw homemade explosives (which I guess they had lying around?) at other cops. They also argue that Dzokhar's note in the boat was not a confession. They'd become friends with the Tsarnaev family by that point and were willing to propose whatever FBI frame-up would make them look less bad. It was sad to read, and my reaction at the time was to think I now had to unlearn everything Gessen said about Putin.
Boston municipal election1 mentions across 1 issues

Boston municipal election is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 27, 2025 and October 27, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "The ACX Boston meetup group has completed their voter guide for this week’s Boston municipal election". It most often appears alongside ACX, Asterisk Magazine, Berkeley.

Mention count
1
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1
First seen
October 27, 2025
Last seen
October 27, 2025
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Open Thread 405
October 27, 2025 · Original source
2: The ACX Boston meetup group has completed their voter guide for this week’s Boston municipal election.
Inline links: their voter guide for this week’s Boston municipal election
Brainshuttle AD study1 mentions across 1 issues

Brainshuttle AD study is a recurring event 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 "Latest interim results from the Brainshuttle AD study: A phase Ib/IIa study". It most often appears alongside A. Bejanin, A. de Calignon, A. Elobeid.

Reference entry
Brainshuttle AD study
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 · Original source
[75] L. Kulic et al., “Latest interim results from the Brainshuttle AD study: A phase Ib/IIa study of trontinemab in people with Alzheimer’s disease.” Poster presented at the Clinical Trials on Alzheimer’s Disease (CTAD 2024), Madrid, Spain, Oct. 30, 2024. Available: https://medically.roche.com/content/dam/pdmahub/restricted/neurology/ctad-2024/CTAD-2024-presentation-kulic-latest-interim-results-from-brainshuttle-ad-study.pdf
Inline links: https://medically.roche.com/content/dam/pdmahub/restricted/neurology/ctad-2024/CTAD-2024-presentation-kulic-latest-interim-results-from-brainshuttle-ad-study.pdf
Brazilian Scientific Olympiad1 mentions across 1 issues

Brazilian Scientific Olympiad is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 01, 2023 and February 01, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "he won gold medals at a Brazilian Scientific Olympiad". It most often appears alongside 2006 Ioannidis paper, ACTIV-6, Alexandros.

Mention count
1
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1
First seen
February 01, 2023
Last seen
February 01, 2023
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Response To Alexandros Contra Me On Ivermectin
February 01, 2023 · Original source
Alexandros is unhappy with my portrayal of Cadegiani’s background. I cite details that make him look strange and maybe fake, but there are other details that make him seem more impressive, like that he won gold medals at a Brazilian Scientific Olympiad.
Brazilian study1 mentions across 1 issues

Brazilian study is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 16, 2021 and February 16, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "the best-quality RCT (the Brazilian study)". It most often appears alongside Annweiler et al, Asians, Butler-Laporte et al.

Reference entry
Brazilian study
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
February 16, 2021
Last seen
February 16, 2021
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Source context
Vitamin D: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
February 16, 2021 · Original source
So my impression is that the best-quality observational study (UK Biobank studies that adjusted for race correctly), the best-quality RCT (the Brazilian study), and an additional really neat high-tech method all converge on no effect of Vitamin D on coronavirus incidence or severity.
Does Vitamin D use at a hospital significantly improve your chances?: 25% chance this is true. I trust the large Brazilian study more than the smaller Spanish one, but aside from size and a general bias towards skepticism I can't justify this very well.
Brexit1 mentions across 1 issues

Brexit is a recurring event 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 "His thesis got a boost when Brexit and Trump". It most often appears alongside 1/6 insurrection, Abdel al-Sisi, Abu Ghraib.

