Astral Codex Ten

Organizations: E

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Organizations: E

Groups, collectives, magazines, venues, and institutions operating inside the scene. This section collects the E slice of the category index.

Reference Index

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EA27 mentions across 27 issues

EA is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 27 times across 27 issues between January 29, 2021 and April 06, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "thinking of the EA movement as trying to perfectly quantify"; "EA started with a sort of merger and cross-pollination between people trying to save lives by eg curing malaria, and transhumanist/singularitarian groups working on protecting the long-term future"; "EA organizations on how they can attract more donations". It most often appears alongside ACX, Scott, Twitter.

Article page
EA
Mention count
27
Issue count
27
First seen
January 29, 2021
Last seen
April 06, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Contra Weyl On Technocracy
January 29, 2021 · Original source
Worse, the extremely elitist, segregated, and condescending approach to philanthropy encouraged by the community has created widespread public backlash that has closely tracked a broader populist reaction to technologically-driven globalist elites and that increasingly seems to be one of the largest risk factors for precisely the sorts of catastrophes effective altruists increasingly see as the largest threats to their long-term viewpoint on universal welfare. In short, it increasingly seems like, after almost a decade of existence, a primary conclusion of the movement’s analysis may be that the movement itself is a significant part of the problem it is identifying. Earlier, more open dialog with a broader range of approaches and social classes might have illuminated this more quickly and avoided the associated waste of talent and resources, two things the movement greatly prizes.
Inline links: widespread public backlash
I want to briefly respond to Weyl's critique of rationality and effective altruism:
The effective altruism movement, which largely grew directly out of the rationalist movement, seeks to maximize the efficacy with which charitable donations are directed using standard rationalist methods. It is a tight-knit community that strongly privileges rationalist approaches over all other forms of knowledge-making (such as from the humanities, continental philosophy, or humanistic social sciences) and tends to dismiss input not formulated in rationalist terms. The community also has a strong and explicitly stated view that its activities uniquely contribute to the achievement of “the good”: of their top five recommendations of most productive careers by a leading community organization, two suggest being a researcher or support staff within the movement, and two others recommend working on the AI alignment problem (see the next point). Until recently, much of the analysis and funding emerging from the community has pointed towards a focus on extremely unlikely but potentially catastrophic risks, such as alien, asteroid or biological catastrophes.
ACX Grants ++: The First Half
February 03, 2022 · Original source
#14: Survey On Embryo Selection I would like to design and conduct a survey akin to the moral machine project, but for embryo selection rather than self-driving cars. The idea is to glean the informed preferences of parents over the kinds of traits they want their children to have. This is already a challenge, and the survey would need to be carefully worded to avoid framing effects, and other psychological biases. But the bigger challenge, and my interest in the project, is that parents' preferences will largely depend on the preferences over traits that other parents have. As I wrote about in my book Creating Future People, there is a range of traits in which what is individually rational is partly a function of what other parents are expected to choose, and in which what is individually rational could diverge from what is socially optimal. Survey answers could, in principle, be fed into an AI to help refine the preferences parents exhibit over which embryos to implant. This information would be enormously valuable in for parents and fertility clinics. To the extent that the traits of future people influence the welfare of the entire world, embryo selection done well – guided by accurate information rather than guesswork – could be one of the most important forms of “effective altruism” the world has ever seen. [Email jonathan.anomaly@protonmail.com]
#20: Test Charity Pitch Strategies We will conduct an intervention competition to test which strategies are most effective in convincing people to donate to an effective cause. We (Bastian Jaeger, Josh Lewis, and Noah Costelo) are part of a recently formed team that advises EA organizations on how they can attract more donations. There is little high-quality research on this topic and it is unclear which marketing approaches work best or should be trialed in the field. We will conduct a large-scale experiment to fill this gap. First, we will challenge academics and members of the EA community to submit an intervention that is most effective in generating donations for an effective charity. Next, we will distribute a survey among the participating teams and the EA community in which people are asked to predict the effectiveness of each intervention that was submitted. Finally, we will select the most promising interventions and test their effectiveness in a high-powered, pre-registered, and incentivized experiment. The study will generate actionable insights for various EA organizations looking to optimize their marketing strategy and attract more donations. The survey data will also allow us to test how accurate people are in forecasting the effectiveness of different strategies, by comparing forecasted with actual effectiveness. All data will be made openly available. See https://osf.io/adbwv/ for a more detailed description and you can contact me via b.jaeger@vu.nl.
Spring Meetups In Seventy Cities
April 10, 2022 · Original source
PORTLAND, OR Contact: Sam Celarek (support@pearcommunity.com) Date: April 24 Time: 4:00 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84QVG9G7+XWG Location: 1548 NE 15th Ave, Portland, OR 97232 with a Large "PEAR" sign outside of the Building Notes: Call me (Sam) at 513-432-3310 if you can't find it. Please RSVP on Meetup or LessWrong so we can guesstimate food better. Group info: Portland Effective Altruism and Rationality is very active. We have book clubs, bi-weekly ai safety meet-ups, bi-weekly topical meet-ups, bi-weekly socials, and have an active Discord.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/84QVG9G7+XWG, Meetup, LessWrong, Portland Effective Altruism and Rationality, Discord
Your Book Review: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy
June 24, 2022 · Original source
A Russian sixth-grader could explain why celebrating the glories of Kievan Rus does not subvert Putin’s claims about the history of the Russian nation so much as reinforce them. Just like Hong Kong’s protests, Ukraine has won the meme war with utterly lopsided propaganda and unanimous international support on the Internet. As Yoshimi writes: Floating ghostlike above it is our war, the myth of the ‘Ghost of Kyiv’, ace MIG-29 pilot who has apparently shot down six Russian planes, or the legend of the Ukrainian soldiers defending an island outpost who replied “Russian warship go fuck yourselves” to a surrender offer and may or may not have died heroically, or two Russian II-76 transport aircraft that maybe were shot down near Kiev, or videos of air strikes or dead bodies which variously are Russian or Ukrainian until they turn out to be from Gaza six years ago, or the viral video of an old Ukrainian woman telling off a Russian soldier by offering him sunflower seeds so when he dies, sunflowers (Ukraine’s national flowers) will sprout from the soil. We’re raising funds for the Ukrainian army on crowdfunding apps and giving advice to the civilians being handed assault weapons about how to disable tanks, sharing weird homophobic pictures of Putin as a gay icon and spamming Russian government posts. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has made the decision to stay and fight rather than flee like most would-be leaders who go all in for American foreign policy, and now is being deified by us as “badass”, “a true leader”, etc. etc., alongside his people, whose resistance to authoritarianism we are told is unparalleled in the modern world. After all, so it goes, who could be next? And like in Hong Kong, despite winning the culture war in hyperreality, the actual war in reality is won by the side with overwhelming military might, not morality. The real war is where Ukrainians are experiencing the genuine life-shattering effects of military conflict. It matters because this is the first time Western response is driven by Twitter outcry, and it will not be the last. A New EA Cause? Besides Hanania’s recommendations in the last section (which he admits are more or less impossible in an excellent interview with Caplan), a worthy EA priority might be to somehow turn the public tide on sanctions, which literally kill more people than Putin. Americans should be appalled by the atrocity committed in their names. The banality of the incompetence of foreign policy elites does not excuse their evil. With how entrenched the special interests are, I have no idea if it’s even worth trying, but at the very least the sheer amount of suffering and death from sanctions should be made common knowledge. Nuclear security is one of the top priorities in Effective Altruism, per 80,000 Hours, Future of Life Institute, and Our World In Data. Toby Orb, who wrote the definitive book on existential risk, The Precipice, estimates x-risk from nuclear war to be ~1 in 1000 in the next century. Luisa Rodriguez estimates a 1.1% chance of nuclear war each year and that the chances of a US-Russia nuclear war may be in the ballpark of 0.38% per year; summarised by Max Roser as: Nuclear risk is neglected by the public because of Pax Americana since the collapse of the USSR, and is not discussed as often in EA as it’s thought to be relatively well-funded and mainstream, but in fact major donors like the MacArthur Foundation have been withdrawing funding. As Joan Rohling details in an 80,000 Hours podcast there is much to be done, especially when Ukraine gave up their nuclear arsenal in 1994 in exchange for Russia’s promise to never threaten or use military force against them. A worthwhile adjacent cause area might be de-escalation of public outcry to reduce x-risk from nuclear war beyond just regular anti-proliferation efforts — even a Russian specialist from the RAND Corporation is surprised by how much public outrage is driving policy: Even just the pace of the sanctions: we went to 11 out of 10 in like two days — farther than many expected we’d ever get in short order. And I think the same is true about these military assistance initiatives. We’re just trying to do something because there’s a public demand for action. So that’s what worries me, that the sort of public outrage that’s being channeled in Western democracies through political systems could result in decisions that prove ultimately unwise. Despite how odd it is that some wars are “legal” while others aren’t, we should be glad UNSC exists as much as everyone laughs at how useless the rest of the UN is. All is fair in love and war, but international norms is all that stands between us and nuclear annihilation. It is hard to emphasise just how delusional it is for the public to fixate on no-fly zones — I, like Scott, am surprised we’re still capable of jingoism. 80,000 Hours has updated their top career recommendations to include China specialist to improve China-Western coordination on global catastrophic risk, which seems more important after reading how irrational and captured the American foreign policy apparatus is. As Hanania writes, “great power competition” is an anachronism. If Ukraine is the first war warped by hyperreality, it won’t be the last. Now that US foreign policy elites have driven Putin into the arms of China, let’s hope IR specialists can imbibe the public choice model instead of antagonising yet another nuclear rival. Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy is an important work because it raises the sanity waterline, which at the least should make us stop killing millions for no reason, and at the most should make the human race more knowledgeable of how to prevent total extinction from nuclear armageddon. Pax Americana is dead, but a multipolar world will be more humane. Endnotes In the fiscal year 2018, the top five government contractors were all weapons manufacturers, with Lockheed Martin in first place at $40.6 billion. The Department of Defence spent $358 billion on contracting, ten times higher than second place Department of Energy. Collective action problems that stop a bunch of smaller companies from effectively influencing policy are no hindrance for companies like Lockheed Martin.
Inline links: writes, interview, 80,000 Hours, Future of Life Institute, Our World In Data, The Precipice, ~1 in 1000, estimates, summarised, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!PRc2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe90b1bb5-d84b-45dc-b9fa-2edddbf6b9fa_1600x1006.png, Pax Americana, MacArthur Foundation, details, gave up, surprised, Scott, jingoism, China specialist, captured, writes, the sanity waterline, a multipolar world will be more humane
Open Thread 231
July 04, 2022 · Original source
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Impact Markets: The Annoying Details
July 15, 2022 · Original source
This is how I’ve always explained it before - and you can read other explanations like Paul Christiano’s or Vitalik Buterin’s. This post isn’t about the theory. It’s about the annoying implementation details. It may not be very interesting to people who are neither effective altruists nor institution design wonks, sorry.
Inline links: Paul Christiano’s, Vitalik Buterin’s
Advantage: This is very simple, and can be done right now: in fact, a team is already doing this for good Effective Altruism Forum posts.
Inline links: is already doing this
Disadvantage: We probably couldn't get them right away, and there aren’t that many who really understand effective altruism yet.
Criticism Of Criticism Of Criticism
July 20, 2022 · Original source
But I'm Not Racist: Racism, Implicit Bias, And The Practice Of Psychiatry Disruption! Grabbing the third rail! Asking about what we’re overlooking! It seems that psychiatry, like EA, is really good at criticizing itself. Even better: these aren’t those soft within-the-system critiques everyone is worried about. These are hard challenges to the entire paradigm of capitalism or whatever. And it’s not just the APA as an institution. Go to any psychiatrist at the conference and criticize psychiatry in these terms - “Don’t you think our field is systemically racist and sexist and fails to understand that the true problem is Capitalism?” and they will enthusiastically agree and maybe even tell you stories about how their own experience proves that’s true and how they need to try to do better. Is there any criticism that can touch these people at all? Here’s my proposal: ask why they prescribe s-ketamine instead of racemic ketamine for treatment-resistant depression. If you say this, psychiatrists will push back. If you say it in a confrontational way - maybe you hint that they’ve outsourced their thought processes to a handful of regulators and pharmaceutical companies even when this severely disadvantages patients, because thinking for themselves is hard and scary - they’ll get offended. The world is full of psychiatrists who will confess to systemic racism with a smile on their face, then get all huffy when you ask them about esketamine. Here are other criticisms that I think can actually start fights: should tricyclics be higher on our treatment algorithm for depression than atypical antipsychotics? Should we use levothyroxine more (or less) often? And my nominee for “highest likelihood of people actually coming to blows” would be asking if they’re sure it’s ethical to charge poor patients three-digit fees for no-shows. All of these are the opposite of the racism critique: they’re minor, finicky points entirely within the current paradigm that don’t challenge any foundational assumptions at all. But you can actually start fights if you bring them up, instead of getting people to nod along and smile vacuously. The racism critique doesn’t imply any specific person is doing any specific thing wrong. Certainly not you! It doesn’t demand any specific response except maybe more awareness, saying the right slogans, and maybe having some other person form a committee to make meaningless changes to some set of bylaws. But the esketamine critique actually demands that you in particular go out and learn about a different medication which is kind of scary and could get you in trouble if you use it wrong. It implies that you personally are failing patients, in a way that some other doctors aren’t failing patients. Maybe it means those other doctors are better than you! And so the knives come out. III. This is also how I think about EA criticism. I’m going to give an example of criticism I don’t like. I hate doing this, because all the criticism pieces are heartfelt and people worked hard on them. But I have to pick on someone in particular, so I’m going to pick on Some Blindspots In Rationality And Effective Altruism (disclaimer: I appreciate the work that went into this and like the people involved). It tries to get ahead of any “this isn’t paradigm-busting enough” by making extremely general and abstract points, like: EA assumes people are individuals, but actually, they are interdependent. Instead of swallowing western individualism, we need to be better at thinking within communalist and collectivist paradigms.
Inline links: why they prescribe s-ketamine instead of racemic ketamine, Some Blindspots In Rationality And Effective Altruism
Highlights From The Comments On Criticism Of Criticism Of Criticism
July 28, 2022 · Original source
Last month, when I posted why I thought that a recent crime wave was because of anti-police protests, was that evanglizing? If I were Bahai, and I posted something about why I thought the Bahai religion was true, using the same style of argument, would that be evangelizing? If I posted my interesting thoughts about charity in 2005, and those happened to be the exact same thoughts that later became effective altruism, would I have been evangelizing then? If I write a post now about why you should all join EA, would that be evangelizing now?
Highlights From The Comments On Subcultures
August 19, 2022 · Original source
Postcycle: Since 2020 Now things are pretty stable, partly because we put enough distance between ourselves and our growth phase that we can start to get a little hipster cool again, and partly because effective altruism is the Hot New Thing that everyone is supposed to have an opinion on. This is the usual pattern of exciting talked-about movements spawning successor movements that then get to be exciting and talked-about in turn, while the original movement gets to go back to being normal people with a common interest again. By the way, in the past week, effective altruism has gotten long, glowing profiles in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Vox, the cover of TIME Magazine, shoutouts from Elon Musk and Andrew Yang, podcast interviews with Tyler Cowen and Tim Ferriss, and criticism from Freddie deBoer. Enjoy it while it lasts! ___________________ 7: MT writes: A lot of this sounds like truism, or selection bias. Thing isn't popular or exciting to most, then it catches on and grows, then it stops growing, fragments into new directions and isn't novel but becomes part of the mainstream. This HAS TO describe literally anything in the past that was ever popular/exciting, because it wasn't always that way (started small) and can't grow indefinitely without becoming either an institution (stable leadership/direction), fragmented (new leadership/direction), or just falling apart. The germ of this idea was my feeling that I’ve been in movements where it starts out feeling like everyone can’t stop gushing about how great we are, and then later there’s another phase where criticism reigns and everyone feels slightly embarrassed to be involved. This doesn’t feel tautological to me, although it might become trivial if you allow enough selection bias (some movement where this hasn’t happened “isn’t the kind of movement this happens to”). I could prove this by making nontrivial predictions about which movements are going to get less camaraderie and more internecine struggle in the future. Four years ago I would have said “new left socialism”, and I think I did endorse Robby Soave’s article to that effect at the time, but I think new left socialism is well into involution or even postcycle now. Last year I would have said YIMBYism, but I’m not up-to-date on it and maybe it’s already transitioned too. The only movement I see that’s still clearly high on “we are so great and such good friends with each other” is postrationalism/ingroup/TPOT, so sure, I expect things to get worse for them (sorry for this potentially self-fulfilling prophecy). (I’m nervous about saying EA because they still have more money than they can spend in a reasonable amount of time; as long as that situation continues they won’t be exactly resource-scarce, and the people with the purse-strings will have a natural advantage as “elites”.) I’m actually surprised how few uncomplicated happy growth spurt movements I can think of now, compared to how many I can think of that seem to have passed through that stage. I think this is a combination of: This is a pretty pessimistic social moment (eg the thing where dystopian SF has become more popular than the utopian SF of the late 20th century).
Inline links: the New Yorker, New York Times, Vox, cover of TIME Magazine, Elon Musk, Andrew Yang, Tyler Cowen, Tim Ferriss, Freddie deBoer, MT, Robby Soave’s article to that effect, postrationalism/ingroup/TPOT
Book Review: What We Owe The Future
August 23, 2022 · Original source
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22
October 18, 2022 · Original source
Several additional plaintiffs I can’t find good information about You can find the complaint here. The plaintiffs write: The [CFTC’s action], without explanation or other indication of reasoned decisionmaking, without “written notice of the facts or conduct which may warrant” the Revocation, and without providing anyone “an opportunity to demonstrate or achieve compliance” with the terms of No-Action Relief or other requirements, violates the Administrative Procedure Act. 5 U.S.C. §§ 558, 706. Among other things, the Revocation is “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, [and/or] otherwise not in accordance with law” and occurred “without observance of procedure required by law.” The Court should “hold unlawful and set aside” the Revocation, including its command that contracts that would otherwise turn on events occurring after February 2023 be prematurely liquidated. 5 U.S.C. § 706. The Court also should enter a preliminary and then permanent injunction against the prescriptions in the Revocation requiring the liquidation of contracts by February 2023, including contracts that concern the 2024 elections, well before they would ordinarily mature. I am not a lawyer, but it sounds kind of like they’re saying “the decision was bad, and the Administrative Procedure Act says regulators shouldn’t do bad things”. I am split between the part of me which hates government regulators doing bad things, and the part of me which feels like this is how you get a cover-your-ass-ocracy that never does anything at all without fifteen layers of paperwork and ten trillion dollars per action. Whatever. At least this time it’s in my favor. Of course there are prediction markets about it: Source: Insight Prediction Nuclear Warcasting, Part 2 Samotsvety Forecasting is a team made of top prediction market players and tournament winners, vaguely affiliated with effective altruism, who make predictions in the public interest. Earlier this year, they got attention for forecasting the risk of nuclear war - in particular, they said there was an a 0.01% per month chance of London getting nuked this spring. Since then, most of the fear has crystallized into a specific scenario. Suppose Russia is losing very badly in Ukraine. Putin, fearing a coup or revolution at home if he gives up, decides to use a tactical nuclear weapon, ie a “small” nuke more suited to winning battles than destroying cities. He nukes a Ukrainian battlefield position. The West is enraged at this violation of the nuclear taboo and feels like it needs to respond decisively - maybe by nuking something on Russia’s side, or through some other act of extreme escalation. Then Russia feels like they need to respond, and eventually it escalates to strikes on major cities and global nuclear war. There are reasons for doubt. Tactical nukes wouldn’t really be useful in Ukraine; the battle lines are too spread out and there’s no single place where a nuclear explosion could take out a substantial portion of Ukraine’s forces. In the past, nuclear powers have accepted lost wars gracefully rather than turning to nukes. And the Russians deny it, and saying this is all just Western propaganda intended to scare people. Amid this uncertainty, Samotsvety has published an update: now they are at 16% chance that “Russia uses any type of nuclear weapon in Ukraine in the next year”, and 0.02% per month of a strike on London. Although they didn’t mention it this time, they previously said the risk of a strike on San Francisco was a little over half that of London; I don’t know if that’s changed. See also Dan Keys’ comment here for some skepticism of Samotsvety’s process. Swift Centre is a lot like Samotsvety; they’re a collection of top forecasters brought together by EA to make important predictions. They also took a swing at the nuclear question, and said 9.1% chance of a hostile nuclear detonation in Europe in the next six months. They didn’t calculate the risk that this would spread to global war, but they did discuss how different scenarios would bring the risk up or down: One of my hopes for forecasting is that it eventually becomes so well-validated that decision-makers can take these kinds of considerations into account: “Should we sent ATACMS missiles to Ukraine? It would have such-and-such benefits, but also increase the risk of nuclear escalation by 3.6%, is it worth it?” We can’t directly compare Samotsvety and Swift because they’re predicting over different time periods. But assuming that there’s more risk in the next six months than in the six months after that, I think Samotsvety is a little higher but they’re not embarrassingly far off. Metaculus is a bit more optimistic than either, believing there’s only a 4% chance of detonation in Ukraine in 2023 and a 7% chance of any use in the next ~year. Max Tegmark is going much higher than anyone else and says 16% chance of global nuclear war. Kalshi Applies For Election Markets Kalshi is a regulated and fully-legal prediction market with good lobbyists and a compliance team. This means the CFTC probably won’t randomly shut them down one day. But it also means they can only create new markets with CFTC permission. In July, Kalshi asked the CFTC for permission to make midterm election prediction markets - specifically, which party will win control of the House and Senate. The CFTC has said they will make a decision by October 28 (which doesn’t leave much time for predicting to happen before the November 8 election, but I guess it sets a precedent). September was the Request For Comment period, when the CFTC solicited comments from stakeholders about what they should do. Kalshi tried really hard to get lots of people to send in positive assessments - I know this because of how many people asked me “why is the CEO of Kalshi emailing me about this thing?” Their strategy seems to have worked; among the people who wrote to the CFTC in support were: A managing director at JP Morgan
Inline links: additional plaintiffs, here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!LaYa!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0aaec309-35d6-430d-aeaa-b7cab022f4d6_548x215.png, Insight Prediction, Samotsvety Forecasting, Earlier this year, accepted lost wars gracefully, published an update, comment here, Swift Centre, They also took a swing at the nuclear question, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!TczM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F702c1236-47d9-4c60-9b99-ab9b2ca320e7_737x377.png, a 4% chance, a 7% chance, 16% chance, In July, they will make a decision by October 28, A managing director at JP Morgan
Highlights From The Comments On Nerds And Hipsters
April 27, 2023 · Original source
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Followup: Quests And Requests
November 10, 2023 · Original source
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In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruism
November 28, 2023 · Original source
Become so influential in AI-related legislation that Politico accuses effective altruists of having “[taken] over Washington” and “largely dominating the UK’s efforts to regulate advanced AI”.
Inline links: “[taken] over Washington”, “largely dominating the UK’s efforts to regulate advanced AI”
Played a big part in creating the YIMBY movement - I’m as surprised by this one as you are, but see footnote for evidence17. I think other people are probably thinking of this as par for the course - all of these seem like the sort of thing a big movement should be able to do. But I remember when EA was three philosophers and few weird Bay Area nerds with a blog. It clawed its way up into the kind of movement that could do these sorts of things by having all the virtues it claims to have: dedication, rationality, and (I think) genuine desire to make the world a better place. II. Still not impressed? Recently, in the US alone, effective altruists have: ended all gun violence, including mass shootings and police shootings
Inline links: 17
People aren’t acting like EA has ended gun violence and cured AIDS and so on. all those things. Probably this is because those are exciting popular causes in the news, and saving people in developing countries isn’t. Most people care so little about saving lives in developing countries that effective altruists can save 200,000 of them and people will just not notice. “Oh, all your movement ever does is cause corporate boardroom drama, and maybe other things I’m forgetting right now.”
Contra DeBoer On Movement Shell Games
November 30, 2023 · Original source
I think less than a tenth of people do (1), less than a tenth of those people do (2), and less than a tenth of people who would hypothetically endorse both of those get to (3). I think most of the people who do all three of these would self-identify as effective altruists (maybe adjusted for EA being too small to fully capture any demographic?) and most of the people who don’t, wouldn’t.
Followup to: In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruism
Inline links: In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruism
Freddie deBoer says effective altruism is “a shell game”:
Inline links: is “a shell game”
Open Thread 305
December 04, 2023 · Original source
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Highlights From The Comments On Capitalism & Charity
January 11, 2024 · Original source
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Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 - Call For Organizers
March 08, 2024 · Original source
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Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
March 30, 2024 · Original source
BELGRADE Contact: Tanja Contact Info: tanja[dot]trninic[at]efektivnialtruizam[dot]rs Time: Sunday, April 7th, 2:00 PM Location: Venezelosova 20, Belgrade, Serbia. Effective Altruism Serbia is organizing a casual hang out + lunch in vegan and low-waste Kafe VeZa Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GP2RFC9+36 Group Link: https://efektivnialtruizam.rs/ Notes: Please RSVP to tanja.trninic@efektivnialtruizam.rs so we can reserve enough tables for everyone.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8GP2RFC9+36, https://efektivnialtruizam.rs/
Profile: The Far Out Initiative
May 15, 2024 · Original source
If the effective altruists are firmly on the Plato/Marx side of the divide, developing the Buddhist/Stoic version of transhumanist utilitarianism fell to David Pearce.
This is Pearce’s thesis. It’s not as popular as the normal effective altruism that just tries to help solve poverty and cure diseases. While Ord and Bostrom and MacAskill got followers and press coverage and friendly billionaires, Pearce and his movement (“suffering abolitionism”) got a few very devoted email correspondents.
Contra Stone On EA
May 30, 2024 · Original source
According to Rethink Priorities, the organization that keeps track of this kind of thing, there were about 7,400 active effective altruists in 2020 (90% CI: 4,700 - 10,000). Growth rate was 14% per year but has probably gone down lately, so there are probably around 10,000 now. This matches other sources for high engagement with EA ideas (8,898 people have signed the Giving What We Can pledge).
Inline links: According to Rethink Priorities,, have signed
Suppose that the Bay Area contains 25% of all the effective altruists in the world. That means it has 2,500 effective altruists. Its total population is about 10 million. So effective altruists are 1/4000th of the Bay Area population.
Suppose that the average person gives 3% of their income to charity per year, and the average effective altruist gives 10%. The Bay Area with no effective altruists donates an average of 3%. Add in the 2,500 effective altruists, and the average goes up to . . . 3.0025%. Stone’s graph is in 0.5 pp intervals. So this methodology is way too underpowered to detect any effect even if it existed.
Meetups Everywhere Fall 2024 - Call for Organizers
August 01, 2024 · Original source
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2024
September 26, 2024 · Original source
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Open Thread 371.5
March 05, 2025 · Original source
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Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places
March 25, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Laura Contact Info: laura[period]leighton94[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, April 13th, 5:00 PM Location: The Burrow, West End - we will be downstairs and probably towards the back where it tends to be quieter Coordinates: https://plus.codes/5R4MG2C7+44M Notes: This event will be co-hosted with the regular meetup of Effective Altruism Brisbane as there's usually a ~75% overlap in attendance.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/5R4MG2C7+44M
Contact: Sam Celarek Contact Info: scelarek[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Friday, April 18th, 06:00 PM Location: 133 SE Madison Street, Portland, OR 97214 United States, Portland, OR There will be a large sign saying PEAR with a light shining on it outside the BRIDGESPACE building. Of note, the entrance is on the East side of the building! Feel free to call Sam Celarek at 5134323310 if you can't find it. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84QVG87P+7C Group Link: https://discord.gg/JwJ [remove this bit] tAJKA Notes: Feel free to bring food, but vegan food and drinks will be provided. RSVP on the meetup here: Portland Effective Altruism and Rationality (PEAR): https://meetu.ps/e/NV6r6/Ywbrj/i
Inline links: https://plus.codes/84QVG87P+7C, https://meetu.ps/e/NV6r6/Ywbrj/i
Links For December 2025
December 10, 2025 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Open Thread 428
April 06, 2026 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
EU14 mentions across 14 issues

EU is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 14 times across 14 issues between March 15, 2021 and November 01, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "The EU ends the year with more confirmed Covid-19 deaths than the US"; "The EU ends the year with more confirmed Covid-19 deaths"; "The EU also put its tacit blessings behind the coup". It most often appears alongside US, China, United States.

