Civilization is a recurring game in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 25, 2022 and May 15, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "imagine you have two options: play Civilization and lose"; "play Civilization and lose"; "playing classy games, like Civilization". It most often appears alongside ACX survey, AGI, AI-risk.
- Article page
- Civilization
- Mention count
- 2
- Issue count
- 2
- First seen
- August 25, 2022
- Last seen
- May 15, 2025
Outbound links
- http://web.archive.org/web/20221104130431/https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/1m-bet-rules
- http://web.archive.org/web/20221129133112/https://blog.rootclaim.com/rootclaim-accepts-500000-challenge-on-covid-vaccine-safety-efficacy/
- http://web.archive.org/web/20221224061743/https://www.skirsch.com/covid/SaarWilf.pdf
- https://archive.ph/pY4gF#selection-663.103-683.190
- https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/against-ice-age-civilizations
- https://awweide.substack.com/p/civilization-6-and-choices-choices
- https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pRQbRbEUwSH_jm94PI_ij-88swat7vQ4iNaNp6gd39g/edit#heading=h.xt5wmaxjtmff
- https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/04/book-review-madness-and-civilization/
- https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/10/book-review-the-prices-are-too-dmn-high/
- https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/08/12/book-review-secular-cycles/
- https://web.archive.org/web/20230104080248/https://www.rootclaim.com/
- https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/details-that-you-should-include-in/comment/61387082
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
For an example of other choices that work kind of like this - imagine you have two options: play Civilization and lose, or go to a moderately interesting museum. It's hard to say that one of these options is better than the other, so you might as well treat them as equal. But now suppose that you also have the option of playing Civ and winning. That's presumably more fun than losing, but it's still not clearly better than the museum, so now "play Civ and win" and "museum" are equal, while "play Civ and lose" is eliminated as an inferior choice.
10: Siberian Fox writes: astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-…\n\nbut I still disagree. I'm open to being wrong because it means I get my eyes pecked by seagulls, but I do believe a galactic civilization with trillions of barely worth living meh lives > a bubble utopia of 5000 people around wasteland","username":"SilverVVulpes","name":"Siberian fox","profile_image_url":"","date":"Wed Aug 24 18:57:30 +0000 2022","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":0,"like_count":3,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{"url":"https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-what-we-owe-the-future","image":"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1200,h_600,c_limit,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F051d8840-77a5-4dfa-8a7c-fe6cd0c626da_535x382.png","title":"Book Review: What We Owe The Future","description":"...","domain":"astralcodexten.substack.com"},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM">
I’m also sympathetic to the galactic civilization, but only because it’s glorious. This is different from “it has a lot of people experiencing mild contentment”.
When I try to apply SRTHMK’s lessons, I can’t deny that I’m being exactly the kind of hypocrite who says that my generation was okay but the next generation is destroying society. I chafed against all of my parents’ stupid computer use restrictions as a teenager - why couldn’t they understand that I was only playing classy games, like Civilization, and hanging out on decent sites, like LiveJournal? Now it’s twenty years later and…