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Brexit
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1
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1
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September 17, 2021
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September 17, 2021
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Book Review: The Revolt Of The Public
September 17, 2021 · Original source
Gurri divides the world between the Center and the Border. He thinks the Center - politicians, experts, journalists, officials - will be in a constant retreat, and the Border - bloggers, protesters, and randos - on a constant advance. His thesis got a boost when Brexit and Trump - both Border positions - crushed and embarrassed their respective Centers. But since then I'm not sure things have been so clear. The blogosphere is in retreat (maybe Substack is reversing this?), but the biggest and most mainstream of mainstream news organizations, like the New York Times are becoming more trusted and certainly more profitable. The new President of the US is a boring moderate career politician. The public cheers on elite censorship of social media. There haven't been many big viral protests lately except Black Lives Matter and the 1/6 insurrection, and both seemed to have a perfectly serviceable set of specific demands (defunding the police, decertifying the elections). Maybe I've just grown used to it, but it doesn't really feel like a world where a tiny remnant of elites are being attacked on all sides by a giant mob of entitled nihilists.
Inline links: is in retreat, becoming more trusted
British Science Journalist of the Year1 mentions across 1 issues

British Science Journalist of the Year is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 23, 2021 and July 23, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Tom Chivers, who recently won a British Science Journalist of the Year award". It most often appears alongside Ace Attorney, Adam Smith, Amazon.

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1
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1
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July 23, 2021
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July 23, 2021
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Links For July
July 23, 2021 · Original source
6: Congratulations to SSC/ACX reader and commenter Tom Chivers, who recently won a British Science Journalist of the Year award. My own encounter with Tom was that he once wrote a book about the rationalist community, and asked to informally talk to me and my at-the-time girlfriend. My girlfriend was trying to decide whether or not she was ready to have children, so she got one of those robot babies that they use in school health classes to teach you how hard having an infant is. And she didn’t want to leave it alone or it would start crying and grade her as unready to be a mother. So she took it to the interview, and obviously Tom noticed it, and we had the fun task of convincing him that we were normal people who just happened to be carrying a robot baby around, for reasons that were totally unrelated to us being in something that we were trying to make clear to him was NOT a robot cult. He was very understanding and didn’t dwell on it too much in his book, which was very gracious of him. Anyway, you can read his science reporting here.
Inline links: British Science Journalist of the Year, a book about, here
Brown v. Board1 mentions across 1 issues

Brown v. Board is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 26, 2021 and August 26, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "the closing of the public school system in Prince Edward County, Virginia after Brown v. Board". It most often appears alongside ADHD, alt-right, American.

Reference entry
Brown v. Board
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1
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1
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August 26, 2021
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August 26, 2021
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Highlights From The Comments On Missing School
August 26, 2021 · Original source
This article cites a number of studies about various incidents that disrupted education, including Hurricane Katrina, the bombing of German cities during WWII, the Blitz, and the closing of the public school system in Prince Edward County, Virginia after Brown v. Board, that claim to have found long-lasting effects though I’m sure some of them suffer from the problems you mentioned.
Inline links: This article
Brown versus Board of Education1 mentions across 1 issues

Brown versus Board of Education is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 16, 2025 and January 16, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "testified in favor of segregated schools during Brown versus Board of Education". It most often appears alongside Afghanistan, Africa, African small-plot subsistence agriculture.