Article page
EU
Mention count
14
Issue count
14
First seen
March 15, 2021
Last seen
November 01, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Mantic Monday: Mantic Matt Y
March 15, 2021 · Original source
1. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock win the Georgia Senate races 2. The same party wins both Senate races in Georgia 3. Joe Biden ends the year with his approval rating higher than his disapproval rating 4. Joe Biden ends the year with his approval rating above 50% 5. US GDP growth in 2021 is the fastest of any year of the 21st century 6. The year-end unemployment rate is below 5 percent 7. The year-end unemployment rate is above 4 percent 8. Lakers win the NBA championship 9. Joe Biden ends the year as president 10. Nancy Pelosi sets a definitive retirement schedule 11. A vacancy arises on the Supreme Court 12. The EU ends the year with more confirmed Covid-19 deaths than the US 13. Substack will still be around 14. People will still be writing takes asking if Substack is really sustainable 15. Apple releases new iMacs powered by Apple silicon 16. Apple does not release a new Mac Pro powered by Apple silicon 17. Monthly year-on-year core CPI growth does not go above 2 percent 18. Monthly year-on-year core CPI growth does not go above 3 percent 19. Lloyd Austin not confirmed as Defense Secretary 20. No federal tax increases are enacted 21. Biden administration unilaterally relieves some but not all student debt 22. United States rejoins JCPOA and Iran resumes compliance 23. Israel and Saudi Arabia establish official diplomatic relations 24. US and China reach agreement to lift Trump-era tariffs 25. Slow Boring will exceed 10,000 paid members
1. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock win the Georgia Senate races (60%) 2. The same party wins both Senate races in Georgia (95%) 3. Joe Biden ends the year with his approval rating higher than his disapproval rating (70%) [83%] 4. Joe Biden ends the year with his approval rating above 50% (60%) [60%] 5. US GDP growth in 2021 is the fastest of any year of the 21st century (80%) [84%] 6. The year-end unemployment rate is below 5 percent (80%) 7. The year-end unemployment rate is above 4 percent (80%) 8. Lakers win the NBA championship (25%) [25%] 9. Joe Biden ends the year as president (95%) [96%] 10. Nancy Pelosi sets a definitive retirement schedule (60%) 11. A vacancy arises on the Supreme Court (70%) [50%] 12. The EU ends the year with more confirmed Covid-19 deaths than the US (60%) [80%] 13. Substack will still be around (95%) 14. People will still be writing takes asking if Substack is really sustainable (80%) 15. Apple releases new iMacs powered by Apple silicon (90%) [84%] 16. Apple does not release a new Mac Pro powered by Apple silicon (70%) [53%] 17. Monthly year-on-year core CPI growth does not go above 2 percent (70%) 18. Monthly year-on-year core CPI growth does not go above 3 percent (90%) 19. Lloyd Austin not confirmed as Defense Secretary (60%) 20. No federal tax increases are enacted (95%) 21. Biden administration unilaterally relieves some but not all student debt (80%) 22. United States rejoins JCPOA and Iran resumes compliance (80%) 23. Israel and Saudi Arabia establish official diplomatic relations (70%) [38%] 24. US and China reach agreement to lift Trump-era tariffs (70%) 25. Slow Boring will exceed 10,000 paid members (70%) [75%]
Book Review: The New Sultan
March 18, 2021 · Original source
Washington acquiesed in the "soft coup", if tacitly. US secretary of state Madeleine Albright explained on July 11, 1997 that while military intervention was not necessarily "a silver bullet" to Turkey's problems, the US had "made very clear that it is essential that Turkey continue in a secular, democratic way." The EU also put its tacit blessings behind the coup, saying that while it was "concerned at the implications for democratic pluralism and freedom of expression," "this decision [the coup] is in accordance with the provisions of the Turkish Constitution".
2020 Predictions: Calibration Results
April 05, 2021 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Your Book Review: The Accidental Superpower
May 21, 2021 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Highlights From The Comments On Orban
November 11, 2021 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Highlights From The Comments On Health Care Systems
January 27, 2022 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Ukraine Warcasting
March 01, 2022 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Ukraine Thoughts And Links
March 08, 2022 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Your Book Review: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy
June 24, 2022 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Why Not Slow AI Progress?
August 08, 2022 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Grading My 2018 Predictions For 2023
February 20, 2023 · Original source
The European Union will not collapse. It will get some credibility from everyone hating its enemies – Brexit, the nationalist right, etc – and some more credibility by being halfway-competent at its economic mission. Nobody will secede from anywhere. The crisis of nationalism will briefly die down as the shock of Syrian refugees wears off, then reignite (possibly after 2023) with the focus on African migrants. At some point European Muslims may decide they don’t like African migrants much either, at which point there may be some very weird alliances.
The Question Of Separatism
May 19, 2023 · Original source
… and we think, thank goodness that Germany is unified now. So much easier to think about! Can you imagine if the Our World in Data charts had to show separate lines for the Electorate of Saxony, the Prince-Bishopric of Augsburg, the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg, and about 1,800 other semi-sovereign states? Can you imagine traveling around if each of them had its own currency? (Fun fact: the List of states in the Holy Roman Empire Wikipedia page doesn’t contain such a list. Instead it points to no less than 28 sub-lists.) Jacobs stops shy of asking, in either book, the question that seems to be the logical continuation of her reasoning: should everything be a city-state? Should we encourage separatism until each inhabited place in the world is either a city or a city region with its own currency? We can hazard a guess as to what her answer would be. She would probably say that there’s no need to upend everything right this moment. Just adopt an attitude of political openness and experimentation. Don’t try to hold together entities that don’t work that well. When separatist sentiment arises somewhere, you can argue it’s a bad idea, but don’t fight it out of emotion such as fear for your nation’s integrity. Eventually, things will settle — the regions that want to be city-states will be, and those that prefer to be united with others, for cultural or economic reasons, will stay that way. Unity has good PR and some genuine advantages, so there will still be plenty of it. But maybe Jane Jacobs never asks this question because she knows it’s irrelevant. We just can’t help fighting for our big countries and supranational unions (like the EU), and too bad if they enter long periods of stagflation until they violently collapse. This might be the right time to mention that her last book, published in 2004, is called Dark Age Ahead. IV. Something to Dislike For Everyone Jane Jacobs’s most famous book is The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She is recognized as perhaps the most influential thinker in urbanism. She is credited with saving Greenwich Village and SoHo in New York City, and helping cancel the Spadina Expressway in Toronto. To this day people organize “Jane’s Walks” as a living memorial to her impact on cities. But Jane Jacobs herself thought that her greatest intellectual contribution was not in city planning, but in economics. She thought that import replacement was her most important discovery, since it explained how wealth expands better than existing macroeconomic theories. She wrote multiple books that were explicitly about economics and was about to write another when she died, Uncovering the Economy. I am not an economist, so I might not be qualified to make a judgment on this matter, but: it seems to me that there’s a discrepancy here. Jacobs is widely seen as a great intellectual, but her economic ideas don’t quite seem mainstream. I’d never heard of import replacement before reading her book. Why not? The null hypothesis is that economists have examined her ideas and simply rejected them. There were some critical academic reviews of Cities and the Wealth of Nations when it came out, and more recently Tyler Cowen expressed his own mild skepticism. Some of the criticism involves the lack of quantitative data in her work, and her failure to think about issues of scale. The most obvious target, of course, is her city obsession: yes, cities are important, but they’re not the only economic phenomenon that matters, some would say. Perhaps Jacobs has overplayed her hand. But there are other possible explanations for the discrepancy. One is that she was a woman and had no credentials, which made it difficult for (mostly male) professionals to take her seriously. We know this was true at the beginning of her career at least. It seems possible that even after she managed to establish herself as an original urban thinker, economists had trouble accepting that she could, with her lack of any college degree, come up with new insights in their field. I doubt that’s really true today, though. We do take Jacobs seriously, and still read all of her books, which is more than we could say about most economists. Instead, I propose that the discrepancy comes from a darker place: in laboring to be comprehensive about cities and economics, she reached conclusions that most people don’t want to be true. No matter your politics, there’ll be something for you to dislike in Jacobs’s work. For example, it’s pretty clear that she didn’t think the European Union was a good idea, so she probably would have supported Brexit. Brexiters might rejoice, except that a lot of them are British nationalists who certainly don’t want Scotland to leave the UK, whereas Jacobs would agree with that. Which would be great news to Scottish independentists — except that if a new separatist movement arose within Scotland, she’d also support that. Jacobs’s ideas and grassroots activism in favor of small-scale, organic urban planning have come to be seen as left-wing — yet her criticism of national welfare programs wouldn’t make her out of place among hardcore right-wingers. Unless those right-wingers were military hawks, in which case they’d find no solace in reading Jacobs on military transactions of decline. Writing during the Cold War, Jacobs criticized the Soviet Union for its incredible centralization of decision-making in Moscow. She rightfully predicted its collapse, making her an ideological ally of the capitalist West, right? Not so, since the United States is also, according to her, too centralized and in the early stages of decay. “Today the Soviet Union and the United States each predicts and anticipates the economic decline of the other,” she writes. “Neither will be disappointed.” Whether she was correct about the US is left as an exercise to the reader. In any case, she did foresee, using her theory on cities, the decline of Japan. This must have been bold in the 1980s at the peak of the Japanese economic miracle, when there was a widespread trope that Japan would soon take over the world. Yet she was right: in 1991, Japan entered its “lost decade,” which soon became two lost decades, and then three. To be fair, she predicted the decline of all large-ish countries, so I wouldn’t mark her as a superforecaster or anything. Still, this puts in perspective the more recent trope that China is going to take over the world. No country, no ideology is safe from Jacobs’s prophecies. Smaller ideologies aren’t spared, either. Effective altruism would probably seem totally mistaken to her, since at its core it promotes an inorganic, top-down transfer of wealth from prosperous cities to poor areas. Progress studies people think that technological innovation will solve economic stagnation, but she would point out how labor-saving equipment so often causes damage when it is introduced to regions that don’t benefit from the other city forces, like the Scottish Highlands or many of her other examples in Colombia, India, or the American South. (This point would deserve an essay of its own, but reading Jacobs has made me a bit more worried about the “AI will take our jobs” thing. It’s clear that new jobs will appear, but when the technology city force from the San Francisco Bay Area reaches distant places with poor economies, which it will very soon thanks to the internet, the effects might not be very pleasant to see.) Overall, the political ideology that might fit Jacobs the best might be… libertarianism? She’s not a big fan of large governments who make big top-down decisions, clearly. Yet I don’t get the feeling that this association fits all that well either. Jacobs doesn’t seem to be anti-government if the government is at the city level. I doubt she would have liked the kind of hyperfragmented world depicted in Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. I also doubt she’d be impressed by cryptocurrency-backed “cloud cities” or fantasies of charter cities, none of which she would see as real cities in the sense of concentrated pockets of people who start replacing what they import with local production. Jane Jacobs, in sum, was an archetypal accidental moderate. She took one idea very seriously — the idea that cities are fundamental — and explored its ramifications without caring in the slightest if it led to the “wrong” opinions, as her friends in 1980 Toronto must have thought when she wrote about Quebec. I don’t know if she went too far; I’m sure someone more qualified than I am can find flaws in that core idea or any of her other observations. But to me she sounds convincing, and her consistency is frankly admirable. So, to end this review on a more review-y note, go read Jane Jacobs. Her books are a delight, with their elegant arguments and masterfully told anecdotes. Her predictions often take an air of doom, but she is also an optimist who offers constructive ways forward. She sets an example for all of us who care about getting the details right, no matter the credentialed experts, the current political climate, or the great theories of the past. Image credits Cities and the Wealth of Nations book cover: from Amazon.
Inline links: List of states in the Holy Roman Empire, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!gyMq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdc388f24-009c-42ee-adca-9d5c50faaa66_932x190.png, academic, reviews, expressed, Japan would soon take over the world, fantasies, of, charter, cities, accidental moderate, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!r8Rb!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F60621c76-b34b-4e10-b272-394480443e1b_1600x1066.png, Amazon
Highlights From The Comments On British Economic Decline
July 20, 2023 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Links For November 2024
November 01, 2024 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
European Union9 mentions across 9 issues

European Union is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 9 times across 9 issues between March 18, 2021 and October 22, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "big on joining the EU"; "Montenegro isn't technically in the European Union"; "The European Union tries to object to all this". It most often appears alongside United States, EU, Europe.

Article page
European Union
Mention count
9
Issue count
9
First seen
March 18, 2021
Last seen
October 22, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Book Review: The New Sultan
March 18, 2021 · Original source
So he waited a couple of years until his ban expired, then founded the No, Really, Totally Not Islamist At All, Trust Us This Time Party (AKP). The AKP was officially center-right. It was liberal capitalist, pro-West, pro-human-rights, and big on joining the EU - all things that gave it apparently unimpeachable non-Islamist credentials. Lots of actual center-rightists joined up, noticing that Erdogan was a better leader than any of the clowns in the Turkish center-right up to that point. "Ak" is Turkish for "white", so the AK Party was also the White Party, ie the party of being clean and pure and uncorrupt, a popular message in 90s Turkey. They won elections in a landslide, and Erdogan became Prime Minister.
Model City Monday
July 05, 2021 · Original source
Problem: Montenegro isn't technically in the European Union, which makes it hard to move to (although it is expected to be accepted in soon). Also, if you did move there, you would be a resident and not a citizen, which limits your ability to influence the political process. Also, European libertarians are kind of like cryptids: often rumored to exist, rarely spotted.
Dictator Book Club: Orban
November 04, 2021 · Original source
The European Union tries to object to all this. But Hungary is in the EU, and Orban’s party is in a pretty big coalition with a lot of other parties that don’t really want to mess with him. Also, from the New Yorker:
Inline links: New Yorker
Highlights From The Comments On Orban
November 11, 2021 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Ukraine Thoughts And Links
March 08, 2022 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Your Book Review: The Future Of Fusion Energy
June 17, 2022 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
The Question Of Separatism
May 19, 2023 · Original source
… and we think, thank goodness that Germany is unified now. So much easier to think about! Can you imagine if the Our World in Data charts had to show separate lines for the Electorate of Saxony, the Prince-Bishopric of Augsburg, the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg, and about 1,800 other semi-sovereign states? Can you imagine traveling around if each of them had its own currency? (Fun fact: the List of states in the Holy Roman Empire Wikipedia page doesn’t contain such a list. Instead it points to no less than 28 sub-lists.) Jacobs stops shy of asking, in either book, the question that seems to be the logical continuation of her reasoning: should everything be a city-state? Should we encourage separatism until each inhabited place in the world is either a city or a city region with its own currency? We can hazard a guess as to what her answer would be. She would probably say that there’s no need to upend everything right this moment. Just adopt an attitude of political openness and experimentation. Don’t try to hold together entities that don’t work that well. When separatist sentiment arises somewhere, you can argue it’s a bad idea, but don’t fight it out of emotion such as fear for your nation’s integrity. Eventually, things will settle — the regions that want to be city-states will be, and those that prefer to be united with others, for cultural or economic reasons, will stay that way. Unity has good PR and some genuine advantages, so there will still be plenty of it. But maybe Jane Jacobs never asks this question because she knows it’s irrelevant. We just can’t help fighting for our big countries and supranational unions (like the EU), and too bad if they enter long periods of stagflation until they violently collapse. This might be the right time to mention that her last book, published in 2004, is called Dark Age Ahead. IV. Something to Dislike For Everyone Jane Jacobs’s most famous book is The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She is recognized as perhaps the most influential thinker in urbanism. She is credited with saving Greenwich Village and SoHo in New York City, and helping cancel the Spadina Expressway in Toronto. To this day people organize “Jane’s Walks” as a living memorial to her impact on cities. But Jane Jacobs herself thought that her greatest intellectual contribution was not in city planning, but in economics. She thought that import replacement was her most important discovery, since it explained how wealth expands better than existing macroeconomic theories. She wrote multiple books that were explicitly about economics and was about to write another when she died, Uncovering the Economy. I am not an economist, so I might not be qualified to make a judgment on this matter, but: it seems to me that there’s a discrepancy here. Jacobs is widely seen as a great intellectual, but her economic ideas don’t quite seem mainstream. I’d never heard of import replacement before reading her book. Why not? The null hypothesis is that economists have examined her ideas and simply rejected them. There were some critical academic reviews of Cities and the Wealth of Nations when it came out, and more recently Tyler Cowen expressed his own mild skepticism. Some of the criticism involves the lack of quantitative data in her work, and her failure to think about issues of scale. The most obvious target, of course, is her city obsession: yes, cities are important, but they’re not the only economic phenomenon that matters, some would say. Perhaps Jacobs has overplayed her hand. But there are other possible explanations for the discrepancy. One is that she was a woman and had no credentials, which made it difficult for (mostly male) professionals to take her seriously. We know this was true at the beginning of her career at least. It seems possible that even after she managed to establish herself as an original urban thinker, economists had trouble accepting that she could, with her lack of any college degree, come up with new insights in their field. I doubt that’s really true today, though. We do take Jacobs seriously, and still read all of her books, which is more than we could say about most economists. Instead, I propose that the discrepancy comes from a darker place: in laboring to be comprehensive about cities and economics, she reached conclusions that most people don’t want to be true. No matter your politics, there’ll be something for you to dislike in Jacobs’s work. For example, it’s pretty clear that she didn’t think the European Union was a good idea, so she probably would have supported Brexit. Brexiters might rejoice, except that a lot of them are British nationalists who certainly don’t want Scotland to leave the UK, whereas Jacobs would agree with that. Which would be great news to Scottish independentists — except that if a new separatist movement arose within Scotland, she’d also support that. Jacobs’s ideas and grassroots activism in favor of small-scale, organic urban planning have come to be seen as left-wing — yet her criticism of national welfare programs wouldn’t make her out of place among hardcore right-wingers. Unless those right-wingers were military hawks, in which case they’d find no solace in reading Jacobs on military transactions of decline. Writing during the Cold War, Jacobs criticized the Soviet Union for its incredible centralization of decision-making in Moscow. She rightfully predicted its collapse, making her an ideological ally of the capitalist West, right? Not so, since the United States is also, according to her, too centralized and in the early stages of decay. “Today the Soviet Union and the United States each predicts and anticipates the economic decline of the other,” she writes. “Neither will be disappointed.” Whether she was correct about the US is left as an exercise to the reader. In any case, she did foresee, using her theory on cities, the decline of Japan. This must have been bold in the 1980s at the peak of the Japanese economic miracle, when there was a widespread trope that Japan would soon take over the world. Yet she was right: in 1991, Japan entered its “lost decade,” which soon became two lost decades, and then three. To be fair, she predicted the decline of all large-ish countries, so I wouldn’t mark her as a superforecaster or anything. Still, this puts in perspective the more recent trope that China is going to take over the world. No country, no ideology is safe from Jacobs’s prophecies. Smaller ideologies aren’t spared, either. Effective altruism would probably seem totally mistaken to her, since at its core it promotes an inorganic, top-down transfer of wealth from prosperous cities to poor areas. Progress studies people think that technological innovation will solve economic stagnation, but she would point out how labor-saving equipment so often causes damage when it is introduced to regions that don’t benefit from the other city forces, like the Scottish Highlands or many of her other examples in Colombia, India, or the American South. (This point would deserve an essay of its own, but reading Jacobs has made me a bit more worried about the “AI will take our jobs” thing. It’s clear that new jobs will appear, but when the technology city force from the San Francisco Bay Area reaches distant places with poor economies, which it will very soon thanks to the internet, the effects might not be very pleasant to see.) Overall, the political ideology that might fit Jacobs the best might be… libertarianism? She’s not a big fan of large governments who make big top-down decisions, clearly. Yet I don’t get the feeling that this association fits all that well either. Jacobs doesn’t seem to be anti-government if the government is at the city level. I doubt she would have liked the kind of hyperfragmented world depicted in Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. I also doubt she’d be impressed by cryptocurrency-backed “cloud cities” or fantasies of charter cities, none of which she would see as real cities in the sense of concentrated pockets of people who start replacing what they import with local production. Jane Jacobs, in sum, was an archetypal accidental moderate. She took one idea very seriously — the idea that cities are fundamental — and explored its ramifications without caring in the slightest if it led to the “wrong” opinions, as her friends in 1980 Toronto must have thought when she wrote about Quebec. I don’t know if she went too far; I’m sure someone more qualified than I am can find flaws in that core idea or any of her other observations. But to me she sounds convincing, and her consistency is frankly admirable. So, to end this review on a more review-y note, go read Jane Jacobs. Her books are a delight, with their elegant arguments and masterfully told anecdotes. Her predictions often take an air of doom, but she is also an optimist who offers constructive ways forward. She sets an example for all of us who care about getting the details right, no matter the credentialed experts, the current political climate, or the great theories of the past. Image credits Cities and the Wealth of Nations book cover: from Amazon.
Inline links: List of states in the Holy Roman Empire, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!gyMq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdc388f24-009c-42ee-adca-9d5c50faaa66_932x190.png, academic, reviews, expressed, Japan would soon take over the world, fantasies, of, charter, cities, accidental moderate, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!r8Rb!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F60621c76-b34b-4e10-b272-394480443e1b_1600x1066.png, Amazon
1DaySooner's Trump II Health Policy Proposals
February 07, 2025 · Original source
Regulatory Reciprocity: I will keep this one in here until somebody does something about it. It’s the idea that Americans should be allowed to buy medical products if they’ve been approved by some trusted ally, like the European Union, possibly in exchange for the EU giving FDA-approved products the same deal in Europe. This has been amply championed by Alex Tabarrok and the Mercatus crowd for years, and is starting to make inroads in other countries. If full reciprocity is a step too far, 1DaySooner proposes Makary build off innovative pilot programs like Project Orbis, which enables concurrent submissions and reviews of oncology drugs by multiple regulatory agencies, and the CoGenT pilot, which does the same for cell and gene therapies.
Inline links: Alex Tabarrok, Mercatus, starting to make inroads
My Antichrist Lecture
October 22, 2025 · Original source
Yes! Just last year, researchers found that forehead creases were actually a cutting-edge biometric target, and suggested them as a superior alternative to fingerprints (contactless) and facial recognition (blocked by masks during a pandemic). This section suggests that Anthropic will come up with its own proof-of-personhood scheme, superior to OpenAI’s WorldCoin in that it uses the newer forehead-based biometric recognition (with the more commonly-used handprint as a backup). We’ll discuss more about why you might not want to be in their database later. The Woman Of The Apocalypse Revelation 12:1 introduces an unnamed figure commonly called the Woman of the Apocalypse: And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars. The woman gives birth to a son, who is implied to be the Messiah. Satan tries to kill the son, so the mother flees with her child to Heaven, where she waits for 1,260 days. This is obviously a reference to the Virgin Mary and Christ, but (as per the multilayered symbolism of Revelation) somehow also a reference to some specific person in the End Times. I originally couldn’t figure out who that person was, but a now-deactivated Tumblr poster, resinsculpture, convinced me that it was Ursula von der Leyen, current president of the European Union. Here is a typical official picture of von der Leyen. She is in her trademark yellow suit (“clothed with the sun”), standing with her head centered in the twelve stars of the EU flag (“upon her head a crown of twelve stars”). In what sense is “the moon under her feet”? In her role as President, von der Leyen stands above, and frequently addresses, the European Parliament, which looks like this: The Parliament, also known as the Hemicycle, takes the shape of a half (or slightly crescent) moon. When von der Leyen stands in her yellow suit, in front of the Parliament, with the flag behind her, she is “clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars”.2 Von der Leyen is one of the leaders behind the EU’s push to become a “regulatory superpower”, which has born fruit in some surprisingly promising AI regulations. In particular, Europe has been especially strict on biometric proof-of-personhood: If the apocalypse involves a rogue Anthropic model somehow empowered by proof-of-personhood, Europe is one of the best candidates to resist. Von der Leyen, then, stands as a metonymy for the European Union as a bulwark for the forces of Good. The Witnesses / The Lamb Of God The Lamb is John’s version of the Messiah or the Second Coming. He gives us two clues about its identity. First, Revelation 11:3: And I will appoint my two witnesses, and they will prophesy for 1,260 days, clothed in sackcloth. The Lamb will be preceded by two witnesses. Revelation itself does not name them, but Jewish tradition says that one will be the prophet Elijah. Second, 12:1: And I looked, and, lo, a Lamb stood on Mount Zion, and with him a hundred forty and four thousand, having his Father’s name written in their foreheads. The Lamb will stand on Mount Zion. This is a specific mountain in Jerusalem, but also a poetic name for Israel (for example, “Zionism” = support for Israel). So we are looking for someone or something in Israel, which is being heralded by Elijah. The name Elijah is different in different languages, but the Russian version is “Ilya”. And in fact, famous AI scientist Ilya Sutskever recently founded an Israel-based AI company called “Safe Superintelligence”: Is there some sense in which Ilya Sutskever has “his Father’s name written on [his] forehead”? As weird as it sounds, I think this one might just be literally true. There is some kind of unusual pattern on his forehead (image source). I cannot make heads or tails of it right-side-up, but when I flip it over… …it appears to be the Name of God in Hebrew. In our working hypothesis, Ilya is Elijah, the First Witness3, which suggests that the one he is heralding - that is, the Safe Superintelligence which is to be built by his company - is the Lamb of God, the Messiah that will defeat the unsafe superintelligences produced by Anthropic and other companies. The Antichrist / The Dragon Revelation doesn’t use the word “Antichrist” - the concept comes from from the separate Epistles of John, which may or may not be by the same author. Most scholars identify the Epistle’s Antichrist with Revelation’s Beast, but I dissent: we hypothesize the Beast to be a company, but I can’t get past the elegance of having the Antichrist be - like the Christ - a particular individual. I prefer to identify him with a different character in Revelation, namely the Dragon. On the level of Biblical narrative - the same level where the Woman is the Virgin Mary - the Dragon is clearly Satan. On the level of apocalyptic prophecy, he may additionally represent an individual from our own age. Who? John says (13:2 - 13:4) The dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and great authority . . . People worshiped the dragon, because he had given authority to the beast. We saw above that the Beast is a company. Who gives companies their power, then demands to be worshiped by them? Obviously VCs. And in fact, venture capitalists are often identified with dragons in the popular imagination: But which venture capitalist? Plenty of people have claimed to know secret ways to identify the Antichrist, but surely the best-credentialled expert here is the Pope, and according to Wikipedia: Pope Pius IX in the encyclical Quartus Supra, quoting Cyprian, said Satan disguises the Antichrist with the title of Christ. What is the title of Christ? In the Bible, we find two common titles: “The Son of Man” (Matthew 12:32, Luke 12:8, John 1:51)
Inline links: Yes!, resinsculpture, Ursula von der Leyen, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!plab!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fed45366f-e577-4e7a-9161-27d692d8f031_862x575.avif, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!lAgG!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa5c91f3a-873f-4b73-b68d-bc14a7cfffc9_600x314.jpeg, 2, surprisingly promising AI regulations, especially strict on biometric proof-of-personhood, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Vntf!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffcab19e9-c8f0-4996-9fb1-942061463e5d_839x520.png, says, Ilya, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!pdG7!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd81ef77a-d6d6-41dc-9281-3f0d55702f2a_1210x510.png, image source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!1eC5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffb37f1e4-9cbc-4153-b20a-8e879ad753ce_1711x719.png, Name of God in Hebrew, 3, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!W4E8!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc7d2847a-aba1-42a7-b376-9f6e0fd319f0_841x468.png, according to Wikipedia
If the apocalypse involves a rogue Anthropic model somehow empowered by proof-of-personhood, Europe is one of the best candidates to resist. Von der Leyen, then, stands as a metonymy for the European Union as a bulwark for the forces of Good. The Witnesses / The Lamb Of God The Lamb is John’s version of the Messiah or the Second Coming. He gives us two clues about its identity. First, Revelation 11:3: And I will appoint my two witnesses, and they will prophesy for 1,260 days, clothed in sackcloth. The Lamb will be preceded by two witnesses. Revelation itself does not name them, but Jewish tradition says that one will be the prophet Elijah. Second, 12:1: And I looked, and, lo, a Lamb stood on Mount Zion, and with him a hundred forty and four thousand, having his Father’s name written in their foreheads. The Lamb will stand on Mount Zion. This is a specific mountain in Jerusalem, but also a poetic name for Israel (for example, “Zionism” = support for Israel). So we are looking for someone or something in Israel, which is being heralded by Elijah. The name Elijah is different in different languages, but the Russian version is “Ilya”. And in fact, famous AI scientist Ilya Sutskever recently founded an Israel-based AI company called “Safe Superintelligence”: Is there some sense in which Ilya Sutskever has “his Father’s name written on [his] forehead”? As weird as it sounds, I think this one might just be literally true. There is some kind of unusual pattern on his forehead (image source). I cannot make heads or tails of it right-side-up, but when I flip it over… …it appears to be the Name of God in Hebrew. In our working hypothesis, Ilya is Elijah, the First Witness3, which suggests that the one he is heralding - that is, the Safe Superintelligence which is to be built by his company - is the Lamb of God, the Messiah that will defeat the unsafe superintelligences produced by Anthropic and other companies. The Antichrist / The Dragon Revelation doesn’t use the word “Antichrist” - the concept comes from from the separate Epistles of John, which may or may not be by the same author. Most scholars identify the Epistle’s Antichrist with Revelation’s Beast, but I dissent: we hypothesize the Beast to be a company, but I can’t get past the elegance of having the Antichrist be - like the Christ - a particular individual. I prefer to identify him with a different character in Revelation, namely the Dragon. On the level of Biblical narrative - the same level where the Woman is the Virgin Mary - the Dragon is clearly Satan. On the level of apocalyptic prophecy, he may additionally represent an individual from our own age. Who? John says (13:2 - 13:4) The dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and great authority . . . People worshiped the dragon, because he had given authority to the beast. We saw above that the Beast is a company. Who gives companies their power, then demands to be worshiped by them? Obviously VCs. And in fact, venture capitalists are often identified with dragons in the popular imagination: But which venture capitalist? Plenty of people have claimed to know secret ways to identify the Antichrist, but surely the best-credentialled expert here is the Pope, and according to Wikipedia: Pope Pius IX in the encyclical Quartus Supra, quoting Cyprian, said Satan disguises the Antichrist with the title of Christ. What is the title of Christ? In the Bible, we find two common titles: “The Son of Man” (Matthew 12:32, Luke 12:8, John 1:51)
Inline links: says, Ilya, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!pdG7!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd81ef77a-d6d6-41dc-9281-3f0d55702f2a_1210x510.png, image source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!1eC5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffb37f1e4-9cbc-4153-b20a-8e879ad753ce_1711x719.png, Name of God in Hebrew, 3, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!W4E8!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc7d2847a-aba1-42a7-b376-9f6e0fd319f0_841x468.png, according to Wikipedia
EA Forum8 mentions across 8 issues

EA Forum is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 8 times across 8 issues between December 30, 2021 and November 01, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "23: EA Forum: Movement building at top universities"; "The EA Forum and Kelsey Piper have discussions"; "John Halstead on the EA Forum". It most often appears alongside US, Elon Musk, Richard Hanania.

Article page
EA Forum
Mention count
8
Issue count
8
First seen
December 30, 2021
Last seen
November 01, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Links For December
December 30, 2021 · Original source
23: EA Forum: Movement building at top universities
Inline links: Movement building at top universities
Ukraine Thoughts And Links
March 08, 2022 · Original source
m. The EA Forum and Kelsey Piper have discussions on how best to help Ukrainians (this is still not the most efficient way to spend charitable donations - but it’s human to care about things other than efficiency). Ideas range from Polish Humanitarian Action (to help Ukrainian refugees in Poland) to Meduza (opposition Russian news source, apparently still sort of holding on) to direct donations to Ukraine’s Ministry of Health or Ministry of Defence.
Inline links: EA Forum, Kelsey Piper, Polish Humanitarian Action, Meduza, direct donations to Ukraine’s Ministry of Health or Ministry of Defence
Links For June
July 01, 2022 · Original source
55: Should environmentalists buy coal mines to prevent the coal from being mined and burnt? John Halstead on the EA Forum explains why this is financially, legally, and logistically difficult.
Inline links: why this is financially, legally, and logistically difficult
Links For October
October 12, 2022 · Original source
10: Vadim Albinsky on EA Forum: Is it really true that economic growth doesn’t increase happiness? Concludes that this is a pretty weak finding which goes away if you choose to do the analysis a little differently.
Inline links: Is it really true that economic growth doesn’t increase happiness?
16: Yitz on EA Forum: Public Facing [AI] Censorship Is Safety Theater. Big AI companies have whole teams that spend months making sure their AI will refuse to draw boobs or swastikas. Then two weeks later some scrappy open source team releases a copy that can draw as many swastika-covered boobs as you want. Given that all the “Trust And Safety” stuff seems more about protecting AI companies’ reputations than really preventing boobs or swastikas from being drawn, what are we actually doing here? Is it damaging public trust in AI safety? Producing false confidence? Muddying the waters? I guess I should be in favor of this if it wastes AI talent that would otherwise be going to capabilities research - but as a social phenomenon it’s pretty strange.
Inline links: Public Facing [AI] Censorship Is Safety Theater
30: Stephen McAleese on EA Forum: Estimating the current and future number of AI safety researchers. There are probably about 300 AI safety researchers in the world [insert appropriate caveats], and their number seems to be increasing by about 28% per year (or 10x per decade); at this rate there will be 1500 in 2030. Does that mean that If we can make it another 60 years, every living human will be an AI safety researcher, there will be nobody left to work on capabilities, and the problem will be solved by default?
Inline links: Estimating the current and future number of AI safety researchers
2023
January 31, 2023 · Original source
This was a helpful reminder that Metaculus is a real organization, not just a site I go to sometimes to check the probabilities of things. The company is run remotely; catching nine of them in a room together was a happy coincidence. Although I think it still relies heavily on grants, Metaculus’ theoretical business model is to create forecasts on important topics for organizations that want them (“partners”) - so far including universities, tech companies, and charities. A typical example is this recent forecasting tournament on the spread of COVID in Virginia, run in partnership with the Virginia Department of Health and the University of Virginia Biocomplexity Institute (this year’s version here). The main bottleneck is interest from policy-makers, which they’re trying to solve both through product improvement and public education. In December, Metaculus’ Director of Nuclear Risk, Peter Scoblic, published an article in Foreign Affairs magazine about forecasting’s “struggle for legitimacy” in the foreign policy world. It’s paywalled, but quoting liberally: Organizational change is difficult under the best of circumstances and is close to impossible when powerful insiders actively resist it. National security experts with decades of experience and access to classified information see little reason for deferring to the upstart winners of forecasting tournaments, contests that allow the public to compete at putting realistic odds on future events. Perhaps they are concerned that as forecasters get better at geopolitical analysis, they will threaten the notion of expertise and the professional identities of those who supply it. But forecasting should be seen as a complement to expert analysis, not a substitute for it. The same situation obtains among the corps of foreign-policy columnists, think tank fellows, and former government officials who wield more influence for the confidence of their convictions than for the precision of their predictions. There is little incentive for such analysts to ask when they have been wrong and why—questions that top forecasters must constantly confront if they are to maintain their place in the accuracy hierarchy. Instead, the “thought leader” ecosystem insulates the careers of people who would have washed out of any geopolitical forecasting tournament. It concludes: All this suggests that to make forecasting a resource that policymakers use, the quality of both supply and demand needs to improve. The former requires giving subject-matter experts a role in producing forecasts—in formulating questions (because they know which indicators are most germane) and in vetting the rationales that inform forecasts (because they can gut-check causal claims and fact-check evidence). The latter requires making the national security establishment more numerate or at least more open to quantitative appraisals of the future. These are challenging tasks, but forecasting scholars are already testing methods for not only measuring the best forecasts but also judging the most persuasive rationales for those forecasts. For example: What story best conveys that there is a 10–15 percent chance of between one and three million people dying in the Ukraine war by the end of 2024? Where forecasters provide probability, subject-matter experts can provide plausibility, making well-calibrated quantitative future estimates more convincing and palatable to policymakers—and therefore making their decisions a little less wrong. And in national security, being a little less wrong can be a lot less dangerous. These are the kinds of questions Metaculus-the-organization is thinking about, and the kinds of problems it’s trying to solve. They’ve also got some exciting ideas for making their product more policy-relevant. For example, they’re working on causal modeling, where forecasters not only predict the chance of (eg) a Russian nuclear strike, but also all of the inputs into their decision. For example, there’s a 10% chance of a strike, which comes from a 15% chance if the war in Ukraine continues vs. a 5% chance if it doesn’t. And they think there’s a 50% chance the war will continue, which comes from a 60% chance if the US stops arms shipments and a 33% chance if it doesn’t - and so on. Policymakers can play around with the causal graph, investigate which factors make a strike more vs. less likely, and check how their preferred policy would affect things they care about. For more on the intersection of forecasting and policy, see this EA Forum post. To learn more about Metaculus, follow them on Twitter or Facebook. And here’s to many millions more predictions! Taking Stock Prediction market users really want stocks. “Stock” in this sense means an instrument that measures the status of a person, group, or idea. When their status goes up, the stock goes up. When their status goes down, the stock goes down. It feels like a natural way to bet on things like “I’m bearish on Elon Musk and think everyone else is overestimating him.” It’s hard to turn this vague idea into a real financial instrument. You could try tying it to their Twitter follower count, or Google search trends, or net worth, but none of these exactly track “status”. If Musk commits murder in broad daylight, his search volume will go up, his Twitter follower count will stay about the same, his net worth might not be affected, but his status will have gone way down. The current solution is to make no effort whatsoever to moor stocks to the real world and just hope they work out. This could work! It’s kind of like a Ponzi scheme or crypto token. Some big influencer endorses MoonCoin, and MoonCoin goes up, because MoonCoin has gained status, which means more people will want to buy it, because it’s even more likely that more people will want to buy it later. Crypto tokens keep a fig leaf of “and maybe in the cyberpunk future when all transactions everywhere have switched to crypto this will really pay off”, but over time that fig leaf became increasingly threadbare, and a fun low-stakes instrument like Manifold stocks might do fine without it. But the 0% to 100% prediction scale is a bad match for stocks. If Elon started at 50% in 2000, then when Tesla made it big he surely should have doubled. And that brings him up to 100% and leaves nowhere for him to go. Also, people who bet on Elon Musk in 2000 might be miffed that their prescient choice only doubled their money. Probably the solution is some kind of cardinal number. But which one, and at what scale? Again, the lesson from crypto is that maybe it doesn’t matter. Just start at 10 or something or something and see where it ends up. Manifold leadership isn’t totally resigned yet to having stocks be meaningless Ponzi schemes. If you have a better idea for how to run stocks, leave it in the comments here and they’ll probably see it. CFTC vs. PredictIt Update So far it’s not clear if this means indefinite normal operation, or if they’ll spend the extra time trying to wind existing markets down. The overall chance of them winning their lawsuit remains unchanged at around 25%. PredictIt has gotten some sympathetic news coverage, including from the Washington Post. In the process, the Post tried to get some clarity on what terms of the no-action letter PredictIt violated, apparently without success: @CFTC why they're shutting PredictIt down. They give no real answer, just as in the original withdrawal letter. Closest thing we have to an answer is that they don't want other prediction markets. But why? No sense here at all. washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2023… ","username":"RichardHanania","name":"Richard Hanania","profile_image_url":"","date":"Tue Jan 24 18:12:59 +0000 2023","photos":[{"img_url":"https://pbs.substack.com/media/FnQbawZaYAAKRws.jpg","link_url":"https://t.co/zeKhe8sjnT","alt_text":null}],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":8,"like_count":39,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM"> @StephenPiment I'm flat appalled the CFTC said \"you violated terms\", but won't tell anyone, @PredictIt included, which ones, and then has big enough balls to try to get the judge to dismiss PI's \"shotgun\" defense. Um, with no info what other case COULD they make?\n","username":"kmett","name":"Edward Kmett","profile_image_url":"","date":"Sun Nov 27 19:01:29 +0000 2022","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":8,"like_count":21,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{"url":"https://www.bonus.com/news/cftc-predictit-hearings-coming/","image":"https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/8d5a1d5e-49ee-4294-84cd-eb5a4259bbc3_1200x800.jpeg","title":"Hearings Coming Soon in PredictIt Lawsuit, CFTC Asks to Dismiss","description":"The CFTC is seeking to have the PredictIt lawsuit dismissed, while the plaintiffs want the case fast-tracked due to the shutdown deadline.","domain":"bonus.com"},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM"> I guess they’ll have to give some kind of explanation during the hearing, right? Related: Richard Hanania has an article on How To Legalize Prediction Markets. The actual advice isn’t very surprising, and mostly boils down to “write letters to the government officials in charge of this”, but like other people I learned something new from the details: In the United States, prediction markets are, with a few minor exceptions, against the law. If you don’t have a legal background, you might think that means that Congress at some point considered the issue, decided people shouldn’t be able to bet on real world events, and passed a law to that effect, which was then signed by the president. But this is not what happened. As with most things, Congress has never directly considered the matter. Rather, prediction markets are illegal due to the discretion of a government agency called the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Why does it have this right? And on what basis has it made prediction markets illegal? […] In 1936, Congress passed and FDR signed the Commodity Exchange Act. In 1974, Congress created the CFTC to enforce the original law, which has been amended on multiple occasions over the years. The CFTC has authority to regulate what are called “derivatives markets.” A derivatives contract derives its value from some kind of underlying asset or benchmark in the real world. The thing to understand about derivatives is that the baseline is that they’re legal. That’s why you can “bet” on the price of oil through a futures contract. The CFTC wasn’t created to ban derivative markets, but to regulate them, though this can involve prohibiting certain kinds of markets altogether. Current law includes the following provision on event contracts, [banning]: activity that is unlawful under any Federal or State law;
Inline links: this recent forecasting tournament, here, paywalled, this EA Forum post, Twitter, Facebook, https://www.metaculus.com/questions/11236/-of-predictions-on-metaculus-by-eoy-2023/, remains unchanged at around 25%, Washington Post, How To Legalize Prediction Markets, can involve
Links For August 2023
August 09, 2023 · Original source
31: During the pandemic, scientists became hopeful that irradiating rooms with germ-killing but seemingly-safe-for-humans far-ultraviolet radiation could provide a general solution to infectious disease. Max Gorlitz on the EA Forum gives a progress report. TL;DR: still seems promising, but there’s a lot more work to be done to determine whether doses that kill pathogens are safe for humans, and what the optimal dose that kills the most pathogens with the least risk to humans is. UV air filters would have fewer safety concerns but be less effective.
Inline links: gives a progress report
Links For January 2024
January 18, 2024 · Original source
27: Back in November I tried to list some of effective altruism’s accomplishments. Now the EA Forum has a more official list of some of what EA did in 2023, including help convince the WHO to speed up malaria vaccines, help convince the USDA to approve cultivated (ie lab-grown) meat, and help get USAID to cancel a Wuhan-style “search for maximally dangerous viruses’” study.
Inline links: I tried to list, a more official list
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
EPA6 mentions across 6 issues

EPA is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between February 09, 2021 and September 18, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Republican presidents pushed immigration amnesties and founded the EPA"; "https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-typical-passenger-vehicle"; "Trump’s EPA and Biden’s EPA made very different sta". It most often appears alongside Democrats, FDA, Republicans.

Article page
EPA
Mention count
6
Issue count
6
First seen
February 09, 2021
Last seen
September 18, 2023
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Book Review: Why We're Polarized
February 09, 2021 · Original source
In 1976, three years after Roe v. Wade, Democrats and Republicans were about equally likely to support abortion restrictions. That same year, a poll found that "only 54% of the electorate believed that the Republican Party was more conservative than the Democratic Party"; 30% thought there was no difference. As late as 2004, about equal numbers (within 5 pp) of Democrats and Republicans agreed with statements like "government is almost always wasteful and inefficient" and "immigrants are a burden on our country". Between the late 60s and early 90s, Democratic presidents deregulated the airlines and passed welfare reform; Republican presidents pushed immigration amnesties and founded the EPA.
Inline links: As late as 2004
Carbon Costs Quantified
August 25, 2021 · Original source
40: https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-typical-passenger-vehicle
22
May 10, 2022 · Original source
And yet “trust the US government” has so far failed to solve all of our epistemic problems. Partly this is because the US government constantly disagrees with itself (the FDA got in a fight with Biden over vaccine readiness; Trump’s EPA and Biden’s EPA made very different statements on climate change). Partly it’s because for internal political reasons or military/geopolitical reasons, the US government has lots of incentives to lie or stretch the truth. Partly it’s because other organizations with the same advantages as the US government make counterclaims (eg the Ukrainian government said their intelligence told them Russia wouldn’t invade, and they also seemed pretty trustworthy).
Prediction Market FAQ
December 20, 2022 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Your Book Review: Public Citizens
June 23, 2023 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Highlights From The Comments On Elon Musk
September 18, 2023 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Effective Altruist Forum5 mentions across 5 issues

Effective Altruist Forum is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between March 24, 2022 and January 11, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Devin Kalish on the Effective Altruist Forum writes Brief Thoughts On Justice"; "Devin Kalish on the Effective Altruist Forum writes Brief Thoughts On Justice Creep And Effective Altruism"; "Levin on the Effective Altruist Forum rephrases this thought experiment". It most often appears alongside China, Google, India.

Mention count
5
Issue count
5
First seen
March 24, 2022
Last seen
January 11, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Highlights From The Comments On Justice Creep
March 24, 2022 · Original source
Devin Kalish on the Effective Altruist Forum writes Brief Thoughts On Justice Creep And Effective Altruism:
Inline links: Effective Altruist Forum, Brief Thoughts On Justice Creep And Effective Altruism
Book Review: What We Owe The Future
August 23, 2022 · Original source
Levin on the Effective Altruist Forum rephrases this thought experiment to be about our obligations to people who aren’t born yet:
Inline links: Levin on the Effective Altruist Forum
But this is a selfish preference coming from the part of me that wants to see philosophers have interesting fights. Most of me agrees with MacAskill’s boring good-PR point: long-termism rarely gives different answers from near-termism. In fact, I wrote a post about this on the EA Forum recently, called Long-Termism Vs. Existential Risk:
Inline links: Long-Termism Vs. Existential Risk
Links For August 2023
August 09, 2023 · Original source
25: Elsewhere in bad policy: after California voted for higher standards for animal welfare in factory farms, the agricultural industry has proposed the EATS Act, banning states from setting standards for what agricultural products they will allow. This seems like a clear attack on states’ rights to me. Still, its supporters cast it as promoting states’ rights, since if eg California bans unethically-factory-farmed meat then Iowa doesn’t have the right to unethically-factory-farm its meat if it wants to sell to California. This is a stupid argument, like saying that it “promotes individual rights” to force dieters to eat high-calorie meals, because their decision not to do so impinges on the rights of chefs to make their meals high-calorie if they would like to sell to dieters. If you’re making a federal power grab, at least admit you’re making a federal power grab! I hope this will either fail or get struck down by the Supreme Court. A post on the Effective Altruist forum urges you to write your representative.
Inline links: the EATS Act, its supporters, A post on the Effective Altruist forum
31: During the pandemic, scientists became hopeful that irradiating rooms with germ-killing but seemingly-safe-for-humans far-ultraviolet radiation could provide a general solution to infectious disease. Max Gorlitz on the EA Forum gives a progress report. TL;DR: still seems promising, but there’s a lot more work to be done to determine whether doses that kill pathogens are safe for humans, and what the optimal dose that kills the most pathogens with the least risk to humans is. UV air filters would have fewer safety concerns but be less effective.
Inline links: gives a progress report
Links For September 2023
September 28, 2023 · Original source
25: Effective Altruist Forum: The charity Pure Earth, sponsored by GiveWell, claims to have reduced the prevalence of lead in Bangladeshi turmeric from 47% to ~0%. Previously, unsavory producers would add lead to turmeric spice to make it appear more brilliantly yellow, poisoning children who consumed it and lowering IQ. Pure Earth raised awareness among consumers, helped the government crack down, and is now declaring at least preliminary victory. “The preliminary findings are that this program can avert an equivalent DALY for just under $1.”
Inline links: claims to have reduced the prevalence of lead in Bangladeshi turmeric from 47% to ~0%
Highlights From The Comments On Capitalism & Charity
January 11, 2024 · Original source
The Effective Altruist Forum now has a post on Economic Growth - Donation Suggestions And Ideas, listing suspected top charities for helping countries develop. These include ACX Grants winner Growth Teams, the Charter Cities Institute, GiveDirectly, and Overseas Development Institute.
Inline links: Economic Growth - Donation Suggestions And Ideas, Growth Teams, Charter Cities Institute, GiveDirectly, Overseas Development Institute
EA Funds4 mentions across 4 issues

EA Funds is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between November 12, 2021 and May 30, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "EA Funds' grant rounds"; "I'm one of the guest fund managers on one of the EA Funds (the EA Infrastructure Fund, specifically)"; "I can confirm that EA Funds are real people and that they’re great (and have lots of money)". It most often appears alongside effective altruism, ACX Grants, Alcoholics Anonymous.

Article page
EA Funds
Mention count
4
Issue count
4
First seen
November 12, 2021
Last seen
May 30, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Apply For An ACX Grant
November 12, 2021 · Original source
How is this different from Marginal Revolution's Fast Grants, Nadia Eghbal's Helium Grants, or EA Funds' grant rounds?
Inline links: Fast Grants, Helium Grants, EA Funds
Open Thread 205
January 03, 2022 · Original source
Thanks for doing this and for this post! I'm one of the guest fund managers on one of the EA Funds (the EA Infrastructure Fund, specifically), and I would really like many of these people to apply to EA Funds for a top up or a substantially larger grant right now (if they haven't already), and for many others to apply later on for "next phases" of these projects or for new projects. https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/apply-for-funding
Inline links: https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/apply-for-funding
4. EA Funds's impact is probably most bottlenecked by number of good applications received (more so than by fund manager time or money available) (I'm most confident of this for the Long-Term Future Fund and the Infrastructure Fund)
Things I often tell people about applying to EA Funds: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4tsWDEXkhincu7HLb/things-i-often-tell-people-about-applying-to-ea-funds
Inline links: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4tsWDEXkhincu7HLb/things-i-often-tell-people-about-applying-to-ea-funds
Contra DeBoer On Movement Shell Games
November 30, 2023 · Original source
Cause evaluation works the same way. Every year, I feel bad free-riding off GiveWell. I tell myself I’m going to really look into charities, find the niche underexplored ones that are neglected even by other EAs. Every year (except when I announce ACX Grants and can’t get out of it), I remember on December 27th that I haven’t done any of that yet, grumble, and give to whoever GiveWell puts first (or sometimes EA Funds).
Inline links: ACX Grants, EA Funds
Contra Stone On EA
May 30, 2024 · Original source
Cause evaluation works the same way. Every year, I feel bad free-riding off GiveWell. I tell myself I’m going to really look into charities, find the niche underexplored ones that are neglected even by other EAs. Every year (except when I announce ACX Grants and can’t get out of it), I remember on December 27th that I haven’t done any of that yet, grumble, and give to whoever GiveWell puts first (or sometimes EA Funds).
Inline links: ACX Grants, EA Funds
EA internships4 mentions across 4 issues

EA internships is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between September 21, 2023 and January 29, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "— EA internships". It most often appears alongside EA job board, Less Wrong, ACX.

Article page
EA internships
Mention count
4
Issue count
4
First seen
September 21, 2023
Last seen
January 29, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
  • 23 September 21, 2023
  • 24 April 11, 2024
  • 25 April 17, 2025
  • 26 January 29, 2026
Related pages
Source context
23
September 21, 2023 · Original source
— EA job board — EA internships — Dating doc directory — Find a Less Wrong/ACX meetup
Inline links: EA job board, EA internships, Dating doc directory, Find a Less Wrong/ACX meetup
24
April 11, 2024 · Original source
— EA job board — EA internships — Dating docs / Manifold.love — Find a Less Wrong/ACX meetup
Inline links: EA job board, EA internships, Dating docs, Manifold.love, Find a Less Wrong/ACX meetup
25
April 17, 2025 · Original source
— EA job board — EA internships — Find a Less Wrong/ACX meetup
Inline links: EA job board, EA internships, Find a Less Wrong/ACX meetup
26
January 29, 2026 · Original source
— EA job board — EA internships — Find a Less Wrong/ACX meetup
Inline links: EA job board, EA internships, Find a Less Wrong/ACX meetup
EA job board4 mentions across 4 issues

EA job board is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between September 21, 2023 and January 29, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "— EA job board". It most often appears alongside EA internships, Less Wrong, ACX.