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1
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1
First seen
January 16, 2025
Last seen
January 16, 2025
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Highlights From The Comments On Lynn And IQ
January 16, 2025 · Original source
(source) … sub-Saharan Africa is also a hot spot. I wonder what’s wrong in Cuba - this is exactly the sort of easily gameable metric I would usually expect them to be good at, or at least carefully faking. If you’re interested, you can donate to Iodine Global Network here. Bob Jacobs writes: > His opponents pointed out both his personal racist opinions/activities That's the mildest possible way you could've put it. He wasn't someone who had "personal racist opinions" that he kept as "personal racist opinions". He was the editor-in-chief of Mankind Quarterly, a white supremacist journal that was founded by people like: Henry Garrett an American psychologist who testified in favor of segregated schools during Brown versus Board of Education, Corrado Gini who was president of the Italian genetics and eugenics Society in fascist Italy, and Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer who was director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of anthropology human heredity and eugenics in Nazi Germany. He was a member of the Nazi Party and the mentor of Josef Mengele, the physician at the Auschwitz concentration camp infamous for performing human experimentation on the prisoners during World War 2. Mengele provided for Verschuer with human remains from Auschwitz to use in his research into eugenics. It's funded by the pioneer fund, an organization he was a board member of and that has been classified as a white supremacist hate group, with one of its first projects being to fund the distribution in US churches and schools of "Erbkrank", a Nazi propaganda film about eugenics. He's not just called racist, he *is* racist, he even describes *himself* as a racist. No contesting any of this. MM writes: I spent 18 months in a country where people are supposed to have an iq of about 70, according to the map. My neighbors and friends were mostly non-literate. They did not seem less intelligent than the people I know in my current (US) neighborhood or the people I grew up with (in the US). Most of them would not have performed well on IQ tests, though. They'd never attended school and had no familiarity with puzzle-solving. This was 35 years ago and most people had not seen movies or even photographs. I remember sitting with one older woman and helping her interpret a black-and-white photograph: this is the arm, here's where it connects to the body, etc. It's hard for people from literate societies with tons of exposure to text & graphical representations to see the extent of the gap. Calvin writes: I have a decent amount of experience with the intellectually disabled, and saying "cognitive issues are only responsible for a small part of the [communication] deficit" is so wrong that it makes me question everything else in this essay. Trust me, even making allowances for poor hearing or difficulty forming words, the cognitive issues are responsible for 90% of the deficit. An IQ of 60 is really low and it's a significant handicap. I was concerned to hear this - I have a little experience with the intellectually disabled, but it didn’t involve knowing people’s exact IQ, so I’m not very well-calibrated here. Looking for more information, I found https://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/ustat/ustat0301-01.htm, which purports to describe the characteristics of very low IQ people, mostly in the context of criminal justice (where lawyers often try to use a client’s low IQ as a mitigating factor - ie maybe he didn’t truly understand that crime is wrong). The report says things like: Although all persons with mental retardation have significantly impaired mental development, their intellectual level can vary considerably. An estimated 89 percent of all people with retardation have I.Q.s in the 51-70 range. An I.Q. in the 60 to 70 range is approximately the scholastic equivalent to the third grade […] Although mental retardation of any degree has profound implications for a person's cognitive and social development, it is a condition which in many cases is not readily apparent. While some of the mentally retarded, such as those whose retardation is caused by Down's syndrome or fetal alcohol syndrome, have characteristically distinctive facial features, most cannot be identified by their physical appearance alone. Unless their cognitive impairment is unusually severe (e.g. an I.Q. below 40), persons with mental retardation may be thought of as "slow" but the full extent of their impairment is often not readily appreciated, particularly by people who have limited contact with or knowledge of them, including police, prosecutors, judges, and other participants in the criminal justice system. Many capital offenders with mental retardation did not have their condition diagnosed until trial or during post-conviction proceedings. And gave some examples (slightly out of order for this list): Oliver Cruz, who was executed in Texas on August 9, 2000, had an I.Q. that was measured variously at 64 and 76. Cruz nonetheless insisted to reporters that, although he was perhaps "slow in reading, slow in learning," he was not mentally retarded. Mitigation specialist Scharlette Holdman recalled a client who so successfully hid his retardation from his attorneys that he allowed them to sign him up for college-level calculus classes, which he could not comprehend. He had gone through much of his schooling allowing his younger sister to complete his homework for him. When he was given papers to read in connection to his case, he would carefully stare at them. If he was asked a substantive question, he usually responded, "I don't recall." Only when experts in retardation evaluated him and investigators reviewed his school records and spoke to his family did lawyers discover he had mental retardation and had been considered "slow" since his early childhood. Another capital defendant "hid his mental retardation for most of his life by working at a very repetitive job as a switcher on the railroad. He lied about finishing high school. He was actually in special education classes and did not finish