Article page
EA job board
Mention count
4
Issue count
4
First seen
September 21, 2023
Last seen
January 29, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
  • 23 September 21, 2023
  • 24 April 11, 2024
  • 25 April 17, 2025
  • 26 January 29, 2026
Related pages
Source context
23
September 21, 2023 · Original source
— EA job board — EA internships — Dating doc directory — Find a Less Wrong/ACX meetup
Inline links: EA job board, EA internships, Dating doc directory, Find a Less Wrong/ACX meetup
24
April 11, 2024 · Original source
— EA job board — EA internships — Dating docs / Manifold.love — Find a Less Wrong/ACX meetup
Inline links: EA job board, EA internships, Dating docs, Manifold.love, Find a Less Wrong/ACX meetup
25
April 17, 2025 · Original source
— EA job board — EA internships — Find a Less Wrong/ACX meetup
Inline links: EA job board, EA internships, Find a Less Wrong/ACX meetup
26
January 29, 2026 · Original source
— EA job board — EA internships — Find a Less Wrong/ACX meetup
Inline links: EA job board, EA internships, Find a Less Wrong/ACX meetup
EA organizations4 mentions across 4 issues

EA organizations is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between February 03, 2022 and February 02, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "We are part of a recently formed team that advises EA organizations on how they can attract more donations"; "they’ve become the bar that EA organizations rate other charities against"; "Writing Forecasting Questions For EA Organizations". It most often appears alongside ACX, Africa, Charter Cities Institute.

Article page
EA organizations
Mention count
4
Issue count
4
First seen
February 03, 2022
Last seen
February 02, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
ACX Grants ++: The First Half
February 03, 2022 · Original source
#20: Test Charity Pitch Strategies We will conduct an intervention competition to test which strategies are most effective in convincing people to donate to an effective cause. We (Bastian Jaeger, Josh Lewis, and Noah Costelo) are part of a recently formed team that advises EA organizations on how they can attract more donations. There is little high-quality research on this topic and it is unclear which marketing approaches work best or should be trialed in the field. We will conduct a large-scale experiment to fill this gap. First, we will challenge academics and members of the EA community to submit an intervention that is most effective in generating donations for an effective charity. Next, we will distribute a survey among the participating teams and the EA community in which people are asked to predict the effectiveness of each intervention that was submitted. Finally, we will select the most promising interventions and test their effectiveness in a high-powered, pre-registered, and incentivized experiment. The study will generate actionable insights for various EA organizations looking to optimize their marketing strategy and attract more donations. The survey data will also allow us to test how accurate people are in forecasting the effectiveness of different strategies, by comparing forecasted with actual effectiveness. All data will be made openly available. See https://osf.io/adbwv/ for a more detailed description and you can contact me via b.jaeger@vu.nl.
Highlights From The Comments On Capitalism & Charity
January 11, 2024 · Original source
But precisely because they’re so good and so easy to quantify, they’ve become the bar that EA organizations rate other charities against, and some of those ratings find the other charities to be better. For example, GiveWell says the charities they fund are usually between 5x and 8x more effective than GiveDirectly.
Inline links: usually between 5x and 8x more effective than GiveDirectly
ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
June 18, 2025 · Original source
30: Writing Forecasting Questions For EA Organizations
Helped create Manifold Markets, a prediction market site with thousands of satisfied users, whose various spinoffs play a central role in the rationalist/EA community.
Open Thread 419
February 02, 2026 · Original source
Peter Wildeford, who placed 1st out of all 2975 participants. Peter is a forecasting celebrity, a leader at EA organizations Rethink Priorities and Institute For AI Policy and Strategy, and a blogger at The Power Law. He regularly makes the top 20 or so, but this year he was able to close the distance and take the top spot. I often rely on his blogging for my geopolitical opinions, and these contest results suggest that you should too. Peter is also the first ACX Forecasting Contest winner to have been featured on the Daily Show:
Inline links: forecasting celebrity, Rethink Priorities, Institute For AI Policy and Strategy, The Power Law
Emergent Ventures4 mentions across 4 issues

Emergent Ventures is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between December 28, 2021 and June 18, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Many people said that the true value of Emergent Ventures and other mini grant programs"; "Fast Grants is run by Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison (plus Emergent Ventures with Shruti Rajagopalan)"; "there are now more than one thousand Emergent Ventures winners". It most often appears alongside ACX Grants, COVID, Scott.

Article page
Emergent Ventures
Mention count
4
Issue count
4
First seen
December 28, 2021
Last seen
June 18, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
ACX Grants Results
December 28, 2021 · Original source
Many people said that the true value of Emergent Ventures and other mini grant programs was the opportunity to be part of a network and make use of the funder’s non-financial resources. Unfortunately I have no idea how to set this up and I’m not sure I have a lot of non-financial resources. So here’s what I can offer:
So You Want To Run A Microgrants Program
February 09, 2022 · Original source
One possible answer: you’re also really smart and experienced. Fast Grants is run by Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison (plus Emergent Ventures with Shruti Rajagopalan); it wouldn’t surprise me if their particular genius is more valuable than a big foundation’s increased specialization and resources. If that’s you, then good work, I guess.
Sorry, I Still Think MR Is Wrong About USAID
May 29, 2025 · Original source
Someone should tell [Scott] that Emergent Ventures overhead is typically two percent, five percent for dealing with screwier banking systems. (That is one reason why I won the recent Time magazine award for innovation in philanthropy.) I am well aware there are various ways of calculating overhead, but there are now more than one thousand Emergent Ventures winners, and all of them can testify to how radically stripped-down the process is.
ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
June 18, 2025 · Original source
Codebuff, an AI coding startup I probably can’t take full credit for all of this just from giving them $20K in seed funding, but I continue to appreciate everything they do for this community and the world. 35: Further S’s Political Career This person didn’t win their election, but has since pivoted to AI safety and works in a well-regarded AI policy think tank. 36: Seeds Of Science, A Journal Of Non-Traditional Research No update received, but this was a public journal and it is easy to follow their work, see their website and Substack. They published two dozen articles of widely varying quality through 2023 and 2024, then closed in 2025. A remnant of the original vision survives as a science blogging aggregator. This was about my median expectation for this grant, but it was very inexpensive and I decided to take a chance on it anyway. 37: Good Science Project, Working To Improve Federal Science Funding No update received, but they have a public Substack discussing their progress. Their proposals for NIH reform have influenced Congress and made government agencies pay more attention to scientific integrity. 38: Advising Developing Countries On How To Grow Their Economies With our initial ACX grant, we piloted the Growth Teams model in Rwanda, helping the government jumpstart the export-oriented call center (BPO) industry. Since 2022, that effort has contributed to the creation of 2,000 formal jobs and the emergence of some of the country’s largest private employers. We’ve since expanded to Tanzania, Malawi, and the Indian states of Goa and Meghalaya. To refocus the global development discourse on broad-based economic growth, we co-organized the Growth Summit with the Center for Global Development and the Charter Cities Institute, and have published articles in leading outlets including Stanford Social Innovation Review, ProMarket, and the Global Prosperity Institute. Our work has attracted support from Open Philanthropy, Schmidt Futures, and Mulago Foundation, and our advisors now include economists Lant Pritchett, Stefan Dercon, and Kunal Sen. 39: Help Luca De Leo Get Started In AI Safety Research No update received, but Luca now runs the AI safety group at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. 40: Typist For Saharon Shelah This was another ACXG+ Grant, funded by an anonymous outside funder and not listed in the original announcement. Saharon is a prolific and influential Israeli mathematician, but many of his discoveries are hand-written in an unpublishable format. This grant funded a typist to help make his results suitable for publication. According to this page, they have made over fifty new papers and preprints available. Second Cohort: One Year Updates 41: Lead-Acid Battery Recycling In Nigeria The Nigeria field research was a major success. We spent most of September doing field research in multiple major cities in Nigeria, and got a good sense of the used lead-acid battery supply chain. This field research served as the foundation for expanding our project, and has been very impactful in shaping our ongoing research. We published our findings from Nigeria, which were shared with Nigerian government regulators and global NGOs working on lead poisoning. The grant also gave us the on-the-ground experience we needed to both fully understand and credibly engage with groups, both in Nigeria and globally, on the ULAB issue. In the meantime, beyond continued research, we’ve also launched a dashboard (trade.leadbatteries.org) for analyzing global lead trade data. Right now, we’re: Launching two studies (one RCT, one environmental analysis) in Nigeria in collaboration with local universities to develop a more rigorous understanding of lead pollution due to low-standard ULAB recycling in Nigeria Collaborating with a non-profit incubator to launch an NGO focused on demand-side solutions Beginning a partnership with a West African environmental regulator to scale cheap air monitoring technology to quickly identify and reduce lead pollution from low-standard smelting If any of this sounds interesting to you, please sign up for our Substack (leadbatteries.substack.com) or send us an email at hugosmith@uchicago.edu! 42: Compensation For Kidney Donors The End Kidney Deaths Act (H.R. 2687 / EKDA) is a groundbreaking ten-year pilot program designed to save lives and reduce healthcare costs. It provides a refundable tax credit of $10,000 per year for five years, a total of $50,000, to living kidney donors who donate to a stranger, helping those who’ve waited the longest on the transplant list. Between 2010 and 2021, 100,000 Americans died while qualified and waiting for a kidney. The EKDA aims to change that trajectory. Within ten years of its passage, up to 100,000 Americans could receive a life-saving living donor kidney which typically lasts twice as long as a deceased donor kidney. This would not only save lives but also save taxpayers up to $37 billion. The legislation has been reintroduced in the House, and we have a committed Republican Senate lead. Now, we need a Democratic Senator to co-lead and help move this bipartisan effort forward. Time is short, and we are racing to pass the bill this Congressional session. 36 organizations already support the EKDA. Join the movement and help end preventable kidney deaths. Visit EndKidneyDeaths.org to help us get to the finish line. Elaine and her org have been working extremely hard on this; you can read a Vox article on their campaign here. If you want to sign up for her email list and get updates any time there is a representative you can contact or meeting you can join in, go here. 43: Genetic Hack To Prevent Suffering In the estimate of multiple team members, the ACX grant was “worth it” - it likely had a counterfactual net positive impact, even though we had to pivot from our initial fast-track plans for developing the precision anti-suffering therapy. We identify three primary streams of value: a) reducing uncertainty in the emerging field through early exploratory research, helping with the identification of dead ends and promising R&D trajectories; b) a wide range of downstream effects (beyond the “raising awareness” cliché), including talent mobilization and rekindled interest in suffering abolitionism as a distinct cause area; and c) certain developments that cannot yet be publicly disclosed. In December 2024, Marcin Kowrygo (Acting CEO & volunteering contributor), David Pearce (Director of Bioethics), Aatu Koskensilta (President), and a few other team members decided to leave The Far Out Initiative. They look forward to collaborating and applying their experience to advance the suffering abolitionist lineage in the spirit of open science, public good, and thoughtfully decentralized governance. Feel free to reach out to us at suffab at protonmail dot com to discuss collaboration opportunities! I wrote a post profiling the Far Out Initiative here. Unfortunately there were some internal disagreements, and the people ACX Grants was closest to left the organization. I plan to continue to monitor whatever they do next. 44: Advocate For Pandemic Response Team At FDA This team prefers has asked me not to discuss their progress publicly, but you can probably guess what their lives are like right now, and your guess would be correct. 45: Anti-Mosquito Drones We developed a cheap sonar that is able to detect, track and classify the ultrasonic echoes of mosquito wings at more than three meters. I believe it’s a world first! We also have control algorithms that take the sonar data and output control commands that both ram into mosquitoes and avoid the walls of a simulated environment. Our current work is on integrating both components on a real drone, and we expect to be able to kill mosquitoes by June. We’ve also made an internal impact study (napkin-sized) that shows we’ll be more cost-effective than ITNs in urban to periurban environments. So, we’re super excited with what comes next and can’t wait to share the videos of our first interceptions! More information [in the video below] and on our website, https://tornyol.com 46: Tarbell Fellowship For AI Journalism No update received, but they have a public website. I can’t find the Voices program in particular, but the overall fellowship completed their first class of seven fellows and is working on their second. 47: Germicidal UV Lamp Study The research has successfully demonstrated the ability of off the shelf ozone scrubbers to mitigate the ozone production of far-UVC lamps, is now available as a preprint (https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/67e4cde76dde43c9084d88b7). The paper has been submitted for publication and is currently undergoing peer review. Any ideas you have for potential funders we can approach to help execute our six-year plan to accelerate far-UVC would be appreciated https://blueprintbiosecurity.org/introducing-project-air/ 48: Technological Solutions To Animal Welfare Challenges Directly because of Innovate Animal Ag's work, the first U.S. egg producer publicly announced in the New York Times their adoption of in-ovo sexing technology, eliminating the need to cull day-old male chicks. The initial in-ovo sexing machine began operating in the U.S. at the end of 2024, with the first eggs from these hens expected on shelves in mid-2025. External evaluations estimate our work accelerated U.S. adoption of this technology by over seven years, meaning that once fully implemented, more than 2 billion chicks will have been spared. In addition to continuing to support the rollout of in-ovo sexing in the US and globally, we're now exploring other technologies and paths to impact. Current promising projects include developing humane slaughter methods for fish and advocating for USDA approval of a poultry vaccine against bird flu. They add: If you ever meet folks that are interested animal welfare and are partial to more technocratic and practical solutions, please continue to pass them our way, or connect them directly to me. 49: Assurance Contract Website www.Spartacus.app is an ACX grantee that created a platform to help solve coordination and collective action problems. It enables the creation of campaigns that build critical mass through conditional commitments, which only activate when a sufficient number of people join, converting risk and uncertainty into a higher probability of successful outcomes. They are currently facilitating several projects that leverage conditional commitments, including a dominant assurance contract interface for fashion pop-ups, accelerating a community business association's membership drive, and helping an AI safety organization organize petitions and events, among others. They have pivoted from an emphasis on high-stakes coordination problems requiring anonymity (because they occur too infrequently) to a broader range of more common use cases and have successfully run small-scale campaigns, but are still working toward product-market fit. Despite resource constraints and split time commitments that have impeded faster progress, they remain dedicated to the project's growth and success. You can follow its progress on X or Substack, or email Jordan directly here. 50: Cause Prioritization @ Center For Exploratory Altruism Research Moderately good progress on a salt reduction policy advocacy project we funded; informal commitments have been made by the Ministry of Health, and we're awaiting the publication of a formal administrative order. The official description sounds maximally generic, but this is an EA charity with a broad mandate whose current thesis is that dietary guidelines in developing countries can have outsized effects in saving lives. They’re making some progress on a salt reduction campaign in a developing country they prefer not to name publicly. 51: Mark Webb Studying Land Reform The purpose of this project was to identify specific farmland that could be acquired and transferred to the farmers already working the land. This has been difficult to achieve. I have been able to connect with other charities and landless farmers, and was able to interview a number of people about what their situation looks like, as well as what it would look like to them personally if they owned, rather than rented, their farmland. All this was immensely helpful in pushing this long-term project forward, even if I was unable to identify a specific plot of land that could be used to try the experiment. I intend to continue this project. If you have any insights or connections, I am interested. 52: More AI Advocacy In Australia Good Ancestors is focused on AI safety policy in Australia. Middle powers might be a useful path to influence as the US and China focus on racing, rather than safety. The ACX grant helped us give testimony about AI safety to the Australian Senate alongside Google, Microsoft and Facebook (We were the only nonprofit to give oral evidence to the inquiry. We also engaged government on other AI-related issues, including cybersecurity, biosecurity, consumer law and automated decision making (https://www.goodancestors.org.au/ai-safety). We’re currently working to inform voters about where parties stand on AI safety for the election, ahead of engaging on a likely Australian AI Act in 2025 (https://www.australiansforaisafety.com.au/). This is the same Australian lobbying organization we founded in Year 1, after a change in name and leadership. I continue to be excited about AI safety in middle-tier countries for a few reasons. First, these countries have some power in international organizations to set international standards. Second, companies will usually comply with any not-excessively-burdensome regulation set by any country with a significant market. Third, AI safety is underfunded by the standard of government programs, so Australia setting up a national AI Safety Institute would significantly expand the field. It’s kind of crazy that ACX Grants tier levels of money can have significant effects at this scale, but GA continues to do a great job and we continue to be proud to support them. 53: Campus For African School Of Economics At Zanzibar Charter City The ACX grant helped launch the first research center at the African School of Economics-Zanzibar, which is a main anchor of the Fumba Town charter city project in Zanzibar. This research center is called the Africa Urban Lab (AUL), focused on rapid urbanization across Africa. The AUL launched its first Diploma program in Urban Development with 38 students in our first cohort (now graduated!), including mayors, and deputy mayor, a director of a national Ministry of urban development, and many others. We published our research framing papers for the AUL's research agenda. We raised funding to launch an Urban Expansion Program that's now selecting 15 African cities to support in implementing urban expansion planning on the urban periphery. We held two Public Talks by renowned cities scholars and practitioners. We received additional funding from Emergent Ventures and from the Templeton Foundation. And we've partnered with 8 universities across the region, and with one of these universities (Ardhi) we'll be working with them to update their urban planning and urban economics curriculum (amplifying AUL's impact beyond our own organization). A longer update from end of 2024 is here: https://www.aul.city/blog/reflecting-on-africa-urban-lab-s-inaugural-year-2024-highlights) 54: Online Training Program For Health Workers In Developing Countries To date, over 11,000 health workers in Nigeria have completed our course on basic, life-saving newborn care. ACX funding was catalytic for helping us secure government approvals and complete an evaluation of the impact of our training on health workers' clinical practices. The evaluation shows that birth attendants provide better birth care after taking the course. We fed the evaluation results into an updated model, which suggests the program is 24 times more cost-effective than direct cash transfers (a widely recognized benchmark for cost-effectiveness). The program is likely to become even more cost-effective as we scale up. https://healthlearn.org/blog/updated-impact-model 55: Smartphone Pupillometry To Diagnose Neurological Conditions We have continued to expand our work in the smartphone pupillometry space and the development of our application, PupilScreen (https://www.apertur.ai/). We have expanded our pilot/research program to include new sites across the United States (Missouri, New Jersey, Kentucky, USAC racing, PitFit driver performance training in Indiana) and the world (Nepal, Taiwan, South Africa). We continue to publish at the leading edge of the pupillometry literature as well looking at concussion (https://neuro.jmir.org/2024/1/e58398 and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39682632/), cerebral vasospasm (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39128501/), and stroke (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39674431/ and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39561861/). Currently, we are raising a $3 million seed round via a SAFE to fund the expansion of our work into the hands of healthcare workers and the general public. We will first focus on traumatic brain injury for clinical use and develop a neuro-monitoring wellness application utilizing our technology for the general public. They add: “We would welcome connections to anyone that you think might be interested in supporting our work further by investing in our $3M seed round of funding.” 56: Mike Saint-Antoine’s Biology Tutorial Videos Since getting the grant, I've continued to make Youtube tutorials as planned. One series that I'm especially proud of is about how to make a neural network in the Julia programming language completely from scratch, with no imports, up to the point of being able to solve MNIST (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWVKUEZ25V97tNULapu07DhWv6_W4NfpE). Also, a college student in Pakistan came across my videos and invited me to give a virtual Zoom-lecture to her department, so I ended up teaching a 6-hour "Python-for-Biologists" workshop to more than a hundred college students in Pakistan over Zoom. So that was pretty awesome. Also, lately I've been teaching some in-person classes too, mostly at Fractal University in NYC, and I also recently organized a day-long, in-person Beginner Python class for people in my local area (Philly suburbs) who wanted to learn some basic programming. I'm having a lot of fun with this project, and am grateful to Scott and the grant funders for their generosity! 57: Conceptual Boundaries Workshop On AI Safety The workshop was completed successfully; you can read a writeup here. 58: Apart Research To Incubate AI Safety Scientists No update received, but they have a public website, and you can see their impact metrics here. They seem to be in urgent need of more funding. 59: Primer On How To Achieve Political Change No update received and I can’t find anything about this. 60: Research IVF Clinic Success Rates We've built a predictive model that estimates the odds of having a child at different IVF clinics across the country while controlling for factors like patient age and infertility differences that can falsely make some clinics look better than others. We found that an average patient can increase their odds of having a kid by 43% just by going to a top 10% clinic. Patients unlucky enough to go to a bottom 10% clinic will reduce their odds of having a kid by 40%. Next month, we're adding several more clinics, 2023 data, additional procedural controls, and donor/gestational carrier models, which should push our accuracy beyond state-of-the-art models in this space and better isolate clinic impact on patient outcomes. We've launched ivf.clinic, a website where patients can access personalized IVF reports and browse our clinic rankings (though we're still squashing some bugs). Currently, we're expanding our research to include comprehensive insurance coverage and pricing data across clinics nationwide. If anyone has insights on automating the collection of IVF clinic pricing information, I'd love to hear from you at scelarek@gmail.com. 61: Replicate Study On Brain Wave Synchronization For Speeding Learning We have acquired and configured the OpenBCI UltraCortex Mark IV 8-channel EEG headset and a clinical-grade Biosemi 32-channel EEG system. We’ve implemented the required components for the experimental pipeline (computing alpha from EEG, flashing bright white light, presenting stimulus images). We are currently putting them together into a single system that we’ll use to collect the data from several participants. We are aiming to gather data on several participants in late June / early July and complete the pilot of the replication in July 2025. If you’d like to be a participant in the study, [they might announce a link once they have it]. 62: Advocate Repeal Of Interstate Runaway Compact No update received and I can’t find anything about this. 63: Animal Welfare (Especially Fish) In Turkiye Future For Fish asks companies to sign up to FFF's fish welfare commitment, which requires producers to certify their facilities and enforce specific standards for stocking density and harvest. Luckyfish, İlknak, Divan (35 restaurants, 17 hotels) and NG Hotels (5 hotels) have signed and published FFF's fish welfare commitment with İlknak publishing the commitment on their website. Kılıç published its first sustainability report detailing fish welfare policies, including enforcing a maximum stocking density of 10 kg/m³ and confirmation of electrical stunning practices. Longer version with some caveats: https://manifund.org/projects/improving-fish-w From the longer document, these commitments involve things like reducing overcrowding, or stunning fish before killing them. Over 30 million fish were affected just from their single largest commitment, and they say 100 fish are helped per dollar spent. 64: More Georgism Advocacy Lars and Will used the 2021 grant to co-found ValueBase. Will remained with the company, and Lars left to do advocacy work at the Center For Land Economics. Here’s their summary of how things are going: [Our] organization transitioned leadership with Greg Miller, a former Program Analyst at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Lars Doucet, author of Land is A Big Deal and Co-Founder of Valuebase, working full time and Joe Caissie stepping aside. This transition happened naturally as the next career transition for each respective person. Since then, progress has been made on pushing forward legislation. Maryland had two bills introduced to give Baltimore and counties the ability to enact split-rate taxes. One of the bills passed the state senate and would allow Baltimore to enact land value taxes within one mile of rail corridors–this contains 50% of Baltimore’s land value. However, the legislative session ended. We expect the bill to revive next session. The Center for Land Economics has been actively working to help efforts to get this bill passed the line. At the same time, we have uncovered systematic undervaluing of vacant land in assessments. We are writing a report on the assessment issues in Maryland with actionable steps to resolve them.
Inline links: Codebuff, website, Substack, survives, a public Substack, in Rwanda, Growth Summit, Stanford Social Innovation Review, ProMarket, Global Prosperity Institute, Saharon, this page, eadbatteries.substack.com, here, here, a post profiling the Far Out Initiative here, https://tornyol.com, a public website, https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/67e4cde76dde43c9084d88b7, https://blueprintbiosecurity.org/introducing-project-air/, our way, connect them directly to me, www.Spartacus.app, X, Substack, here, https://www.goodancestors.org.au/ai-safety, https://www.australiansforaisafety.com.au/, https://www.aul.city/blog/reflecting-on-africa-urban-lab-s-inaugural-year-2024-highlights, https://healthlearn.org/blog/updated-impact-model, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWVKUEZ25V97tNULapu07DhWv6_W4NfpE, here, public website, here, in urgent need, https://manifund.org/projects/improving-fish-w
Minnesota and Virginia also have legislation to enable cities to implement land value taxes. We are monitoring these efforts. There are a few other cities we are operating in. We have helped another organization prepare for a meeting in Tennessee by doing impact analysis of land value taxes in the city. We have presented to city officials in the City of South Bend who have expressed support for land value taxes. Finally, we are in conversation with a State Senator in Colorado who is a champion of land value taxes. Meanwhile, we have soft launched and developed the OpenAVMKit, which uses a unified schema to do assessment accuracy reports and automated valuation methods for any property tax data given. Valuation of land is the key binding constraint to successful implementation of land value taxes. We plan to be the leaders in this space with strong benchmarking capabilities and a repo that can enable the open-source community to make the best automated valuation methods. Along with these efforts, we have expanded the movement. We have posted to the Progress and Poverty Substack growing the subscriber base to around 5,000 subscribers. We have spoken to over 25 local advocates interested in working on land value taxes in their local communities. Yet, there is a long way to go. We need to start earning income through technical assistance contracts as our grant funding expires. We need to continue pushing for a state to implement, and we need to be prepared to tell the success story for when they do. 65: EN’s Work On Bacteriophage Therapy Our project is aimed at pioneering phage therapy in Nigeria, where limited resources/infrastructure have historically held back research in this field. Starting from the ground up, we are establishing the foundational systems needed to support a robust phage research ecosystem. So far, we’ve isolated 34 bacteriophages targeting Pseudomonas aeruginosa, an essential step toward building a comprehensive phage bank. This began with collecting a wide range of clinical Pseudomonas isolates, which we are now characterizing alongside the phages through genome sequencing and phenotypic assays including studies on phage stability across pH, temperature, and salinity ranges. Our long-term goal is to develop a phage-based hydrogel for treating diabetic wounds. On the regulatory front, we have secured approval from the Attorney General to register our nonprofit organization, the Centre for Phage Biology and Therapeutics. Additionally, we’re expanding into vaccine development; following a research stay in Prof. Roderick's lab at the University of Waterloo, we have initiated the design of a phage-based universal Salmonella vaccine aimed at covering all major serotypes—an urgent need underscored by Africa’s reliance on external vaccine sources during the COVID-19 pandemic. I have signed an MTA agreement with Roderick to use his phage-based vaccine platform patents to enable us to design vaccines against any common disease affecting us. This is only the beginning, but we are proud to be laying the scientific and institutional groundwork for homegrown phage innovation in Africa. Emergent Ventures funded EN before we did and deserves a lot of credit here also. 66: Create An Artificial Kidney For an implantable artificial kidney, the first essential component is a hemofilter designed to emulate the glomerulus. Critical requirements for this hemofilter include high permeability (to maximize flow for a given area), selectivity (specifically, the retention of albumin), and robust blood compatibility (ensuring sustained function over time). Our initial strategy focused on using negative surface charge to reduce fouling. I began by testing polyelectrolyte (PE) coatings on 24nm pore membranes featuring a negative terminal charge, similar to the glomerular barrier. These initial static tests, assessing platelet adsorption in whole blood, yielded positive outcomes for some polyelectrolytes, indicating potentially desirable blood compatibility. However, static test setups are not truly representative of dynamic in-vitro conditions and don't provide data on key parameters like permeability, fouling progression, or changes in membrane selectivity. To address these limitations, I designed and built a blood filtration setup. This system sustains human whole blood in circulation for 20 minutes, allowing us to analyze all the aforementioned parameters, as well as platelet activation markers. This has resulted in a fairly high-throughput system for evaluating any surface coating. I'm pleased to report this setup has been accepted for presentation at this year's European Society for Artificial Organs (ESAIO) conference. I am also currently working on a full manuscript, as I believe this system offers a viable way to partially replace animal experiments in our early-stage research, requiring only 1.2ml of human blood per run. Working with a PhD student (hired to support both this research and work on membrane substrates), we have continued testing these PE coatings, alongside PEG coatings, on our membranes. Here, we're finding that optimization of the coating layer is crucial. With the current PE coatings, we observe a permeability drop of about an order of magnitude compared to the base membrane, making them unsuitable for an implantable device in their present form. This is likely due to the specific nature of the initial PE layer, which we can modify. We also suspect there may be ingress of PE into the pores, meaning we're not achieving just a surface coating (our goal), but rather a very thick coating, which would explain the flux loss. Optimizing the coating process to control penetration depth is now a primary focus of my ongoing work. I am currently aiming for a flux of 20ul/min (as this is cap introduced by the protein gel layer anyway) but for it to be at this 'steady state' permeability without drop in permeability. I am also imaging the membranes after contact with SEM to see if there is indeed any platelet adsorption etc. Tugrul has the dubious honor of maybe being "the only person to climb a 4000m peak with severe kidney failure". To raise money and awareness for his artificial kidney project, he is running Climb Against Time, where he will climb 41 mountains over 4000m (13000 ft) this summer. He is looking for donors and climbing partners. 67: Add Tardigrade Genes To Human Cells The goal of this one was to make hybrid cells that are more resilient for research and certain medical applications. They report: The grant was to synthesize vectors for the expression of humanized tardigrade proteins that can be targeted to different areas of the cell. All the vectors were designed, generated, and transposed into human cells. The proteins all localize successfully (e.g. they match the designed target), with one exception (we are still working on validating it). We've done some stress testing with the trangenic cells, but haven't reached firm conclusions yet. We've further generated some multigene designs but have not yet transposed them into cells, but should shortly. We're hoping to submit a manuscript on the first round later this year. 68: Teach Forecasting To EU Policy-Makers The original project didn't work out, but our grantee (who still prefers to remain anonymous) is now working with an EU think tank pursuing the same agenda, and has been teaching forecasting workshops to policy-makers for the past two months. 69: Platform For Single-Cell Imaging They ended up unable to accept this grant and returned the money. 70: Open Source Polygenic Predictor For EA/IQ They have an update here. They think they have a predictor that can explain 12% of variance in intelligence, and they’re working on validating it and creating an easy-to-use website. 71: Improve Flu Vaccines The grant mainly funded agent based modelling to demonstrate the benefit of pre-existing immunity to pandemic influenza if and when a future pandemic occurs (academic publication will result). The original proposal was to attempt to influence the WHO influenza strain selection process. After attending WHO meetings and a global influenza conference, I believe this is not feasible. Stakeholder feedback was the potential short term negative effect on vaccine hesitancy is believed to outweigh the less tangible future benefit. Given the conservative nature of decision makers, pandemic vaccines are likely to remain research only. There are still green shoots of research into pandemic preparedness/prevention that I am continuing to work on. I'm working under the "Australians for Pandemic Prevention" brand of Good Ancestors, another group that ACX funded in 2024. 72: Scenario Analysis For Developing World Agricultural Programs In addition to the research and analysis funded by the grant, I’ve learned to code with LLMs and have built an MVP of the project. The app is being considered for further development by staff at a large international organization. 73: Further C’s Political Career C’s political career is going well, but he continues to think it wouldn’t be strategic to give more information publicly at this time. Lessons Learned I'm most impressed with our lobbying/advocacy organizations. In particular, Good Ancestors has gotten the Australian government to sign onto an international AI safety declaration, partner with various x-risk-related organizations, and (possibly) extend charity tax deductions to some EA causes that previously didn't have it - I think this on its own goes a substantial way to paying back the cost of all ACX Grants. Coalition to Modify NOTA has a kidney donation bill in front of Congress that the (very illiquid) prediction markets give a 45% chance of passing; if it works, it could save thousands of lives. The Georgists are partly responsible for bills making land value taxes slightly easier to implement in a handful of states. Good Science Project seems to have significantly improved science. Are lobbying organizations a better bet than other types of nonprofit (within the constraints of ACX Grants)? I'm not sure. It could just be that lobbyists are (naturally) better at playing themselves up and sounding successful than (for example) scientists, or that politicians are good at people-pleasing and make people feel heard and encouraged in a way that might not change overall policy later. Also, I recently talked to some grantmakers who funded a lobbying organization that superficially seems excellent, but they expressed concern it was net negative (!) by taking away oxygen and spotlight from potentially more effective orgs. So I am encouraged but wary. Animal welfare organizations were another standout success. Again, I don't know how to think about this - while I think our grantees were exceptional, there's also an issue where the scale of animal welfare challenges is so great, and work on them so neglected, that lots of organizations can save a million chickens here, or a million fish there, without particularly making a splash. On the one hand, this is exactly what effective altruism should be doing - exploring grants that are very high in linear utility even if they don't feel satisfying. On the other, they're unsatisfying - and also hard to assess retroactively. How many chickens should a good animal welfare grant save? Any realistic number will both be overwhelmingly large in absolute terms and far too small in relative terms. I'm most ambivalent about our science grants. Many of them say they are successful and can point to published papers which explain the science they did. But it's hard to judge whether anything useful has changed based on the science getting done. I know it's important to fund basic research and not just last-mile technology startups, but it's hard for a mini-grants program like this one to evaluate these kinds of abstract interventions. One disappointing result was that grants to legibly-credentialled people operating in high-status ways usually did better than betting on small scrappy startups (whether companies or nonprofits). For example, Innovate Animal Ag was in many ways overdetermined as a grantee - former Yale grad and Google engineer founder, profiled in NYT, already funded by Open Philanthropy - and they in fact did amazing work. On the other hand, there were a lot of promising ACX community members with interesting ideas who were going to turn them into startups any day now, but who ended up kind of floundering (although this also describes Manifold, one of our standout successes). One thing I still don't understand is that Innovate Animal Ag seemed to genuinely need more funding despite being legibly great and high status - does this screen off a theoretical objection that they don't provide ACX Grants with as much counterfactual impact? Am I really just mad that it would be boring to give too many grants to obviously-good things that even moron could spot as promising? Someone (I think it might be Paul Graham) once said that they were always surprised how quickly destined-to-be-successful startup founders responded to emails - sometimes within a single-digit number of minutes regardless of time of day. I used to think of this as mysterious - some sort of psychological trait? Working with these grants has made me think of it as just a straightforward fact of life: some people operate an order of magnitude faster than others. The Manifold team created something like five different novel institutions in the amount of time it's taken some other grantees to figure out a business plan; I particularly remember one time when I needed something, sent out a request to talk about it with two or three different teams, and the Manifold team had fully created the thing and were pestering me to launch a trial version before some of the other people had even gotten back to me. I take no pleasure in reporting this - I sometimes take a week or two to answer emails, and all of the predictions about my personality that this implies would be correct - but it's increasingly something that I look for and respect. A lot of the most successful grants succeeded quickly, or at least were quick to get on a promising track. Since everything takes ten times longer than people expect, only someone who moves ten times faster than people expect can get things done in a reasonable amount of time. In almost every case where I thought to myself “this is a cool idea, but I don’t know how it’s going to really pay off, as opposed to reaching a cool intermediate accomplishment and then stagnating”, this was a correct criticism, and I should have taken it more seriously. But I can’t rule out that these were good in vague and hard-to-measure ways that I should take more seriously. This one is really self-serving, but in general when people were good communicators (or even bloggers) and wowed me with the writing-composition of their application, they turned out to be a good bet. And when people were hard to understand and annoying to communicate with, even if their ideas seemed good, they were less likely to pan out. Overall Thoughts The total cost of ACX Grants, both rounds, was about $3 million. Do these outcomes represent a successful use of that amount of money? Very naively, startups originating from ACX Grants have about $50 million in value1. If ACX Grants is equivalent to a pre-seed funder, and pre-seed funders usually get ~5%, then if we were VCs we would have a portfolio worth $2.5 million. About 1/5 of ACX Grants were attempting to be market-valued startups, so if we assume the charitable portion did about as well as the startup portion, then the charity portion is “worth” $10 million. There’s some reason to expect this is too high, since much of the startup value came from one successful outlier. But there’s another reason to expect this is too low, since we were aiming at charity rather than market cap, and any actual market cap that our grantees got was an unexpected side effect. I’m treating this as a sanity check rather than as a real number. It’s harder to produce Inside View estimates, because so many of the projects either produce vague deliverables (eg a white paper that might guide future action) or intermediate results only (eg getting a government to pass AI safety regulations is good, but can’t be considered an end result unless those regulations prevent the AI apocalypse). Because we tend towards incubating charities and funding research (rather than last-mile causes like buying bednets), achieved measurable deliverables are thin on the ground. But here are things that ACX grantees have already accomplished: Improved the living/slaughter conditions of 30 million fish.
Inline links: Progress and Poverty Substack, Climb Against Time, here, 1
Ethereum4 mentions across 4 issues

Ethereum is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between September 29, 2021 and September 29, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin"; "the steps of the Ethereum development roadmap are called “the Merge”, “the Surge”, “the Verge”, “the Purge”, and “the Splurge”"; "Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum-founder-turned-cryptocurrency-public-intellectual". It most often appears alongside California, Biden, Elon Musk.

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Ethereum
Mention count
4
Issue count
4
First seen
September 29, 2021
Last seen
September 29, 2025
Instagram handle
@shoppingtheatre.inc
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Book Review: The Scout Mindset
September 29, 2021 · Original source
Galef says not necessarily. Did you know that Jeff Bezos said outright he started off with a 30% chance Amazon would succeed, even going so far as to tell investors “I think there’s a 70% chance you’re going to lose all your money”? Or that Elon Musk said the odds of SpaceX working were “less than 10%”? Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin said he’s “never had 100% confidence in cryptocurrency as a sector…I’m consistent in my uncertainty”. And since the book came out, I stumbled on this profile of billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, which says he believed his chances of success “were only 20% to 25%”.
Inline links: this profile
Links For October
October 12, 2022 · Original source
23: Did you know: the steps of the Ethereum development roadmap are called “the Merge”, “the Surge”, “the Verge”, “the Purge”, and “the Splurge”.
Inline links: the steps of the Ethereum development roadmap
24
February 20, 2024 · Original source
How many residents will live in Prospera, a new special economic zone in Honduras, on Jan 1, 2026? Answer: 600 (80% confidence interval 100-2,000) This seems like a good guess (except that my confidence interval would have included zero because there’s a 20%+ chance that it gets shut down). So overall its forecasts seem pretty impressive. But I was concerned by its reasoning even in some of the questions it got “right”. For example, the Nikki Haley question tried to get a base rate by asking what percent of elections Haley had won before, and found she had won 71% of them - these were mostly elections for South Carolina governor. You can see what the AI is trying to do - but it’s not going to work. Then it got confused and read a lot of news stories about how she’s currently losing the 2024 presidential election, and seemed to think they were about 2028. So either the AI only got a reasonable probability by coincidence, or it was testing many different strategies, throwing out the useless ones, and updating only on the useful ones, in a way that was kind of opaque to the casual reader. Still, if the company says it beats most human forecasters, this doesn’t seem totally impossible based on what I’ve seen. And that would be exciting! An AI that can generate probabilistic forecasts for any question seems like in some way a culmination of the rationalist project. And if you can make something like this work, it doesn’t sound too outlandish that you could apply the same AI to conditional forecasts, or to questions about the past and present (eg whether COVID was a lab leak). I would be most excited if at some point this graduated from its geopolitical focus and was able to answer questions on any topic (eg “what is the chance that Astral Codex Ten gains paid subscribers this year?”), maybe if the questioner gives it links or feeds it some of the appropriate information. FutureSearch is run by a team formerly from Metaculus, including former Metaculus CTO (and Google internal prediction market veteran) Dan Schwarz. They’re looking for potential clients and/or investors; if you’re interested, email hello@futuresearch.ai. Vitalik On AI Prediction Markets Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum-founder-turned-cryptocurrency-public-intellectual, has a blog post on The Promise And Challenge Of Crypto + AI Applications. One of them is a prediction market. He writes: Prediction markets have been a holy grail of epistemics technology for a long time; I was excited about using prediction markets as an input for governance ("futarchy") back in 2014, and played around with them extensively in the last election as well as more recently. But so far prediction markets have not taken off too much in practice, and there is a series of commonly given reasons why: the largest participants are often irrational, people with the right knowledge are not willing to take the time and bet unless a lot of money is involved, markets are often thin, etc. One response to this is to point to ongoing UX improvements in Polymarket or other new prediction markets, and hope that they will succeed where previous iterations have failed. After all, the story goes, people are willing to bet tens of billions on sports, so why wouldn't people throw in enough money betting on US elections or LK99 that it starts to make sense for the serious players to start coming in? But this argument must contend with the fact that, well, previous iterations have failed to get to this level of scale (at least compared to their proponents' dreams), and so it seems like you need something new to make prediction markets succeed. And so a different response is to point to one specific feature of prediction market ecosystems that we can expect to see in the 2020s that we did not see in the 2010s: the possibility of ubiquitous participation by AIs. AIs are willing to work for less than $1 per hour, and have the knowledge of an encyclopedia - and if that's not enough, they can even be integrated with real-time web search capability. If you make a market, and put up a liquidity subsidy of $50, humans will not care enough to bid, but thousands of AIs will easily swarm all over the question and make the best guess they can. The incentive to do a good job on any one question may be tiny, but the incentive to make an AI that makes good predictions in general may be in the millions. Note that potentially, you don't even need the humans to adjudicate most questions: you can use a multi-round dispute system similar to Augur or Kleros, where AIs would also be the ones participating in earlier rounds. Humans would only need to respond in those few cases where a series of escalations have taken place and large amounts of money have been committed by both sides. This is a powerful primitive, because once a "prediction market" can be made to work on such a microscopic scale, you can reuse the "prediction market" primitive for many other kinds of questions: Is this social media post acceptable under [terms of use]?
Inline links: FutureSearch, hello@futuresearch.ai, The Promise And Challenge Of Crypto + AI Applications, back in 2014, played around with them extensively, more recently, Polymarket, tens of billions on sports, LK99, Augur
Open Thread 401
September 29, 2025 · Original source
We are holding a contest until October 6th for using LLMs and other models to predict how important 45 open source repos are to Ethereum. The winning submissions, as judged by their error rate to ground truth data collected from experts, get to distribute $350,000 to projects and also win $20,000 in prizes from Ethereum Foundation. This is a continuation of a project in the ACX mini forecasting challenge, with a pivot from using a particular LLM for assessing impact to a data science competition where anyone can submit models. Compete here .
Inline links: here
EA group3 mentions across 3 issues

EA group is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between February 10, 2025 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "UChicago also has a long-running EA group"; "local EA group (which grew out of the "Spring" ACX meetup)"; "combining this with the local EA group". It most often appears alongside 131 Colonie Center, 200 Degrees, Aaron Kaufman.

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EA group
Mention count
3
Issue count
3
First seen
February 10, 2025
Last seen
April 01, 2026
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Open Thread 368
February 10, 2025 · Original source
3: And some University of Chicago students have just started a rationalist reading/meetup group and ask me to advertise that they exist. If you’re interested, email dnbirnbaum@uchicago.edu or fill out this form. UChicago also has a long-running EA group.
Inline links: this form, EA group
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Chris Contact Info: cvjones7[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, October 4th, 2:00 PM Location: Parliament House Gardens Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4R99487J+PCQ Notes: We'll have a crack at combining this with the local EA group (which grew out of the "Spring" ACX meetup). Bad weather and we'll move into Irish Murphy's.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/4R99487J+PCQ
Contact: Gavin Contact Info: bisga673[a t]student[period]otago[period]ac[period]nz Time: Friday, September 26th, 5:30 PM Location: WEA Canterbury Workers' Educational Association - don't have details about the exact entrance right now but it will be obvious and if you are unsure, email me sometime beforehand Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4V8JFJCJ+5M Group Link: EA group link (same organiser): https://www.facebook.com/groups/EAChristchurch Notes: We'll have a pot luck, and later in the evening a Petrov Day celebration. I'm a big reader of ACX and would love to connect with similar people (and connect you with some Chch EA people if you're interested). Note we've got the biggest ever NZ EA event (EA Summit) happening the next day and you're welcome to come to that too! https://www.facebook.com/share/1Aw5PaF7ms/ More info at that link. Please RSVP on facebook if you can't bring food. (Please RSVP anyway but don't let it stop you from coming)
Inline links: https://plus.codes/4V8JFJCJ+5M, https://www.facebook.com/groups/EAChristchurch
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places
April 01, 2026 · Original source
Contact: Chris Contact Info: cvjones7[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, May 23rd, 02:00 PM Location: Parliament House Gardens Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4R99487J+PCQ Additional Notes: We’ll have a crack at combining this with the local EA group (which grew out of the “Spring” ACX meetup). Bad weather and we’ll move into Irish Murphy’s.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/4R99487J+PCQ
eBay3 mentions across 3 issues

eBay is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between February 14, 2023 and March 13, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "advertised really heavily within the small community of eBay power users, who often buy and sell to other eBay power users"; "Amazon and eBay have made it trivial to exchange money"; "the eBay founder Pierre Omidyar". It most often appears alongside Amazon, Manifold, ACLU.

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eBay
Mention count
3
Issue count
3
First seen
February 14, 2023
Last seen
March 13, 2025
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23
February 14, 2023 · Original source
Thiel describes how PayPal solved this: they advertised really heavily within the small community of eBay power users, who often buy and sell to other eBay power users. Eventually many of these people started using PayPal, and then other people who might want to transact with eBay power users started using it, and so on to the rest of society. Mark Zuckerberg solved this by starting with Harvard students, then other college students, and then the rest of the world.
Contra Kriss On Nerds And Hipsters
April 19, 2023 · Original source
Also, what was up with stamp and coin collectors? This seems like a different phenomenon: surely nobody wanted to identify with the US Postal Service. I have a better hypothesis for why this pastime has died out: collectors enjoyed the thrill of hunting for a rare piece, but Amazon and eBay have made it trivial to exchange money for whatever coins/stamps you want. I’m not sure this works; when I was young in the 90s, there was a store in my hometown that sold rare coins; even then I could have gone to the store and walked out with a pretty good collection. But maybe the fact that I would need multiple books to know which coins were “rare”, and that the store could have been out of one or two valuable pieces, was enough cover to make it still seem interesting and impressive. Now there’s no sense that you have to really care about stamps or coins to have a great stamp/coin collection: you just need a higher budget than whoever else typed “stamps and coins” into the eBay search function.
OpenAI Nonprofit Buyout: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
March 13, 2025 · Original source
In late January, a group of 25 charities, including one started by the eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife, piled on. The coalition urged Bonta "to take prompt legal action to ensure that OpenAI's assets are not illegally diverted for private gain."
Inline links: urged Bonta
Eli Lilly3 mentions across 3 issues

Eli Lilly is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between November 24, 2022 and March 12, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Novo Nordisk’s competitor Eli Lilly owns a closely related molecule"; "Eli Lilly’s coupon for Mounjaro was less restrictive at first"; "Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, the pharma companies behind semaglutide and tirzepatide respectively". It most often appears alongside FDA, Novo Nordisk, Novo Nordisk.