the sixth grade. He was drafted into the army and discharged because of his mental retardation. He lied about his service record. He often made things up so that people would not suspect mental retardation." Morris Mason, whose I.Q. was 62-66, was executed in 1985 in Virginia after being convicted of rape and murder. Before his execution, Mason asked one of his legal advisors for advice on what to wear to his funeral As one psychiatrist testified about a capital defendant with an I.Q. of between 35 to 45: "[People with mental retardation try] to go along with people that they suspect are in authority. For example, I asked [the defendant] where we were when I saw him, and he obviously didn't know, so I asked him if we were in Atlanta and he said `Yes, we are in Atlanta.' In fact, we were in Birmingham, Alabama. I could have said New York and he would have said `Sure, New York' These people are obviously not going to win Nobels anytime soon. But even the guy with IQ 35 - 45 was still talking to people. I think this supports the thesis that intellectually disabled people without specific syndromes can seem pretty normal most of the time. (though keep in mind that anything from the court system should be treated with a grain of salt - defense attorneys have an incentive to exaggerate the intellectual disability of their clients in the hopes that it gets them a lighter sentence) Lyman Stone writes: Emil's post isn't correct, however. We know from the recent Reich lab paper on long-run genetic selection that there was strong selection for IQ in the neolithic revolution, which implies agriculture strongly selects for IQ and ability to plan. Malawians are 60-80% subsistence farmers. Even a "normal" low-IQ person cannot do the implied math and long-term planning involved in this kind of farming. And in fact, economists routinely find that African small-plot subsistence agriculture is actually highly optimized; farmers make very precise choices about where to plant which seeds, which fertilizer to use, etc. Key point is basically: it really isn't true that an IQ 60 person can run a farm functionally. Moreover, mean IQ of 60 implies large shares even lower, at ranges that are uniformly nonverbal even without specific disability. And this is why in the actual record-level NIQ database, they truncate estimates below 60, because even the database managers realize these estimates are crazy. See my post here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-154757665 We know that people with extremely low IQs in the Flynn sense must be capable of subsistence agriculture, because pre-Flynn Effect, most of the West had extremely low IQs, and they were all doing subsistence agriculture. How is this possible? Responding to Lyman’s comment, I wrote: I stick to the claim in this post - that our estimates for what a very low IQ means are poorly-grounded, and that people with low IQs can do some pretty impressive things, especially if they're concrete and part of a cultural transmission package. Maybe this is the Joseph Henrich "Secret Of Our Success" thing. We know that Malawians get poor test scores in school, so it seems like there's some disconnect between do-well-on-tests intelligence and run-a-subsistence-farm intelligence, and the abstract/concrete and novel/cultural distinctions are the best explanation that I can think of. You say that "the phenotype that arises from a given tested IQ in America is clearly vastly worse than the phenotype arising from the same tested IQ in Africa", which I basically agree with. I think part of it is the syndromes issue raised above, and part of it is that maybe Malawians have zero contact with the culture of abstraction that IQ tests come out of whereas even very uneducated Westerners have some contact with it, and maybe another part of it is that whatever health/nutrition issues the Malawians have preferentially harm faculties responsible for more abstract tasks rather than more concrete ones. For an opposite data point, when I was in Haiti, my boss told me (secondhand, no personal experience) of extreme difficulties working with Haitians, like that they couldn't alphabetize files even when that was explained to them. Many Haitains are also successfuly subsistence farmers, so I think this also supports some kind of heavy abstract/concrete distinction. I don't think we're really disagreeing, just agreeing on something like the correlations that make up IQ being less valid outside the normal range. Maybe one way to look at it is to go back to the claim from the justice system document above, saying that people with IQ in the 60s are the mental equivalent of third-graders. The third-graders I know are very into Pokemon, and have all sorts of opinions on how if you add X bonus to a Y strength fire-type Pokemon and then play Z combo, it will [commence six weeks of droning on about different Pokemon cards]. Is this the sort of math/reasoning/strategizing that we don’t expect someone with IQ 60 to be able to do? Does the fact that third-graders can do it mean that we’re miscalibrated? I’m not sure. The part of Lyman’s comment that gives me the most pause is his observation that, if the mean IQ is 60, a decent fraction of people must be 45, and a non-negligible portion 30. At this point, even third-grader comparisons don’t save us. I guess this is where I bring in the claim that IQ breaks down as a guide to practical living skills below some point. You can see several more layers of response between me and Lyman here, but I was especially grateful for him teaching me two things I didn’t already know: First, he corrected my misconception about Reich on ancient European cognitive evolution. Reich had said that pre-agriculture Europeans were “2-3 standard deviations” below moderns. I had interpreted that as IQ deviations of 15 points, making them genetic IQ 55-70, which would have been pretty crazy. Stone tells me he actually meant PGS deviations, each of which was about 3-4 IQ points, so he’s claiming that pre-agriculture Europeans had genetic IQ of 90 (they probably also had lower IQ for environmental reasons).,
Inline links: source, donate to Iodine Global Network here., writes, writes, writes, https://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/ustat/ustat0301-01.htm, writes, https://substack.com/home/post/p-154757665, here
Buck1 mentions across 1 issues