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Eli Lilly
Mention count
3
Issue count
3
First seen
November 24, 2022
Last seen
March 12, 2025
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Semaglutidonomics
November 24, 2022 · Original source
The first analysis asks “what if doctors medicalized obesity as comprehensively as they’ve medicalized hypertension and high cholesterol?” That is: what if we put in a society-wide effort to get every obese person to a doctor, and after only a little diet and exercise, the doctor puts them on a medication? They find that the US obesity market would multiply by a factor of 25, to about $87 billion/year. The second analysis is a more realistic projection for the next decade. Two things stand out. First, the number of patients on Wegovy or related medications goes from an estimated 46,910 now (pretty close to my 50,000 estimate!) to 11.3 million in 2030. Second, the cost per prescription goes from $15,000/year to about $4,000 year. Let’s look at this second change in more detail. Right now semaglutide is literally in a class of its own for weight loss. But remember, it started as a GLP-1 agonist diabetes drug. And there are other GLP-1 agonists already in use for diabetes. Novo Nordisk’s competitor Eli Lilly owns a closely related molecule, tirzepatide (Mounjaro®). They’ve already done studies showing it also works very well for weight loss - if anything even better than semaglutide - and they’re expected to get FDA approval to market it as a weight loss medication next year. Although capitalism fans might expect the presence of two competing drugs to immediately drive down prices, this is mysteriously not how things work in health care and prices will probably stay the same in the short term. But several other companies are working on semaglutide-like drugs, some will be cheaper to produce than semaglutide, and Morgan Stanley expects that this stronger level of competition will eventually drive costs down to $350/month ($4,000/year) by 2030. “Mounjaro” sounds like the playful animal sidekick in a Disney movie. From a purely economic perspective, semaglutide costs the health system money (because it’s expensive) but also saves the health system money (because we don’t have to pay for obesity consequences like diabetes and heart attacks). Which effect wins out? According to the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, benefits would outweigh costs if semaglutide cost less than about $8,000/year. Since it costs $15,000 year now, it’s not cost effective. But if Morgan Stanley’s model comes true and it costs $4,000/year in 2030, then it will be cost effective. So at some point, Medicare (and so insurance companies) may start covering it more out of self-interest. I can’t tell whether the model takes this into account or not. (there’s also a third-level effect where it costs the health system money again, because it prevents people from dying of obesity-related complications, and dead people stop needing expensive health care. I think health economists are supposed to ignore this level.) 11.3 million prescriptions at $4,000/year comes to $45 billion, but Morgan Stanley expects that not everyone will fill their prescriptions consistently or stay on the medication the same amount of time, leading to their $31 billion figure. Towards The Glorious Post-Obesity Transhuman Future The Morgan Stanley report shows that even the greediest pharma investors, openly plotting to medicalize obesity, can’t bring themselves to believe in more than 11 million US semaglutide patients by 2030. That’s less than 10% of the US obese population. Isn’t that kind of disappointing? We’ve got > 100 million people dealing with a condition that not only makes them unhealthy, but also causes them psychological distress, and makes lots of people low-grade disappointed in and repulsed by our society. And we’ve got an effective drug that treats the condition. And we’re going to use it on less than 10% of the people involved? In 2032, semaglutide goes off-patent. It will probably take a few years to sort out legal issues and ramp up generic production, but by the mid-2030s, its price will go way down. I don’t think there are technical barriers to getting it down as low as $10 - $100 per month. By then, maybe there will be even more exciting branded weight loss drugs for wealthy people to choose from. But at the very least, semaglutide itself should become much more widely available even to poor or uninsured patients. I’m not sure what will happen. Will there be an inflection point, where so many people use semaglutide that obesity becomes unusual again, and then the remaining obese people start using it just to fit in? Will obesity become an optional fashion statement, like shaving your head or getting a tattoo? Or will semaglutide end up disappointing us in some way, like so many promising drugs have before? I come at semaglutide from a transhumanist perspective. I want to hack genetics and biology until everyone is as tall as they want, as strong as they want, as smart as they want, and whatever gender they want. If you want wings, you should be able to have wings. And yes, part of this vision is everyone having the weight they want. I’m not sure this will happen, but for the first time I can see a clear path to how it might. Postscript 1: Should You Take Semaglutide? I can’t answer this, please ask your doctor. But I do want to add that there are potential side effects I haven’t mentioned in this post, including nausea, gastrointestinal problems, pancreatitis, and kidney problems. Semaglutide has been accused of slightly increasing risk of pancreatic and thyroid cancers. Studies have found trends in this direction, but these conditions are so rare that even over thousands of patients over many years, the increase hasn’t yet reached clear statistical significance. The current consensus position is that it may increase thyroid cancer by a tiny amount not relevant to most patients, and that it probably doesn’t increase pancreatic cancer. I think my father has looked over these data more and is less sure than other people about the lack of pancreatic cancer risk, but he can’t get the resources he needs to prove anything, and I can’t remember his exact argument. More broadly: like all medications, semaglutide has benefits and risks, and you shouldn’t blindly take it after reading one blog article. Postscript 2: Is There A Way To Cheat The System To Get Semaglutide For Lower Cost? Health care is much like airline tickets: everyone pays a different price for everything and there’s usually a secret way to get what you want for much less money. Is this true of semaglutide? Pharma company Novo Nordisk offers a Savings Card that they say brings the price down to as low as $25 per month. I’m a little suspicious of this - pharma company offers are rarely as good as they sound - but I don’t notice any obvious tricks in this one and it should probably be your first bet. This startup claims that they can get insured people semaglutide for a $25/month copay “after their deductible is met” by negotiating with the insurance company very effectively. I can’t imagine how that works or what they have to negotiate with, but they seem pretty convinced, so I would welcome more information. Otherwise, you don’t have many great options. Although there are two older forms of semaglutide not FDA-approved for weight loss - Ozempic and Rybelsus - these are both more expensive, milligram per milligram, than Wegovy itself. Canada is also of no help. The usual Canadian pharmacies don’t seem to carry Wegovy, and charge about the same amount for Ozempic as American pharmacies do. This article in Drug Discovery Trends says that compounding pharmacies have been selling semaglutide for $300/month, less than a quarter of the sticker price. This is a bit confusing: compounding pharmacies are small local operations permitted to dispense unusual medications by mixing existing ones together in nonstandard ways. They’re arguing that they can legally dispense the semaglutide because they’re mixing it with vitamins, which, fine, but how are they getting it in the first place? Everyone else seems as confused as I am: "Nobody knows how [compounding pharmacies are] getting it," said Karl Nadolsky, an endocrinologist at Spectrum Health. "Who's making it? [The pharma company that makes it] Novo [Nordisk]'s not giving it to them. They're the ones with the rights to the molecule, so how is anybody getting semaglutide?" Has nobody asked compounding pharmacists about this? Do they have a conspiracy of silence? Does the FDA sometimes send their goons in to extract the information, but the compounding pharmacists compound sleeping gas / smoke grenades and vanish into the night? Anyway, the usual authorities warn you not to take compounded semaglutide under any circumstances, but they’re the same people who tell you never to buy drugs from a Canadian pharmacy because they might be adulterated. You can decide how much you want to trust them. Postscript 3: What About Europe And The Rest Of The World? Countries that are not the US usually negotiate with pharmaceutical companies over price. Because of some combination of “negotiation works” and “they are free-riding off Americans’ hard work”, they usually get much lower prices. What does semaglutide cost elsewhere? This is hard to find out because government health agencies sometimes keep their prices secret, plus Wegovy mostly isn’t available in other countries yet. The only information I could find was from Britain, which is in the process of making Wegovy available to patients. It looks like NHS will “restrict the expensive drug’s availability to very obese people attending specialist weight-loss clinics”, but that it might be possible to get it from private clinics for £199/month = £2400/year. Wegovy has been approved in the EU but doesn’t seem to have made it there yet. I can’t find any information about any other country. Non-weight-loss-indicated versions of semaglutide are available in many countries, but I wouldn’t expect their health care systems to be flexible about redirecting it for weight. Canadian regulators have approved Wegovy, but it doesn’t seem to be available there yet. I haven’t seen any evidence that Ozempic costs less in Canada than it does in the US, and I’m not sure why. Maybe the pharma companies have figured out that anything that happens in Canada gets imported into the US, and they’re playing hardball this time. I don’t know whether Canadians will be able to get it for cheaper than Americans or not. Postscript 4: Predictions (all predictions are conditional on no singularity or global catastrophe) 10 million Americans on semaglutide (or yet-to-be-approved equally good or superior alternatives) by 2030: 75%
Inline links: this is mysteriously not how things work in health care, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!5poy!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc201f05a-7d1f-4738-911f-11d0d051adf9_2880x1562.png, Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, don’t think there are technical barriers, offers a Savings Card, This startup, about the same amount for Ozempic, This article in Drug Discovery Trends, Everyone else seems as confused as I am, NHS will, private clinics
Highlights From The Comments On Semaglutide
November 30, 2022 · Original source
I think those numbers might be "over one year", and they could stay on it longer than a year. I was kind of lazy just asserting “drugs might get better”, but I think the upcoming CagriSema combination and AMG-133 are good examples of how this might play out. Max Görlitz has done the proper thing and made Manifold markets for each of my predictions - see here, here, here, here, and here. Despite the problems with prediction markets for decades in the future, the “will obesity be cut in half by 2050” one seems popular: 5. Do You Have To Stay On Semaglutide Forever Or Else Gain The Weight Back? Biff_Ditt writes: I saw on the 1 year follow-up to the STEP-1 trial that most of the participants gained all of their lost weight back. Biff is probably thinking of Weight Regain And Cardiometabolic Effects After Withdrawal Of Semaglutide, which finds people gained back 2/3 of the lost weight after a year. The graph looks like it’s in the process of plateauing but not quite there, so I don’t know if we should expect them to regain the other third later. This matches what I would expect from my understanding of other diets and weight loss drugs. Still, some people disagree. Maximum Liberty writes: Anecdote is not the singular of data, but my better half lost 25 pounds on it, then had to get off it for reasons unrelated to the drug. She has not regained the weight yet -- and consistently eats less now that she had for years. So in at least one case, the drug helped with a successful change in eating habits. Lauren Thomas writes: So there's been a lot of research on dieting and losing weight, etc., and one of the things that has been found is that your body has a "set" point weight wise that it will try REALLY hard to return you to. If you lose weight, your body will slow its metabolism until you return to that weight. If you gain weight, your body will rev up metabolism. That's why you might gain 10 lbs over Christmas and then lose it in January without purposefully trying to lose weight. (this is all in the short term, ofc, as people do tend to naturally gain weight as they age). This seems to imply that semaglutide would need to be taken forever. However, there seems to be an important caveat: you *can* reset your set point, it just takes a long time at the new weight. When most people go on diets and lose weight, they end up regaining the new weight quite quickly after they "end" their diet, so they don't have a chance to reset their set point. Speaking from personal experience, I had kind of an accidental natural experiment with this: I once lost 40 lbs over the course of a year and a half, where I began with a very strict low carb diet that very very slowly trailed off to a normal diet, mostly because I got progressively more tired of being on the low carb diet. So by the time I had gotten back to my normal diet, I had been losing weight for a long time. I ended up regaining 10 lbs of the weight, but no more, and am still ~30 lbs below my peak even today (5 years later). Something like this has been my experience with dieting too so far. And something like set point reset has to exist in order to explain things like why so many obese people fail to lose weight after they start eating healthy, and maybe other things like anorexia. And maybe it works for some people. Still, the evidence suggests that most people who stop semaglutide will regain the weight, at least for the protocol used in the study. Maybe some other protocol that had them on it for more than a year would have done better? 6. Personal Anecdotes Edgehopper writes: I couldn’t get Wegovy at a reasonable price when it was approved, and then Novo Nordisk started having huge supply chain problems with their injectors. Fortunately, Eli Lilly’s coupon for Mounjaro was less restrictive at first, though they’ve had to crack down as they have trouble meeting demand for both off-label weight loss use and for the approved T2D use. I am what the doctors call “morbidly obese,” and it’s been more effective than anything else I’ve ever tried. Down about 35 lbs in the first three months, and unlike with other diets I’ve tried, I’m not feeling miserable or hungry all the time. Assuming there aren’t scary side-effects in the future, these really are miracle drugs. I do expect the price to come down relatively quickly due to competition, which is a good thing. Education Realist (blog) writes: I am on Mounjaro, and have been for four months. Lost 20 pounds so far, and I'm not yet on full dosage. Occasional mild nausea but real issue for me is....tiredness. Not fatigue or exhaustion. I'm a former insomniac who can now hit the sack at 9:00 and sleep happily to 6 am, which is insanely weird. I have been trying to lose weight for 6 years, and for most of that time been in a 20 pound range that is 100 pounds over what someone of my height should weigh. I've eaten 1500 calories a day and not lost a pound, have to drop to 1100 to lose weight verrry slowly (that's with intermittent fasting and low carbs, around 50 grams). Last year before Mounjaro I started intermittent fasting and lost 20 pounds very quickly and then stopped cold. I do not have eating issues. I don't binge. I cut out the "four white foods" six years ago because I learned that I do better on meat and cheese and vegetables than I do on pasta or bread or potatoes and vegetables. I put on weight despite walking two and in some cases four miles a day, which I can do easily. I am ridiculously healthy and do not have an obesity diagnosis. Stone cold normal readings in A1c, glucose, cholestrol. My doctor sent me to an endocrinologist after I lost 20 pounds and then stopped cold despite the same behavior (which I still do today) because she agreed I might be insulin resistant. Endocrinologist shrugged, said it's multifactorial, but agreed that anyone with my numbers, appearance, and obvious good health was clearly doing everything right and put me on Mounjaro with no further questions. Diagnosis: insulin resistance. My insurance pays around $500 but I'm on the $25 coupon. I didn't change a single thing about my eating habits and lost ten pounds in 2 months on the low dosage. Higher dosages have finally reduced my appetite somewhat, but my endocrinologist and I have decided to stop the increases at 12.5 (15 is the top) and then maybe even reduce, since my appetite is decreasing but the weight loss rate is constant. Because I lost weight doing the same behavior and no drop, I'm quite convinced that something far different than appetite suppressing is also going on (fwiw, I was on phentarmine back in the day and liked it fine). Mounjaro is supposed to increase insulin production and reduce the liver's sugar production, although what that means I dunno. I have no idea what's up with obesity but the idea that it's all about cutting intake and exercise is just stupid. I should have been losing weight for all of the past six years and haven't. Plenty of people eat healthily and are still obese. We're probably the descendants of famine survivors. Anyway, I wrote about it here: https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2022/10/09/weight-loss-and-mounjaro Eliezer Yudkowsky writes: I tried semaglutide and it did nothing to slow rate of weight gain, just produced stomach upset, going up to 2.4mg injectable. I know one other person trying semaglutide and they reported something similar. I wonder if they played some clever games with their choice of patients. My expectation of how the news goes here is a whole lot of people who try semaglutide, maybe after fighting really hard to get on it, and find that it does nothing. That said, I know at least one friend of a friend, if not a friend per se, who claims that semaglutide was their miracle drug. So maybe still worth that hard fight, even if I'm guessing that the real proportion who get nothing out of it will prove to be over 50% in real populations. Further fun fact: Semaglutide comes heavily recommended with diet and exercise and many stern injunctions about that! The actual insert sheet includes a graph for how much weight people lose with and without "lifestyle interventions" added. The two graphs are roughly the same. Lan writes: I wonder about the adoption of the medication, though. I took victoza (=saxenda, but approved for diabetes) and the absence of the desire to eat lead to some unforeseen lifestyle side effects. Given that 5 almonds made me full for the day, I was not interested in having dinner with the family or going out with friends. There is the reality that some restaurants would probably not be happy if you only ordered the smallest appetizer. In addition, alcohol was also very difficult, because the drug slows down gastric emptying and your stomach ends up absorbing alcohol for hours. I got really, really drunk for an entire night from a single glass of wine once. Before taking this drug I had not fully appreciated how much of one's (social) life revolves around food; lunch break with colleagues, dinner with family or friends, drinks on the weekend, a sweet treat, snacks and a movie etc. But once I was not interested in food anymore, combined with the tiredness that comes with eating little, a lot of those activities also lost their appeal. (On the upside, I slept like a log.) Walter Sobchak, Esq writes: I have been taking Wegovy for 14 months. When I began I weighed 275 lbs and my BMI was 39.9. I have hypertension, albeit well controlled by medicines. Diet and exercise phaaahhh. I could eat faster than I could exercise. And no, I eat very little fast food and little candy and soda. I worked with my doctor to be prescribed Wegovy. It was only approved by the FDA in June 2021. My doctor was reluctant because he was unfamiliar with the class of compounds. He does not like to prescribe off label so he was not willing to to start me on Ozempic. But, the FDA solved that problem. I knew to ask for the drug because my daughter was pre-diabetic and had been put on Metformin and Ozempic. She lost 100 lbs. in 2019 and 2020. I started on Wegovy in September 2021. I now weigh 220 and my BMI is 31.5. That represents a 20% reduction in my original weight. 220 was my original goal. To get a BMI under 30 I would have to be under 209. I doubt that I will get there. I am back in 40 in. trousers which I had not been able to wear in 30 years. 220 was my original goal. I have had no major side effects other than constipation. Even that is a little hard to tease out. I am on 7 Rx drugs and at least 5 of them are constipating. I have been pounding Metamucil and Colace for years. I have been able to fill my prescriptions using a GoodRx coupon at $1328 for a box with 4 injectors. A year requires 13 boxes. The total cost for 15 boxes has been about $20,000. I can afford it and it has been worth while. I call it a bargain, the best I've ever had. I understand that it still way too expensive for the American health care system to afford. But given the bonanza size of the market. There will be lots of competition starting with the Lilly's tirzepatide. There are several other pharma's with GLP-1 agonists in development. I am sure that the cost will come down. My doctor tells me that I can expect to stay on semaglutide for the long term. He is proposing that I switch to Ozempic 2 mg for maintenance as I can buy that for less than $1,000 for a four dose pen. My only sadness is that semaglutide wasn't invented 40 years ago when i would have saved me from a lot of damage. But, I am grateful that it exists now and that it has helped my daughter so much. Also from Walter, and I was wondering about this: I was very concerned with the injections before I started Wegovy. My experience is that the injector is fast and almost painless. My pharmacist was important because he showed me how to do it correctly before I started. 7. Tangents That I Find Tedious, But Other People Apparently Really Want To Debate Why can’t people just diet and exercise? (142 comments)
Inline links: here, here, here, here, here, writes, Weight Regain And Cardiometabolic Effects After Withdrawal Of Semaglutide, writes, writes, anorexia, writes, Education Realist, blog, https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2022/10/09/weight-loss-and-mounjaro, writes, writes, from Walter, Why can’t people just diet and exercise?
The Ozempocalypse Is Nigh
March 12, 2025 · Original source
But the compounders aren’t the only ones boxing clever. Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, the pharma companies behind semaglutide and tirzepatide respectively, have opened consumer-facing businesses about halfway between a traditional doctor’s appointment and the telehealth/compounder model that’s getting banned. So for example, Lilly Direct offers to “find you a doctor” (I think this means you do telehealth with an Eli Lilly stooge who always gives you the meds you want) and “get medications delivered directly to you”. The price depends on dose, but an average dose would be about $500 - so about halfway between the cheap compounding price and the usual insurance price. Not bad.
Inline links: Lilly Direct
Pharma companies don’t like dose-based pricing (that is, charging twice as much for a 10 mg dose as a 5 mg dose). Part of their objection is ethical - some people have unusual genes that make them need higher doses, and it seems unfair to charge these people twice as much for genetic bad luck. But there’s also an economic objection - they want to charge the maximum amount the customer can bear, but if they charge a subset of people with genetic bad luck twice as much as they can bear, those people won’t buy their drug. So usually they sell all doses at a similar price, opening an arbitrage opportunity: if they sell both 5 mg and 10 mg for $500/month, and you need 5 mg, then buy the 10 mg dose, take half of it at a time, stretch out your monthlong supply for two months, and get an effective cost of $250/month. But here Eli Lilly is doing something devious I’ve never seen before. They’re selling their medication in single-dose vials, deliberately without preservatives, so that you need to take the whole dose immediately as soon as you open the vial - the arbitrage won’t work! So although this looks on paper like a $300 price increase ($200 to $500), the increase will be even higher for people who were previously exploiting the dose arbitrage.
Ethereum Foundation3 mentions across 3 issues

Ethereum Foundation is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between October 09, 2023 and September 29, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "a “Next Billion Fellow” by the Ethereum Foundation"; "the Ethereum Foundation and has received previous grants"; "it was the research topic of my choice for a recent fellowship with Ethereum Foundation ( summerofprotocols.com )". It most often appears alongside Scott, #EEGManyLabs, 23andme.

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3
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3
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October 09, 2023
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September 29, 2025
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@shoppingtheatre.inc
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Impact Market Mini-Grants Results
October 09, 2023 · Original source
Many people like Devansh’s idea. He was selected as a “Next Billion Fellow” by the Ethereum Foundation and has received previous grants from Gitcoin Grants and the Plurality Institute. He has clearly put a lot of work into this. He has some great videos and explainers talking about what he’s doing:
Followup: Quests And Requests
November 10, 2023 · Original source
I also think I understand the problem pretty well as it was the research topic of my choice for a recent fellowship with Ethereum Foundation (summerofprotocols.com). Happy to chat through the problem and/or share my research with people in private.
Inline links: summerofprotocols.com
Open Thread 401
September 29, 2025 · Original source
We are holding a contest until October 6th for using LLMs and other models to predict how important 45 open source repos are to Ethereum. The winning submissions, as judged by their error rate to ground truth data collected from experts, get to distribute $350,000 to projects and also win $20,000 in prizes from Ethereum Foundation. This is a continuation of a project in the ACX mini forecasting challenge, with a pivot from using a particular LLM for assessing impact to a data science competition where anyone can submit models. Compete here .
Inline links: here
Eventbrite3 mentions across 3 issues

Eventbrite is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between August 26, 2022 and August 29, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Event link(s): Eventbrite"; "Event link(s): LessWrong , Facebook event , Meetup.com , Eventbrite"; "register via Eventbrite". It most often appears alongside ACX, ACX, ACX MEETUP.