Buck is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 15, 2023 and May 15, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Supreme Court’s ruling on Buck said that". It most often appears alongside 60 Minutes, Adam Mastroianni, Adraste.

Reference entry
Buck
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1
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1
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May 15, 2023
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May 15, 2023
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Galton, Ehrlich, Buck
May 15, 2023 · Original source
Adraste: Ah yes, mental disabilities. Carrie Buck was the plaintiff in Buck v. Bell, the case where the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that involuntary sterilization was fully constitutional. She was sterilized for a mental disability. . . after making the honor roll at her school! Probably a family member raped her, and the family was trying to save their reputation and prevent any further inconvenient pregnancies. Then they sterilized her sister, on the grounds that she was related to Carrie and so probably had the same genes. Nobody knows how many of the hundred-thousand-odd forced sterilizations in the US were like this. Probably a lot. Again, not that it would have been any better if they were all real disability cases - just that the sheer incompetence and callousness of the people charged with making these life-ruining decisions is impossible to overestimate.
Coria: Absolutely not. I’m only recommending the existence of governments, which has been standard practice since Gilgamesh. Many things are rights violations - for example, seizing someone’s property. But when a legitimate government does so in the public interest after due consideration, we accept it as part of living in a society. It was a rights violation to quarantine an entire population in their homes during the early days of the coronavirus. But the legitimate government decided to do it in order to protect the public interest, so it’s not morally equivalent to kidnapping or whatever we would call it if a random person did it. And some states still castrate pedophiles as a punishment - one which naturally includes sterilization - and I have no particular problem with that. So it seems I must believe governments may sometimes involuntarily sterilize citizens when it is in the public interest. Did you know the Supreme Court’s ruling on Buck said that “The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes?”
Adraste: Yes, this is one of the very many things about the Buck ruling I would change if I had a time machine.
Buck v. Bell1 mentions across 1 issues

Buck v. Bell is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 15, 2023 and May 15, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Carrie Buck was the plaintiff in Buck v. Bell, the case where the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that involuntary sterilization was fully constitutional". It most often appears alongside 60 Minutes, Adam Mastroianni, Adraste.

Reference entry
Buck v. Bell
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1
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1
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May 15, 2023
Last seen
May 15, 2023
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Galton, Ehrlich, Buck
May 15, 2023 · Original source
Adraste: Ah yes, mental disabilities. Carrie Buck was the plaintiff in Buck v. Bell, the case where the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that involuntary sterilization was fully constitutional. She was sterilized for a mental disability. . . after making the honor roll at her school! Probably a family member raped her, and the family was trying to save their reputation and prevent any further inconvenient pregnancies. Then they sterilized her sister, on the grounds that she was related to Carrie and so probably had the same genes. Nobody knows how many of the hundred-thousand-odd forced sterilizations in the US were like this. Probably a lot. Again, not that it would have been any better if they were all real disability cases - just that the sheer incompetence and callousness of the people charged with making these life-ruining decisions is impossible to overestimate.
Burlington VT Spring ACX Meetup1 mentions across 1 issues

Burlington VT Spring ACX Meetup is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 10, 2023 and April 10, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Event Link: /burlington-vt-spring-acx-meetup". It most often appears alongside 100 Alexander St, 10004 Jasper Ave, Edmonton, AB T5J 1R3, 11841 Wagner St, Culver City, CA.

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1
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1
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April 10, 2023
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April 10, 2023
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Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023
April 10, 2023 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
But I'm Not Racist: Racism, Implicit Bias, And The Practice Of Psychiatry1 mentions across 1 issues

But I'm Not Racist: Racism, Implicit Bias, And The Practice Of Psychiatry is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 20, 2022 and July 20, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "But I'm Not Racist: Racism, Implicit Bias, And The Practice Of Psychiatry". It most often appears alongside #MeToo Movement, American Psychiatric Association, Anand Giridharadas.

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1
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1
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July 20, 2022
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July 20, 2022
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Criticism Of Criticism Of Criticism
July 20, 2022 · Original source
But I'm Not Racist: Racism, Implicit Bias, And The Practice Of Psychiatry