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3
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Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places
August 26, 2022 · Original source
BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA Contact: Jarred Filmer, jarred[dot]filmer[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 7:00 PM Location: 52 McCaul Street Taringa (house) Coordinates: 5R4JFXXQ+P8 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: We used to meet once a month years ago, but now just meet whenever there's a Meetups Everywhere :) Notes: Snacks will be provided but dinner will not be, would recommend eating before you come CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA Contact: Andy Bachler, Andy[dot]Bachler[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Wednesday, August 31, 5:30 PM Location: Badger & Co pub at ANU. Central location, parking free after 5pm, might be loud, sorry! Coordinates: 4RPFP4FC+34 Event link(s): LessWrong, Eventbrite Notes: Parking area just to the north of the pub, over the river, is free after 5pm! GOLD COAST (SOUTH), AUSTRALIA Contact: Lerancan, lerancan[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 11, 2:00 PM Location: A picnic table, Wyberba Street Reserve, Tugun Coordinates: 5R3MVF5W+555 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Email me in case of bad weather/you can't find me/you can't make that time etc. MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA Contact: Ryan, xgravityx[at]hotmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 2, 6:00 PM Location: Beer Deluxe Federation Square Coordinates: 4RJ65XM9+3Q Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: We're officially the Less Wrong Melbourne social meetup group, though our members include the broader rationalist community. We meet once a month for casual discussion (and beers for those so inclined). Please join our Facebook group to see the meeting invite; there you will see a WhatsApp group link - please join that group too to ensure timely updates in case of changes (Facebook notifications don't work reliably for this). Notes: Please RSVP to the meeting invite on the Facebook group so that I can make an appropriate booking. PERTH, AUSTRALIA Contact: Madge, madgech[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 25, 2:00 PM Location: Russell Square, Northbridge, corner of Shenton and Aberdeen St. There will be some sort of ACX meetup sign. Coordinates: 4PWQ3V34+W6 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: I run one meetup per year, if someone else wants to take over please do Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong or Facebook SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA Contact: Eliot, Redeliot[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, September 15, 6:00 PM Location: City of Sydney rsl, lvl 2 in the fishbowl Coordinates: 4RRH46F4+983 Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Group info: We meet monthly WOLLONGONG, AUSTRALIA Contact: Jason, jason[dot]bowkettblogs[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 12:00 PM Location: UOW Library Coordinates: 4RQGHVVH+69 Event link(s): LessWrong CHENGDU, CHINA Contact: Alex, acx[dot]chengdu[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, September 15, 7:00 PM Location: Chef Wenwu Hot & Spicy Jianghu Food (Yulin store)/文武大厨·热辣江湖菜(玉林店). I (a foreigner) will be wearing a green shirt. Coordinates: 8P26J3C5+462 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP at the above email address, I will give you my Wechat contact if you're interested in attending. Open to time/date/location changes, so let me know if the proposed event doesn't work for you! Can be a bilingual event; all welcome. 有双语交流的可能性。如果想来的话，请提前发给我个电子邮件。 HONG KONG Contact: Nathan, nathan[at]xevarion[dot]org Time: Saturday, September 10, 1:00 PM Location: The Catalyst, 2 Po Yan Street, Sheung Wan. Big wooden door. Coordinates: 862M74PW+6XP Event link(s): LessWrong BANGALORE, INDIA Contact: Nihal, propwash[at]duck[dot]com, Discord: propwash#4648 Time: Sunday, September 18, 4:00 PM Location: Matteo Coffea, Church Street Coordinates: 7J4VXJF4+PR Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We're the longest active group in Asia — we've been meeting monthly for the last 4 years, discussing ACX posts, LW content with a diverse and friendly group of people. Check our website for more info. Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong to help me be better prepared. HYDERABAD, INDIA Contact: Vatsal, vmehra[at]pm[dot]me, Whatsapp: +919944430856 (username: Vim) Time: Sunday, September 11, 5:00 PM Location: The Weekend Cafe, Plot No D, 3, Vikrampuri Colony, beside vac's bakery, Vikrampuri Colony, Lane, Secunderabad, Telangana, 500015, India Coordinates: 7J9WFF4X+5P Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Our rationality meetup group has been around for about 3 months and we discuss articles and exercises (eg. CFAR handbook) that can help us improve epistemic and instrumental rationality. MUMBAI, INDIA Contact: PB, e2y94n1nv[at]relay[dot]firefox[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 9, 4:00 PM Location: Jamjar Diner, Versova Coordinates: 7JFJ4RM6+5W Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong or via email so I can plan activities accordingly. NEW DELHI, INDIA Contact: Suryansh Tyagi, suryanshtyagiphone[at]gmail[dot]com, WhatsApp/phone +919997299972 Time: Sunday, September 11, 5:00 PM Location: Select CityWalk Mall, Saket. Where inside the mall depends on the number of people interested. Coordinates: 7JWVG6H9+8H Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please either send me an email or message me on WhatsApp if you want to attend. Any suggestions/changes are welcome. UDAIPUR, RAJASTHAN, INDIA Contact: Shailendra Paliwal, acx-meetup-2022[at]shailendra[dot]me Time: Saturday, September 10, 7:00 PM Location: We'll be at Doodh Talai near Pichola Lake and I'll be wearing a gray t-shirt carrying a sign ACX Meetup Coordinates: 7JPMHM9M+HG Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so that I can plan ahead UBUD, BALI, INDONESIA Contact: William Ubud, Napaproject[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Tuesday, August 30, 6:00 PM Location: PARQ Ubud Coordinates: 6P3QG789+F7 Event link(s): LessWrong TOKYO, JAPAN Contact: Harold Godsoe, hgodsoe[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 8, 10:00 AM Location: Near Nakameguro station - RSVP for details Coordinates: 8Q7XJPV2+QFP Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Notes: ACX Tokyo meets monthly since Sept 2021. Our meetups are in English, so far. To join in, feel free to get in touch in any of the many ways to do so (email, Meetup.com). It's useful to be in contact before coming to an event, to help with that first leap of faith. KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA Contact: Yi-Yang, yi[dot]yang[dot]chua[at]gmail[dot]com, LessWrong profile Time: Saturday, September 17, 2:00 PM Location: I'll be in Lisette's Bangsar, which is a 5-minute walk from Bangsar LRT. I'll be wearing a pale green t-shirt and carrying an ACX sign. Coordinates: 6PM34MHH+VW Event link(s): LessWrong AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND Contact: Jonathan De Wet, jonpdw[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 6:30 PM Location: 32 Stanley Ave Milford, Auckland Coordinates: 4VMP6QH4+86 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Notes: It’s a dinner party! Please RSVP on FB so I know how much food to make DUNEDIN, NEW ZEALAND Contact: Gavin, bisga673[at]student[dot]otago[dot]ac[dot]nz Time: Saturday, September 3, 3:00 PM Location: Picnic tables outside of St. David's lecture theatre on Otago University campus. I'll make a sign with ACX meetup. Coordinates: 4V6G4GP7+GM5 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: There is no Dunedin group as far as I'm aware of, but I'd be keen to meet other likeminded people and organise group hangouts occasionally. WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND Contact: Ben W, benwve[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Tuesday, September 27, 5:30 PM Location: Rutherford House, Bunny Street, Wellington. Room MZ05, which is on the mezzanine floor Coordinates: 4VCPPQCH+FGC Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: We're running the event this time in partnership with Effective Altruism Wellington LAPU LAPU, CEBU, PHILIPPINES Contact: Dave, tokkolizard[at]tutanota[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 4, 2:00 PM Location: Starbucks in Mactan Newtown, there will be a sign with ACX MEETUP on it. Coordinates: 7Q268257+4F Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP by mail so I know if I need to set up a bigger meeting place SINGAPORE Contact: Jonathan Ng, jonathan[dot]ng1[at]gmail[dot]com, Telegram @derpy Time: Tuesday, September 6, 6:30 PM Location: Tanjong Pagar MRT gantry, I'll be wearing the dark blue EA Global 2022 jumper Coordinates: 6PH57RGW+J8 Event link(s): LessWrong
Inline links: 5R4JFXXQ+P8, LessWrong, Facebook event, 4RPFP4FC+34, LessWrong, Eventbrite, 5R3MVF5W+555, LessWrong, 4RJ65XM9+3Q, LessWrong, Facebook event, 4PWQ3V34+W6, LessWrong, Facebook event, 4RRH46F4+983, LessWrong, Meetup.com, 4RQGHVVH+69, LessWrong, 8P26J3C5+462, LessWrong, 862M74PW+6XP, LessWrong, 7J4VXJF4+PR, LessWrong, our website, 7J9WFF4X+5P, LessWrong, 7JFJ4RM6+5W, LessWrong, 7JWVG6H9+8H, LessWrong, 7JPMHM9M+HG, LessWrong, 6P3QG789+F7, LessWrong, 8Q7XJPV2+QFP, LessWrong, Meetup.com, Meetup.com, LessWrong profile, Lisette's Bangsar, 6PM34MHH+VW, LessWrong, 4VMP6QH4+86, LessWrong, Facebook event, 4V6G4GP7+GM5, LessWrong, 4VCPPQCH+FGC, LessWrong, 7Q268257+4F, LessWrong, 6PH57RGW+J8, LessWrong
VIENNA, AUSTRIA Contact: Manuel, manuel[dot]turonian[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 2:00 PM Location: Wiener Stadtpark at the Strauss Monument; will have an ACX Meetup sign. Coordinates: 8FWR693H+GP2 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Rationality Vienna is a group of about 30 people who meet once a month in person or via Zoom. You can join our Facebook group. Notes: We may want to shift to an indoor location depending on weather and the local Covid numbers. BRUSSELS, BELGIUM Contact: Bruno D, bruno[dot]astral[dot]codex[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 18, 4:00 PM Location: Guingette Henri, George Henri parc Coordinates: 9F26RCWC+84 Event link(s): LessWrong SOFIA, BULGARIA Contact: Anastasia, sofia[dot]acx[dot]meetup[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 4:00 PM Location: Shade Garden (Сенчестата градинка; part of Borisova garden) Coordinates: 8GJ5M8GW+J9 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Sofia ACX started with last year's Meetups Everywhere round. We have Serious Meetups once per month at which we discuss a blog post, a short story, or a book (for instance, The Scout Mindset, The Money Illusion, The Metropolitan Man); and sporadic non-serious social meetups that mostly include getting dinner, going on a walk, watching a film, or playing board games. Attendance hovers around 6-8 people out of a pool of 13. People get invited to the Discord server after they've attended at least one in-person meetup. ZAGREB, CROATIA Contact: DJStern, dorian[dot]sternvukotic[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 6:00 PM Location: Krivi Put Coordinates: 8FQQRX38+V6W Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Croatian LessWrong active group communicates mainly through a Telegram group, we meetup semi regularly, approx once a month. The group is mostly social, and the meetups are not structured (sometimes we all just meet at a random party) Notes: Send me an Email and I will add you to a Telegram group where everything (active) LessWrong Croatia/Zagreb happens LIMASSOL, CYPRUS Contact: Arseniy, runescape[at]list[dot]ru, @anchorheld (Telegram / Instagram) Time: Saturday, September 3, 12:00 PM Location: By the Municipal Zoo Coordinates: 8G6MM3M3+Q6 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please hit me up on Mail, Telegram, or Instagram if you're actually going PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC Contact: Jiri Nadvornik, jiri[dot]nadvornik[at]efektivni-altruismus[dot]cz Time: Thursday, October 6, 6:00 PM Location: Garden of Dharmasala Teahouse Coordinates: 9F2P3CRW+FP7 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event COPENHAGEN, DENMARK Contact: Søren Elverlin, soeren[dot]elverlin[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 3:00 PM Location: Rundholtsvej 10, 2300 København S Coordinates: 9F7JMH38+GFP Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event, Meetup.com Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong TALLINN, ESTONIA Contact: Andrew W, andrew_n_west[at]yahoo[dot]co[dot]uk Time: Monday, September 26, 7:00 PM Location: St Vitus, Tallinn. I don't know if anyone will turn up, but I'll be wearing a suit, a beard, and a book. Coordinates: 9GF6CPRH+MQ Event link(s): LessWrong HELSINKI, FINLAND Contact: Joe Nash, joenash499[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 4:00 PM Location: Restaurant Töölönranta, Helsinginkatu 56 Coordinates: 9GG65WMJ+2J Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: LessWrong group FONTAINEBLEAU, FRANCE Contact: Ebrahim Akbari, ea[dot]akbari[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 6:00 PM Location: Glasgow bar, Fontainebleau Coordinates: 8FW4CP32+J8 Event link(s): LessWrong PARIS, FRANCE Contact: Olivier, w20l2qtf[at]mailer[dot]me, We have a Discord and a matrix server (both servers are bridged together) Time: Friday, September 23, 6:00 PM Location: In the jardin du carrousel, next to jardin des Tuileries Coordinates: 8FW4V86J+GH Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Regular meetups organized via discord or the newsletter every 3 months with around 20 people. Notes: We have a mailing list if you are interested in future meetups. Please don't hesitate to send me an email to RSVP that you're coming to help gauge the interest. TOULOUSE, FRANCE Contact: Alfonso, barsom[dot]maelwys[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 8, 7:00 PM Location: Bar 'Le Biergarten' (60 Gd Rue Saint-Michel, 31400 Toulouse). We'll be sitting at a table with an ACX MEETUP sign on it. Coordinates: 8FM3HCQW+9H Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP by email TBILISI, GEORGIA Contact: Evgenia Karunus, lakesare[at]gmail[dot]com, https://twitter.com/lakesare Time: Saturday, September 17, 7:00 PM Location: Coffee Place Coordinates: 8HH6MRQ2+WH Event link(s): LessWrong AACHEN, GERMANY Contact: Jörn, acx[at]j[dot]stoehler[dot]eu Time: Tuesday, September 27, 7:00 PM Location: Chico Mendes Coordinates: 9F28Q3HJ+9Q Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP here so I can reserve the right number of tables. BERLIN, GERMANY Contact: Ruben Arslan, ssc[at]alphabattle[dot]xyz Time: Sunday, October 2, 2:00 PM Location: Südplateau Fritz-Schloss-Park Coordinates: 9F4MG9H4+4X Event link(s): LessWrong, Google Calendar Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong. I'll bring some beverages. COLOGNE, GERMANY Contact: Marcel Müller, marcel_mueller[at]mail[dot]de Time: Saturday, October 8, 5:00 PM Location: Marienweg 43, 50858 Köln, private venue, just ring the bell or follow the sign. Coordinates: 9F28WRMX+96H Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: LW / ACX / Rationalist meetup group. Monthly, mostly social meetups. Other activities welcome. Unless noted otherwise we will meet at Marienweg 43 in 50858 Cologne on the 2nd Saturday of each month at 5 pm. Please email me to be added to our mailing list where deviations will be posted. Caution! September Meetup will be at a different venue! Notes: If you read this you are welcome. Our Covid rules are still in effect: You must be tested negative on the same day. Self tests will be available at the meetup. If there is any problem, like you do not find us or I did not see your mail, call me +491788862254. FREIBURG IM BREISGAU, GERMANY Contact: Omar, info[at]rationality-freiburg[dot]de Time: Friday, October 14, 6:00 PM Location: FlexRooms, Salzstr. 1, 79098 Freiburg. We will carry a cardboard sign saying “Rationality Freiburg”. Coordinates: 8FV9XVV2+V56 Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com, Website Group info: The group started in May 2022 and before the summer break we had five meetups with 4-11 people attending. Every two weeks seems like a good rhythm, but nothing is set in stone. So far we always read something beforehand and then discussed it, as well as trying some practical exercises such as TAPs and Personal Calibration. Afterwards we went to have dinner and continued talking about everything and anything for hours. Everything is new and flexible, so come and help us improve! Notes: We have a Signal messenger group and ask you to attend a meetup once to be able to join. HAMBURG, GERMANY Contact: Gunnar Zarncke, g[dot]zarncke[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 5:00 PM Location: Kleine Wallanlagen on the lawn near Memorial Holstenglacis. Look for pink blankets; I will also have an ACX sign. Here is an Open Street Map link which also shows the short-cut tunnel from the subway station. Coordinates: 9F5FHX4H+RXC Event link(s): LessWrongLessWrong Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong KARLSRUHE, GERMANY Contact: Marcus Wilhelm, mail[at]marcuswilhelm[dot]de Time: Saturday, September 24, 3:00 PM Location: Botanischer Garten Karlsruhe Coordinates: 8FXC2C72+85X Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet weekly, alternating offline and online, see our LessWrong page KASSEL, HESSEN, GERMANY Contact: Tobias, Sphinxfire[at]outlook[dot]de Time: Saturday, September 10, 2:00 PM Location: Friedrichsplatz, to the left of the DocumentaHall Coordinates: 9F3F8F6X+R6 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Telegram group Notes: Please join the Telegram group if you are interested in coming. It will be helpful for coordinating something beyond 'let's just see who shows up and take it from there', plus, it will also make me feel a lot better on a purely subjective level if I know beforehand that at least one other person is interested. If you prefer the surprise factor of 'knowing as little as possible about who you're going to meet', you can also just write me via E-mail, of course. LEIPZIG, GERMANY Contact: Gunther Forderung, notavailable[at]riseup[dot]net Time: Tuesday, October 4, 6:00 PM Location: In the Lene-Voigt-Park, in the secluded area opposite of the swings Coordinates: 9F3J8CM2+PF Event link(s): LessWrong TÜBINGEN, GERMANY Contact: Emma, emma[dot]tuebingen[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 23, 6:00 PM Location: The ACX/SSC meetup and dinner (with vegan options) will be on October 23rd at the Annette Kade dormitory (Mohlstraße 44, 8FWFG3H5+XR). If you’d like to attend, please write me an email, and I’ll send you an invitation to our WhatsApp group. Coordinates: 8FWFG3H5+XR Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please email me to get my phone number. If a lot of people are out of town for the holidays and can't come we could meet on, say, October 1st. I would like to know how many people to expect. ATHENS, GREECE Contact: Spyros, spyros[dot]dovas[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Monday, September 5, 7:00 PM Location: On the plaza in front of the National Library Coordinates: 8G95WMQR+WRP Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Group info: We have organized 2 events so far, fall and spring, we just sit around and discuss. We have a Whatsapp group that hasn't picked up momentum yet. Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong or Meetup.com BUDAPEST, HUNGARY Contact: Tim Underwood, timunderwood9[at]gmail[dot]com, WhatsApp 19513120591 Time: Sunday, September 11, 2:00 PM Location: Champs Sziget bar on Margit Sziget, near the front. I'll have a big hardcover copy in Hungarian of a book by Richard Dawkins. Coordinates: 8FVXG2CW+2H Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We've been meeting in Budapest for two years now, with our first meeting being the 2020 ACX meetups everywhere. We meet about once a month, and usually we have two articles that are suggested reading that we discuss. CORK, IRELAND Contact: Mikey, Godojhana[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, September 29, 6:00 PM Location: If sunny: The Lough. If not, then the game arcade on the parade Coordinates: 9C3HVGQ7+JQ Event link(s): LessWrong DUBLIN, IRELAND Contact: Lucius, lucius[at]bushnaq[dot]de, LessWrong profile Time: Sunday, October 2, 12:30 PM Location: Clement & Pekoe, William Street South, Dublin 2. We'll be sitting inside, and there'll be a sign with ACX written on it on the table Coordinates: 9C5M8PRP+JV Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: LessWrong FOLIGNO, ITALY Contact: Mauro, orfino[at]yandex[dot]com, LW profile, Telegram Time: Saturday, September 24, 5:00 PM Location: Parco dei Canapé, at the open air cafe, ask the barista Coordinates: 8FJJXP22+HC Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know how much food to get. No kids please. MILANO, ITALY Contact: Raffaele, raffa[dot]mauro[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 16, 6:30 PM Location: Viale Luigi Majno, 18, 20129 Milano MI - Primo Ventures / T8P, IInd floor. Coordinates: 8FQFF6C4+9C Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet once per month. The group started in May 2022. Notes: Please RSVP by email by the 1st of September PADOVA, ITALY Contact: Carlo, carlo[dot]martinucci[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 1, 3:30 PM Location: Prato della Valle, fountain in the middle. I'll be carrying a sign with ACX MEETUP on it :) Coordinates: 8FQH9VXG+9J Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: We'll probably find a bar to have a hot chocolate or tea or something :) PISA, ITALY Contact: Raffaele, raffaelesalvia[at]alice[dot]it Time: Saturday, October 22, 5:00 PM Location: We will meet in Piazza dei Cavalieri, near the steps of Palazzo della Carovana Coordinates: 8FMGPC92+R44 Event link(s): LessWrong ROMA, ITALY Contact: Grigorio, greghero12[at]gmail[dot]com, Facebook, +393920366026 Time: Saturday, October 8, 6:00 PM Location: We'll be around Gardenie metro station, at the benches, and I will be wearing a red shirt and sitting on top of the station to be seen Coordinates: 8FHJVHP9+8F Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet around 20-25 times a year but it is asymmetrical, focused in summer, Christmas and Easter. We discuss opinions, engage in circling, play games where we spot logical fallacies and biases by attacking our members ideological weakpoints and formalize some debating stances. Occasionally we find the willpower to devote meetups in steelmanning and understanding the outgroup (roughly 4-5 times a year) Notes: If you are into ACX enough to see this post, I believe we have enough common ground to be worth meeting each other. Aren't you curious who else is within this niche community in Rome? Come on, take a leap of faith. P.S. Would be nice if you sent me a message in WhatsApp with your name and probability of attendance, but I love walk-ins just fine. No space limit after all ;-) RIGA, LATVIA Contact: Andis, cerulean[dot]lemniscate[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 4:00 PM Location: Bastejkalns (on top of the hill) Coordinates: 9G86X426+Q5Q Event link(s): LessWrong AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS Contact: Pierre, pierreavdb[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 3:00 PM Location: Kanarie Klub (Bellamyplein 51, 1053 AT Amsterdam) Coordinates: 9F469V89+W4 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: The rationality community is growing in the Netherlands, and we're now planning on having monthly meetups! Join the Rationality NL Discord server. Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I can plan a different venue if needed DELFT, NETHERLANDS Contact: Pierre Bongrand, bongrand[dot]pierre[at]gmail[dot]com, 0033620644013 (Whatsapp/Telegram/Signal) Time: Thursday, September 22, 6:30 PM Location: Delftse Hout Beach, on the grass, in the center of the beach, I will be wearing a red T-shirt and carrying a sign with ACX MEETUP on it. Coordinates: 9F4629FG+66 Event link(s): LessWrong HATTEM, NETHERLANDS Contact: Shoshannah, shos[dot]rationality[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: Dark#0849 Time: Saturday, October 8, 2:00 PM Location: Lijsterbeslaan 6, Hattem Coordinates: 9F48F378+PR Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: We support and coordinate groups across the country, including everything from social meetups to structured events and applied rationality. The intention is to connect all Dutch rationalists and rationalists in the Netherlands. We also discuss rationality topics online and coordinate events on our Discord server. Notes: Feel free to bring kids. Ours will be there :) Also, please park 't Heem if you are coming by car. It's a 2 minute walk to our house. HELMOND, NETHERLANDS Contact: Rutger, silvery[dot]swift[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 3:00 PM Location: De Motte (On top of the hill). Nearest road is Palladio. Coordinates: 9F37FMC5+VR Event link(s): LessWrong THE HAGUE, NETHERLANDS Contact: Kristof Redei, acxmeetup[at]kristof[dot]me Time: Wednesday, September 14, 6:00 PM Location: Paleistuin, Prinsessewal, 2513 EE Den Haag, Netherlands. We'll have a picnic blanket with an ACX sign on the large central field, somewhere near the playground. Coordinates: 9F4638J3+GP Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Notes: Please RSVP on Facebook if possible! All ages/species welcome. If it's not outdoor weather, we'll go to The Bookstor Cafe next door as a backup. OSLO, NORWAY Contact: Hans Andreas & Jonas, acxoslomeetup[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 1:00 PM Location: Look for the sign of Moloch at Café Billabong - Bogstadveien 53B 0366 Oslo Coordinates: 9FFGWPH7+QP Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Group info: We're hoping to do at least a quarterly meetup, but we'll base it on the turnout and enthusiasm of this event. Notes: The cafe has historically been accepting of guests' not ordering--please don't let financial reasons keep you away! GDAŃSK, POLAND Contact: Frank, frankastralcodexten[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: frhrpr#1663 Time: Saturday, August 27, 3:00 PM Location: Next to Park Kuźniczki, opposite the train station, on the circular benches around the water pump; I will be wearing a red armband Coordinates: 9F6W9JJ4+JW Event link(s): LessWrong KRAKÓW, POLAND Contact: Mateusz Bagiński, bagginsmatthew[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 2:30 PM Location: Celna 6/9, the office of the Optimum Pareto Foundation Coordinates: 9F2X2WVX+V2 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: We meet every month, here is our Facebook group. LUBLIN, POLAND Contact: Piotr, piotrekzlublina[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 5:00 PM Location: Między Słowami cafe, Rybna 4, Lublin Coordinates: 9G346HX8+FX Event link(s): LessWrong POZNAŃ, POLAND Contact: Ofelia Kerr, ofel[dot]kerr[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: ofelia#0001 Time: Saturday, October 8, 6:00 PM Location: Van Gogh Pub, Żydowska 12, 61-761. I'll most likely be on the ground floor and I'll have an ACX sign. Coordinates: 9F4RCW5P+X3F Event link(s): LessWrong WARSAW, POLAND Contact: Michał, rationalwarsaw[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 4, 6:00 PM Location: Południk Zero, Wilcza 25 Coordinates: 9G4362G8+2V Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Group info: The community of Warsaw LessWrong/SSC/ACX/etc. readers is active for over 8 years now. We're trying to organise regular monthly meetups. You can join our Facebook group or Meetup.com. LISBOA, PORTUGAL Contact: Luís Campos, luis[dot]filipe[dot]lcampos[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 3:00 PM Location: Jardim Amália Rodrigues, close to Linha d'Água cafe, in the top of a hill, below a bunch of trees Coordinates: 8CCGPRJW+V8 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We've been meeting every month for around 1 year. Get in contact if you want to participate in the WhatsApp group. :) BUCHAREST, ROMANIA Contact: Tony, skyrimtracer[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 16, 3:00 PM Location: Plaza România Mall, Bd. Timișoara 26 - food court Coordinates: 8GP8C2HM+9X Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP by email CLUJ-NAPOCA, ROMANIA Contact: Marius Pop, pop[dot]marius[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 11:00 AM Location: Deva Host, Strada Deva 1-7 Coordinates: 8GR5QH8F+MW Event link(s): LessWrong BELGRADE, SERBIA Contact: Ivica Bogosavljevic, ibogosavljevic[at]gmail[dot]com, Viber +381 65 3473 433 Time: Monday, September 12, 6:00 PM Location: Pool Cafe on Prve pruge Coordinates: 8GP2RCP7+G7 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP on my Viber number, so I know how big the room we need. BRATISLAVA, SLOVAKIA Contact: Viliam, viliam[at]bur[dot]sk Time: Saturday, September 10, 3:00 PM Location: Medická záhrada, by the fountain Coordinates: 8FWV44X9+XW8 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: I will post an announcement on LessWrong later. In case of rain, a new meeting place nearby will be announced there. LJUBLJANA, SLOVENIA Contact: Demjan Vester, demjan[dot]vester[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Wednesday, September 14, 6:00 PM Location: Probably Lili Novy bar, near modern gallery and park Tivoli Coordinates: 8FRP3F3X+6V Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Group info: We meet about 0.7 times a month. Notes: Please RSVP because last time we just barely got a place big enough. BARCELONA, SPAIN Contact: Alfonso, alfonso[dot]martinez[at]upf[dot]edu, WhatsApp +34693846738 Time: Sunday, October 2, 5:30 PM Location: Parc de la Ciutadella, by the Lion Catcher statue; I'll have an ACX sign Coordinates: 8FH495QP+96 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: The idea is to sit on the grass; bring a foulard along for your comfort, or a foldable chair if preferred. Don't worry about the language: English, Spanish, Catalan, we'll find a way. MADRID, SPAIN Contact: Jaime, jaimesevillamolina[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 5:00 PM Location: Teatro de títeres del Parque del Retiro. We'll be on the stands with an ACX sign Coordinates: 8CGRC897+F8C Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We are an EA / rationality group, we've been active for around 5 years but have less in-person activity since the pandemic started. We have a WhatsApp group and a channel in the Spanish-speaking EA Slack. SEVILLA, SPAIN Contact: Edu, edur[dot]acx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 8:00 PM Location: Parque de María Luisa. I'll be on the grass behind the Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions. I'll be the guy next to an ACX sign, a white wooden chair, and a cardboard ukulele with a tiny cardboard hat on it. Coordinates: 8C9P92F6+3RG Event link(s): LessWrong GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN Contact: Joacim, joacimj[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 3:00 PM Location: Condeco Fredsgatan. I'll have a stack of three books on my table. Coordinates: 9F9HPX4C+39G Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN Contact: Sal, niktonick[at]gmail[dot]com, Telegram Time: Sunday, September 25, 3:00 PM Location: Humlegården, Karlavägen. We will meet near blue gazebo, I will have 'ACX meetup' sign. Coordinates: 9FFW83RF+3M5 Group info: Facebook group BERN, SWITZERLAND Contact: Daniel, dd14214+acx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 2, 4:00 PM Location: Grosse Schanze, at the statue in front of the main uni building, heading to the Pittaria if it's cold or raining Coordinates: 8FR9XC2Q+4G Event link(s): LessWrong GENEVA, SWITZERLAND Contact: Eric, eric[dot]c[dot]p[dot]meier[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 11, 4:00 PM Location: Park de la Grange, just towards the lake below Villa de la grange Coordinates: 8FR86548+J4 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We have a small persistent group who has tried to meet up once a month since last years Meetup. Notes: Feel free to bring other people you think would be interested! ZURICH, SWITZERLAND Contact: MB, acxzurich[at]proton[dot]me Time: Saturday, September 24, 3:00 PM Location: TBD Event link(s): LessWrong ISTANBUL, TURKEY Contact: J, jinai[dot]jyap[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 25, 4:00 PM Location: The House Cafe in Ortaköy. I am a young Asian woman and imagine I'll be easy to spot, but will also try to bring a sign with ACX MEETUP on it. Coordinates: 8GHF22XG+23P Event link(s): LessWrong, Partiful Group info: I do not live here; I am just digital nomading for an indefinite amount of time and would like to meet anyone who's here! Notes: Please RSVP via the Partiful link (you can RSVP as a Maybe)! BIRMINGHAM, UK Contact: Thomas Read, thomas[dot]read[dot]acx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 1:00 PM Location: We'll be at The Wellington, 37 Bennetts Hill, on the roof terrace if possible. I'll wear an orange shirt and have a sign saying ACX on the table. Coordinates: 9C4WF3JX+7Q Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: It's only a few minutes walk from the stations, so hopefully people can join from all over the West Midlands! BRIGHTON, UK Contact: Alan Enright, alanenright[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 11:00 AM Location: We'll be at the Alcampo Lounge on London Road—we will try and get a table on the raised area in front of you and to the left as you come in but will also have a little ACX sign. Coordinates: 9C2XRVM6+3X Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com BRISTOL, UK Contact: Nick Lowry, bristoleffectivealtruism[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 2:00 PM Location: We’ll be meeting at entrance closet to Tesco Express in the Galleries, Bristol City Centre Coordinates: 9C3VFC45+RJM Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event, Meetup.com Group info: Meet twice monthly for socials, more regular 'productive' meetups. Been active for 3+ years, please message for WhatsApp group CAMBRIDGE, UK Contact: Hamish Todd, hamish[dot]todd1[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 2:00 PM Location: Bath House Pub, UPSTAIRS!! I will have a copy of Peter Singer's The Most Good You Can Do Coordinates: 9F426439+J9 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: We meet on the third Saturday of every month. The group has been around almost a year and is well-attended! Notes: My phone/WhatsApp number is +44 0730 *** 3550, where the *** are replaced by the serial number of the Boeing plane whose first flight was on September 2, 1998. Email me to get on the mailing list for future events if you'd like that :) CARDIFF, WALES Contact: AF, strmnova[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 16, 5:00 PM Location: Little Man Coffee (note new location!) Coordinates: 9C3RFRHH+W2 Event link(s): LessWrong EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND, UK Contact: Sam, acxedinburgh[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 2:00 PM Location: Pleasance Cafe. Go through the arch and the door to the cafe is on your left Coordinates: 9C7RWRW9+M8 Group info: ~Monthly meetups, often in Pleasance Cafe but have experimented with other locations. Email me to join the mailing list & WhatsApp group. LANCASTER, UK Contact: Gruffydd Gozali, gruffyddgozali[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 15, 3:00 PM Location: Lancaster University Library, will be on the ground floor by the tree wearing an EA shirt. Coordinates: 9C6V2657+WJR Event link(s): LessWrong LINCOLN, UK Contact: Tobias, tobias[dot]showan[at]yahoo[dot]co[dot]uk Time: Saturday, September 10, 2:00 PM Location: Nosey Parker pub, I'll bring a little paper ACX sign. Coordinates: 9C5X6C9R+XJ Event link(s): LessWrong LONDON, UK Contact: Edward Saperia, edsaperia[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 25, 2:00 PM Location: Newspeak House Coordinates: 9C3XGWGH+3F7 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event, Meetup.com, Eventbrite Group info: You can join our mailing list or our Meetup.com group MANCHESTER, UK Contact: Matthew Gibson, melkartmtg[at]hotmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 18, 11:00 AM Location: Sackville Gardens, Alan Turing Memorial Coordinates: 9C5VFQG7+MH Event link(s): LessWrong NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE, UK Contact: Joshua William, iamjoshwilliam[at]icloud[dot]com, Telegram Time: Saturday, September 3, 12:30 PM Location: Trinity Square, High Street Gosforth. You can get the bus to Gosforth from the city center just outside the famous 'Tyneside Cinema' (bus number: 30, 31, or 35 at Monument Pilgrim Street bus stop), or you can take a walk if you want to get your 'steps' in (if you'd like to do the latter, send me an email and I'll send you the directions), which takes ~60-min. Coordinates: 9C7W294H+5V Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: To my knowledge, there isn't an ACX meet up in this city, or region of the UK, though if there is a demand for a reoccurrence, I'd be happy to keep facilitating such. I'd also happily formulate a WhatsApp group if theres interest, after the meet up. Notes: We have a deli, '1901 cafe', on the square, which we can grab an immediate bite to eat at [so save some hunger if you'd like to do that]. There's a safe [and lovely] park with some benches just by the way, which, if the weather is nice, we can sit at after a bite to eat, or, otherwise, we can remain in the cafe. OXFORD, UK Contact: Sam, ssc[at]sambrown[dot]eu, There's a Signal group people can join :) contact Sam for info Time: Wednesday, October 19, 6:30 PM Location: The Star, Rectory Road, Oxford. We'll be in the beer garden round the back, with a sign ?? Coordinates: 9C3WPQX6+QP9 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event, Meetup.com Group info: We run socials every months, and applied rationality workshops from time to time! Notes: Please RSVP on any of the platforms (or email) for free pizza PENRYN, CORNWALL, UK Contact: mini t, tminns[at]btinternet[dot]com Time: Saturday, August 27, 3:00 PM Location: glasney playing field and valley Coordinates: 9C2P5V8V+P9 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: I don't mind rescheduling, or organizing another event, not many people are likely to turn up this far out of the way.
Inline links: 8FWR693H+GP2, LessWrong, Facebook group, 9F26RCWC+84, LessWrong, 8GJ5M8GW+J9, LessWrong, 8FQQRX38+V6W, LessWrong, 8G6MM3M3+Q6, LessWrong, 9F2P3CRW+FP7, LessWrong, Facebook event, 9F7JMH38+GFP, LessWrong, Facebook event, Meetup.com, 9GF6CPRH+MQ, LessWrong, 9GG65WMJ+2J, LessWrong, LessWrong group, 8FW4CP32+J8, LessWrong, Discord, matrix server, 8FW4V86J+GH, LessWrong, 8FM3HCQW+9H, LessWrong, https://twitter.com/lakesare, 8HH6MRQ2+WH, LessWrong, 9F28Q3HJ+9Q, LessWrong, here, 9F4MG9H4+4X, LessWrong, Google Calendar, 9F28WRMX+96H, LessWrong, 8FV9XVV2+V56, LessWrong, Meetup.com, Website, an Open Street Map link, 9F5FHX4H+RXC, LessWrong, LessWrong, 8FXC2C72+85X, LessWrong, our LessWrong page, 9F3F8F6X+R6, LessWrong, Telegram group, 9F3J8CM2+PF, LessWrong, 8FWFG3H5+XR, 8FWFG3H5+XR, LessWrong, 8G95WMQR+WRP, LessWrong, Meetup.com, 8FVXG2CW+2H, LessWrong, 9C3HVGQ7+JQ, LessWrong, LessWrong profile, 9C5M8PRP+JV, LessWrong, LessWrong, LW profile, Telegram, 8FJJXP22+HC, LessWrong, 8FQFF6C4+9C, LessWrong, 8FQH9VXG+9J, LessWrong, 8FMGPC92+R44, LessWrong, Facebook, 8FHJVHP9+8F, LessWrong, 9G86X426+Q5Q, LessWrong, 9F469V89+W4, LessWrong, Rationality NL Discord server, 9F4629FG+66, LessWrong, 9F48F378+PR, LessWrong, Facebook event, 9F37FMC5+VR, LessWrong, 9F4638J3+GP, LessWrong, Facebook event, 9FFGWPH7+QP, LessWrong, Meetup.com, 9F6W9JJ4+JW, LessWrong, 9F2X2WVX+V2, LessWrong, Facebook event, our Facebook group, 9G346HX8+FX, LessWrong, 9F4RCW5P+X3F, LessWrong, 9G4362G8+2V, LessWrong, Meetup.com, Facebook group, Meetup.com, 8CCGPRJW+V8, LessWrong, 8GP8C2HM+9X, LessWrong, 8GR5QH8F+MW, LessWrong, 8GP2RCP7+G7, LessWrong, 8FWV44X9+XW8, LessWrong, 8FRP3F3X+6V, LessWrong, Meetup.com, 8FH495QP+96, LessWrong, 8CGRC897+F8C, LessWrong, 8C9P92F6+3RG, LessWrong, 9F9HPX4C+39G, LessWrong, Facebook event, Telegram, 9FFW83RF+3M5, Facebook group, 8FR9XC2Q+4G, LessWrong, 8FR86548+J4, LessWrong, LessWrong, 8GHF22XG+23P, LessWrong, Partiful, 9C4WF3JX+7Q, LessWrong, 9C2XRVM6+3X, LessWrong, Meetup.com, 9C3VFC45+RJM, LessWrong, Facebook event, Meetup.com, 9F426439+J9, LessWrong, Facebook event, 9C3RFRHH+W2, LessWrong, 9C7RWRW9+M8, 9C6V2657+WJR, LessWrong, 9C5X6C9R+XJ, LessWrong, 9C3XGWGH+3F7, LessWrong, Facebook event, Meetup.com, Eventbrite, our mailing list, Meetup.com group, 9C5VFQG7+MH, LessWrong, Telegram, Monument Pilgrim Street bus stop, 9C7W294H+5V, LessWrong, 9C3WPQX6+QP9, LessWrong, Facebook event, Meetup.com, 9C2P5V8V+P9, LessWrong
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023
April 10, 2023 · Original source
LONDON, UK Contact: Edward Saperia Contact Info: ed[at]newspeak[dot]house Time: Saturday, April 15th, 10:00 AM Location: Newspeak House Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C3XGWGH+3F7 Notes: Please register via Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/astral-codex-ten-meetup-tickets-591452770157
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9C3XGWGH+3F7, https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/astral-codex-ten-meetup-tickets-591452770157
WEST PALM BEACH, FLORIDA, USA Contact: Rob Contact Info: RobRoyACX[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, May 27th, 11:00 AM Location: Grandview Public Market. 1401 Clare Ave, West Palm Beach, FL 33401. We'll be at the northeast outside area, sitting at a table with an ACX MEETUP sign on it. Parking is free at an adjacent lot, and there may also be a free valet service. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76RXMWXP+GH Event Link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/acx-meetups-everywhere-rationality-in-west-palm-beach-tickets-608249630017 Notes: See our Eventbrite for more details, including meetup opportunities in Boca Raton, Delray Beach, and Boynton Beach.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/76RXMWXP+GH, https://www.eventbrite.com/e/acx-meetups-everywhere-rationality-in-west-palm-beach-tickets-608249630017
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Adriana Contact Info: adriana[period]lica[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Thursday, September 4th, 7:00 PM Location: Rooftop terrace of Archie Living building. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FH495RJ+R9 Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/a8JdcnpTRYirgncZT Notes: RSVP required at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/acx-fall-meetup-tickets-1630472118999 We'll have snacks and refreshments. Dogs & kids are welcome. Bring swimwear, if you'd like a pool dip.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FH495RJ+R9, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/a8JdcnpTRYirgncZT
Contact: Allwyn Contact Info: allwyn8443[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, September 6th, 11:00 AM Location: Aperture Coffee Bar, 4124 Main St, Vancouver, BC V5V 3P7 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84XR6VXX+9M Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/Kdl [remove this bit] gviZRNzj1JLYEWbLmg6 Notes: For ice-breaker tell us about your fav ACX post or any posts that you really enjoyed! Please RSVP here: https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/acx-vancouver-fall-2025-meetup-tickets-1579329028639
Inline links: https://plus.codes/84XR6VXX+9M, https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/acx-vancouver-fall-2025-meetup-tickets-1579329028639
Effective Altruism Brisbane2 mentions across 2 issues

Effective Altruism Brisbane is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between March 25, 2025 and August 29, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "co-hosted with the regular meetup of Effective Altruism Brisbane"; "This event is co-hosted with Effective Altruism Brisbane". It most often appears alongside 11841 Wagner Street, Culver City, 13 Mile road, 131 Colonie Center.

Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
March 25, 2025
Last seen
August 29, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places
March 25, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Laura Contact Info: laura[period]leighton94[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, April 13th, 5:00 PM Location: The Burrow, West End - we will be downstairs and probably towards the back where it tends to be quieter Coordinates: https://plus.codes/5R4MG2C7+44M Notes: This event will be co-hosted with the regular meetup of Effective Altruism Brisbane as there's usually a ~75% overlap in attendance.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/5R4MG2C7+44M
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Laura Contact Info: laura[period]leighton94[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Wednesday, October 1st, 6:00 PM Location: Fourth Monkey Bar and Grill, 58 Mollison St, South Brisbane/West End. We will be in the back courtyard or on the back deck where it tends to be quieter. We will have ACX meetup signs up. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/5R4MG2F6+6W Notes: This event is co-hosted with Effective Altruism Brisbane.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/5R4MG2F6+6W
Effective Altruism Madrid2 mentions across 2 issues

Effective Altruism Madrid is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 29, 2024 and March 25, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/Effective-Altruism-Madrid/"; "Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/effective-altruism-madrid". It most often appears alongside 200 Degrees, 4th Ave Food Park, ACX.

Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
August 29, 2024
Last seen
March 25, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places
August 29, 2024 · Original source
...on[d ot]me Time: Saturday, September 21st, 11:00 AM Location: El Retiro Park, puppet theatre. I will be carrying an ACX sign Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8CGRC897+F8M Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/Effective-Altruism-Madrid/ Notes: RSVPs appreciated but not required Sweden GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN Contact: Stefan Contact Info: acx_gbg[at]posteo[d ot]se Time: Wednesday, September 25th, 06:00 PM Loc...
...on[d ot]me Time: Saturday, September 21st, 11:00 AM Location: El Retiro Park, puppet theatre. I will be carrying an ACX sign Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8CGRC897+F8M Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/Effective-Altruism-Madrid/ Notes: RSVPs appreciated but not required Sweden GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN Contact: Stefan Contact Info: acx_gbg[at]posteo[d ot]se Time: Wednesday, September 25th, 06:00 PM Lo...
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places
March 25, 2025 · Original source
...n/tourist information/teatro-de-titeres-de-el-retiro). We will be near the theater stands, and I will bring a large ACX sign Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8CGRC897+F8M Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/effective-altruism-madrid VALENCIA Contact: Giovanni Contact Info: gsstasi[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, April 6th, 3:00 PM Location: Cherry Blossom Valencia, C/ de Moratín, 15, 46002 Coordi...
Effective Altruism Serbia2 mentions across 2 issues

Effective Altruism Serbia is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 25, 2023 and March 30, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Group Link: https://www.linkedin.com/company/effective-altruism-serbia/"; "Effective Altruism Serbia is organizing a casual hang out + lunch in vegan and low-waste Kafe VeZa". It most often appears alongside 200 Degrees, 2740 Telegraph Avenue, 711 Milby St.

Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
August 25, 2023
Last seen
March 30, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places
August 25, 2023 · Original source
...ektivnialtruizam[dot]rs Time: Sunday, September 24th, 3:00 PM Location: Bar Green House, Dr. Dragoslava Popovica 24, Belgrade Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GP2RF7G+36 Group Link: https://www.linkedin.com/company/effective-altruism-serbia/ Notable Guests: Dušan from Serbia Notes: Please RSVP by email to Tatiana on the email above! The meet-up is the monthly meet-up of EA/LW/ACX crowd, usually we discuss so...
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
March 30, 2024 · Original source
BELGRADE Contact: Tanja Contact Info: tanja[dot]trninic[at]efektivnialtruizam[dot]rs Time: Sunday, April 7th, 2:00 PM Location: Venezelosova 20, Belgrade, Serbia. Effective Altruism Serbia is organizing a casual hang out + lunch in vegan and low-waste Kafe VeZa Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GP2RFC9+36 Group Link: https://efektivnialtruizam.rs/ Notes: Please RSVP to tanja.trninic@efektivnialtruizam.rs so we can reserve enough tables for everyone.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8GP2RFC9+36, https://efektivnialtruizam.rs/
Effective Altruism Wellington2 mentions across 2 issues

Effective Altruism Wellington is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 26, 2022 and August 25, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "We're running the event this time in partnership with Effective Altruism Wellington"; "meetup will be run in collaboration with Effective Altruism Wellington". It most often appears alongside 9191 Tahoe Ln, Boulder, CO 80301, 932 Welch Rd. Java Center, ACX.

Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
August 26, 2022
Last seen
August 25, 2023
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places
August 26, 2022 · Original source
BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA Contact: Jarred Filmer, jarred[dot]filmer[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 7:00 PM Location: 52 McCaul Street Taringa (house) Coordinates: 5R4JFXXQ+P8 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: We used to meet once a month years ago, but now just meet whenever there's a Meetups Everywhere :) Notes: Snacks will be provided but dinner will not be, would recommend eating before you come CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA Contact: Andy Bachler, Andy[dot]Bachler[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Wednesday, August 31, 5:30 PM Location: Badger & Co pub at ANU. Central location, parking free after 5pm, might be loud, sorry! Coordinates: 4RPFP4FC+34 Event link(s): LessWrong, Eventbrite Notes: Parking area just to the north of the pub, over the river, is free after 5pm! GOLD COAST (SOUTH), AUSTRALIA Contact: Lerancan, lerancan[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 11, 2:00 PM Location: A picnic table, Wyberba Street Reserve, Tugun Coordinates: 5R3MVF5W+555 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Email me in case of bad weather/you can't find me/you can't make that time etc. MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA Contact: Ryan, xgravityx[at]hotmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 2, 6:00 PM Location: Beer Deluxe Federation Square Coordinates: 4RJ65XM9+3Q Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: We're officially the Less Wrong Melbourne social meetup group, though our members include the broader rationalist community. We meet once a month for casual discussion (and beers for those so inclined). Please join our Facebook group to see the meeting invite; there you will see a WhatsApp group link - please join that group too to ensure timely updates in case of changes (Facebook notifications don't work reliably for this). Notes: Please RSVP to the meeting invite on the Facebook group so that I can make an appropriate booking. PERTH, AUSTRALIA Contact: Madge, madgech[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 25, 2:00 PM Location: Russell Square, Northbridge, corner of Shenton and Aberdeen St. There will be some sort of ACX meetup sign. Coordinates: 4PWQ3V34+W6 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: I run one meetup per year, if someone else wants to take over please do Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong or Facebook SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA Contact: Eliot, Redeliot[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, September 15, 6:00 PM Location: City of Sydney rsl, lvl 2 in the fishbowl Coordinates: 4RRH46F4+983 Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Group info: We meet monthly WOLLONGONG, AUSTRALIA Contact: Jason, jason[dot]bowkettblogs[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 12:00 PM Location: UOW Library Coordinates: 4RQGHVVH+69 Event link(s): LessWrong CHENGDU, CHINA Contact: Alex, acx[dot]chengdu[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, September 15, 7:00 PM Location: Chef Wenwu Hot & Spicy Jianghu Food (Yulin store)/文武大厨·热辣江湖菜(玉林店). I (a foreigner) will be wearing a green shirt. Coordinates: 8P26J3C5+462 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP at the above email address, I will give you my Wechat contact if you're interested in attending. Open to time/date/location changes, so let me know if the proposed event doesn't work for you! Can be a bilingual event; all welcome. 有双语交流的可能性。如果想来的话，请提前发给我个电子邮件。 HONG KONG Contact: Nathan, nathan[at]xevarion[dot]org Time: Saturday, September 10, 1:00 PM Location: The Catalyst, 2 Po Yan Street, Sheung Wan. Big wooden door. Coordinates: 862M74PW+6XP Event link(s): LessWrong BANGALORE, INDIA Contact: Nihal, propwash[at]duck[dot]com, Discord: propwash#4648 Time: Sunday, September 18, 4:00 PM Location: Matteo Coffea, Church Street Coordinates: 7J4VXJF4+PR Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We're the longest active group in Asia — we've been meeting monthly for the last 4 years, discussing ACX posts, LW content with a diverse and friendly group of people. Check our website for more info. Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong to help me be better prepared. HYDERABAD, INDIA Contact: Vatsal, vmehra[at]pm[dot]me, Whatsapp: +919944430856 (username: Vim) Time: Sunday, September 11, 5:00 PM Location: The Weekend Cafe, Plot No D, 3, Vikrampuri Colony, beside vac's bakery, Vikrampuri Colony, Lane, Secunderabad, Telangana, 500015, India Coordinates: 7J9WFF4X+5P Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Our rationality meetup group has been around for about 3 months and we discuss articles and exercises (eg. CFAR handbook) that can help us improve epistemic and instrumental rationality. MUMBAI, INDIA Contact: PB, e2y94n1nv[at]relay[dot]firefox[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 9, 4:00 PM Location: Jamjar Diner, Versova Coordinates: 7JFJ4RM6+5W Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong or via email so I can plan activities accordingly. NEW DELHI, INDIA Contact: Suryansh Tyagi, suryanshtyagiphone[at]gmail[dot]com, WhatsApp/phone +919997299972 Time: Sunday, September 11, 5:00 PM Location: Select CityWalk Mall, Saket. Where inside the mall depends on the number of people interested. Coordinates: 7JWVG6H9+8H Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please either send me an email or message me on WhatsApp if you want to attend. Any suggestions/changes are welcome. UDAIPUR, RAJASTHAN, INDIA Contact: Shailendra Paliwal, acx-meetup-2022[at]shailendra[dot]me Time: Saturday, September 10, 7:00 PM Location: We'll be at Doodh Talai near Pichola Lake and I'll be wearing a gray t-shirt carrying a sign ACX Meetup Coordinates: 7JPMHM9M+HG Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so that I can plan ahead UBUD, BALI, INDONESIA Contact: William Ubud, Napaproject[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Tuesday, August 30, 6:00 PM Location: PARQ Ubud Coordinates: 6P3QG789+F7 Event link(s): LessWrong TOKYO, JAPAN Contact: Harold Godsoe, hgodsoe[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 8, 10:00 AM Location: Near Nakameguro station - RSVP for details Coordinates: 8Q7XJPV2+QFP Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Notes: ACX Tokyo meets monthly since Sept 2021. Our meetups are in English, so far. To join in, feel free to get in touch in any of the many ways to do so (email, Meetup.com). It's useful to be in contact before coming to an event, to help with that first leap of faith. KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA Contact: Yi-Yang, yi[dot]yang[dot]chua[at]gmail[dot]com, LessWrong profile Time: Saturday, September 17, 2:00 PM Location: I'll be in Lisette's Bangsar, which is a 5-minute walk from Bangsar LRT. I'll be wearing a pale green t-shirt and carrying an ACX sign. Coordinates: 6PM34MHH+VW Event link(s): LessWrong AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND Contact: Jonathan De Wet, jonpdw[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 6:30 PM Location: 32 Stanley Ave Milford, Auckland Coordinates: 4VMP6QH4+86 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Notes: It’s a dinner party! Please RSVP on FB so I know how much food to make DUNEDIN, NEW ZEALAND Contact: Gavin, bisga673[at]student[dot]otago[dot]ac[dot]nz Time: Saturday, September 3, 3:00 PM Location: Picnic tables outside of St. David's lecture theatre on Otago University campus. I'll make a sign with ACX meetup. Coordinates: 4V6G4GP7+GM5 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: There is no Dunedin group as far as I'm aware of, but I'd be keen to meet other likeminded people and organise group hangouts occasionally. WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND Contact: Ben W, benwve[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Tuesday, September 27, 5:30 PM Location: Rutherford House, Bunny Street, Wellington. Room MZ05, which is on the mezzanine floor Coordinates: 4VCPPQCH+FGC Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: We're running the event this time in partnership with Effective Altruism Wellington LAPU LAPU, CEBU, PHILIPPINES Contact: Dave, tokkolizard[at]tutanota[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 4, 2:00 PM Location: Starbucks in Mactan Newtown, there will be a sign with ACX MEETUP on it. Coordinates: 7Q268257+4F Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP by mail so I know if I need to set up a bigger meeting place SINGAPORE Contact: Jonathan Ng, jonathan[dot]ng1[at]gmail[dot]com, Telegram @derpy Time: Tuesday, September 6, 6:30 PM Location: Tanjong Pagar MRT gantry, I'll be wearing the dark blue EA Global 2022 jumper Coordinates: 6PH57RGW+J8 Event link(s): LessWrong
Inline links: 5R4JFXXQ+P8, LessWrong, Facebook event, 4RPFP4FC+34, LessWrong, Eventbrite, 5R3MVF5W+555, LessWrong, 4RJ65XM9+3Q, LessWrong, Facebook event, 4PWQ3V34+W6, LessWrong, Facebook event, 4RRH46F4+983, LessWrong, Meetup.com, 4RQGHVVH+69, LessWrong, 8P26J3C5+462, LessWrong, 862M74PW+6XP, LessWrong, 7J4VXJF4+PR, LessWrong, our website, 7J9WFF4X+5P, LessWrong, 7JFJ4RM6+5W, LessWrong, 7JWVG6H9+8H, LessWrong, 7JPMHM9M+HG, LessWrong, 6P3QG789+F7, LessWrong, 8Q7XJPV2+QFP, LessWrong, Meetup.com, Meetup.com, LessWrong profile, Lisette's Bangsar, 6PM34MHH+VW, LessWrong, 4VMP6QH4+86, LessWrong, Facebook event, 4V6G4GP7+GM5, LessWrong, 4VCPPQCH+FGC, LessWrong, 7Q268257+4F, LessWrong, 6PH57RGW+J8, LessWrong
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places
August 25, 2023 · Original source
WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND Contact: Ben W Contact Info: benwve[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Tuesday, October 3rd, 5:30 PM Location: Room MZ02 (on the mezannine floor), Rutherford House, 33 Bunny Street, Wellington 6011 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4VCPPQCH+CMR Group Link: facebook.com/EffectiveAltruismWellington Notes: This meetup will be run in collaboration with Effective Altruism Wellington. The external door closes at 6pm, but if you call me I can let you in. reach me on 0+2+7+3+4+4+1+0+8+2
Inline links: https://plus.codes/4VCPPQCH+CMR, facebook.com/EffectiveAltruismWellington
Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium2 mentions across 2 issues

Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between February 10, 2022 and October 09, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium (EPRC: https://theeprc.org/)"; "his Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium - intended to help investigate phenomena usually considered “spiritual”/”psychedelic”/”mystical”"; "at his Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium - intended to help investigate phenomena". It most often appears alongside Daniel Ingram, 2018, @BendiniUK.

Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
February 10, 2022
Last seen
October 09, 2022
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Source context
ACX Grants ++: The Second Half
February 10, 2022 · Original source
#88: Daniel Ingram’s Nonprofit For Studying Emergent (ie spiritual) Phenomena Emergence Benefactors (EB: https://ebenefactors.org/) is a 501(c)(3) charity established in 2021, striving to reduce global suffering and promote long-term human flourishing through an in-depth understanding of emergent (spiritual, mystical, energetic, psychedelic, and related) phenomena. We are designed to support the roadmap of the Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium (EPRC: https://theeprc.org/) and its allied entities. This way, we fund and support methodologically rigorous, ontologically agnostic research on emergent experiences, practices, and their effects. Furthermore, our aim is to promote the culturally-sensitive incorporation of this scientific and clinical knowledge into global, evidence-based knowledge bases. We draw insights from rationalist and effective altruism frameworks. EB’s Board and team of contractors ensure a diverse range of professional skills and talents. Dr. Daniel M. Ingram (CV: https://tinyurl.com/dringram), the self-funded Acting CEO and Board Chair of EB, has over 37 years of professional and personal experience with emergent phenomena. We welcome both unrestricted donations and those intended to support specific projects and activities. We do appreciate valuable feedback from the ACX community on how to make this project the best it can be. The EPRC Whitepaper contains all the detailed information: https://hypernotes.zenkit.com/i/UFIY1UO1cp/84TWK0BwQlq/?v=M6pP_Tb7W6 For inquiries: daniel.ingram@ebenefactors.org
Open Thread 245
October 09, 2022 · Original source
5: I got to talk to Daniel Ingram (Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, etc) last week. He mentions that his Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium - intended to help investigate phenomena usually considered “spiritual”/”psychedelic”/”mystical” like meditation and enlightenment, and to help health care workers better understand medical/psychiatric issues related to them - is going well but needs funding. Go here to learn more about how to help. They are also interested in connecting with meditators, researchers, and medical practitioners interested in their mission - see here for more.
Inline links: Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium, Go here, here
English parliament2 mentions across 2 issues

English parliament is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between June 10, 2021 and August 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "in 1808, English parliament authorized every county to build it’s own asylum"; "the English Parliament". It most often appears alongside England, English, Europe.

Article page
English parliament
Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
June 10, 2021
Last seen
August 01, 2025
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Your Book Review: Down And Out In Paris And London
June 10, 2021 · Original source
No other drugs are even mentioned. But that isn’t even the most shocking absence from Orwell’s picture of poverty. What struck me first about Orwell’s companions is that despite all of them being unemployed, half-starving wanderers without any social ties…none of them seem to be (extremely)mentally ill. Orwell never once suggests that these men are homeless because of any mental deficiency or disorder. He always maintains that they are just like people he knew in his ‘respectable life’, but poorer. Some are eccentric in the extreme, but nothing like many of the homeless one now sees on the streets of American cities. This is likely because in 1808, English parliament authorized every county to build it’s own asylum, and in 1845 it became compulsory for the counties to do so. And “by the end of the century there were as many as 120 new asylums in England and Wales, housing more than 100,000 people.”2 Now as to the conditions within these asylums, please consult someone who knows more about the history of mental illness than I do. Maybe you could start with Scott’s review of Madness and Civilization. But it at least seems a likely explanation for the utter and complete absence of the (extremely) mentally ill from Orwell’s Paris and London. Orwell never even mentions the problem. Likely it was a given to him that ‘tramps’ were mostly sane, able-bodied men, and that anyone that was truly insane would’ve been immediately locked up. I can’t be sure, because he never mentions mental illness or the asylum system at all. It’s as if it’s not even worth mentioning.
Inline links: 2, Madness and Civilization.
Your Review: Joan of Arc
August 01, 2025 · Original source
In England, however, the practice of scutage (nobles paying money to get out of raising troops) had arisen, and also in England there existed that fantastically useful tool of kings for raising money, the English Parliament.11 With the combination of carrot - redress of grievances - and stick - pay or I'll impose costs on you perfectly legally - augmented by the patriotic pride of Englishmen who might not want to kill Frenchmen themselves but really wanted the Frenchmen dead, Edward collected money and used it to pay professionals drawn from England and Wales, and these professionals fought.
Inline links: 11
Enron2 mentions across 2 issues

Enron is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between May 26, 2023 and July 21, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "book promising to cover 'legendary frauds' had to include... Enron"; "Former Enron employees can chime in here". It most often appears alongside Apple, effective altruism, FTX.

Article page
Enron
Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
May 26, 2023
Last seen
July 21, 2023
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Your Book Review: Lying for Money
May 26, 2023 · Original source
While Lying For Money is a great educational resource that improved my understanding of several parts of the economy, much of the value of the book comes from the sheer entertainment value of reading about famous, infamous, and not-so-famous frauds and capers. (Oftentimes, the not-so-famous stories are the most entertaining: one might imagine that when Dan Davies was selling the proposal, any book promising to cover "legendary frauds" had to include Bernie Madoff and Enron. The other, less-known anecdotes can be plucked out and included because they are interesting, rather than because Davies and his publisher felt a sense of obligation to include them.)
Your Book Review: The Laws of Trading
July 21, 2023 · Original source
We need a framework for thinking about these trades. Lebron’s first law states that we must know ourselves and our motivations for trading before we trade. We tell ourselves many stories, but someone with intellectual honesty – the person with the most alignment between their motivations and actions – will take money from the person who didn’t go through the work to understand their own motivations. There is a reason that Citadel and other hedge funds pay millions of dollars to trade with retail. They know why they are trading: to maximize profit. And the dilettante who “trades for fun” will be eaten alive by a firm with a much better model of a) the world and b) the dilettante themself. Why did I write this book review? To test my intellectual mettle. I could easily have posted this book review elsewhere, but no, I wanted to see how I stack up against other ACX Book Review contest participants. Similarly, this is often the reason people get into trading. One motivation that Lebron explicitly calls out is intellectual validation. You can toil in obscurity for years as an academic. But in trading, there is a quick feedback loop. If your P&L showed $10M last year and the guy sitting next to you showed $8M, you have demonstrated who is “cleverer” and established a clear hierarchy. What lessons here transfer to our daily lives? Like Paul Graham, Lebron encourages us to keep our identities small. He gives the standard decision-making advice to write down your framework and reasoning for why you made a decision at a specific point in time, in order to avoid biases after the fact. This section of the book contained good general advice, but nothing that will be particularly new for the median ACX reader. 2: Adverse Selection You’re never happy with the amount you traded. Now we start to get into the good stuff. Financial markets are an information aggregation mechanism, relying on multiple parties’ beliefs and recursive Bayesian updates of an individual actor’s beliefs based on the beliefs of others2. Market mechanics demonstrate Bayesian beliefs in action. The following quote is quite long, so skip over it if you don’t want to dive deep into the psychology of making a market. I retained it in full because this is quite literally the best description I’ve ever seen of the Bayesian dance between two market makers: “You are a market maker in South African mining companies. Through years of effort and continual improvement, you have built a trading model for the company Veldt Resources. You walk into work one day, ready to set up your trading for the day. It's a stock that doesn't trade much, and usually there are only two market makers: you and another (we'll call her Jo). She's sharp, and she competes well to trade against customer orders that come in. Your model has Veldt valued at 54.35 ZAR (South African rand). You're going to start quoting the stock, so you're about to turn on your machine making a market 54.25 - 54.45 (1000x)3. Before you turn on, you check the current market and notice that Jo has already turned on and she's making her market 53.50 - 54.00 (2000x). If you were to turn on your machine, your market would cross her market, and you would buy 1000 shares from her for 54.00. You now need to make a decision. Whose model do you believe more, yours or Jo's? If you believe yours, you should turn on your machine, trade at 54.00, and expect to make money. If you believe Jo's model, you should adjust your own model parameters to match her market and turn on, making a similar market to hers. What to do? As with many dichotomies, this is a false one. And as with many decision processes, Bayesian reasoning lights the way… …Jo presumably believes Veldt is worth around 53.75 (the average of her bid and offer). But how confident is she in her belief? The width of her market can give you a clue. It's 0.50 ZAR, whereas yours was going to be 0.20 ZAR wide. All other things equal, you should think that Jo only has 40% (0.20/0.50) of the confidence in her fair value as you do in yours. On some absolute scale of confidence, you can say you had a belief-strength of 100 in your fair value of 54.35 (before seeing Jo's market), and Jo has a belief-strength of 40 in her fair value of 53.75 (before seeing yours). And it turns out the weighted average of these two beliefs is quite a reasonable way to combine them: 100/140 * 54.35 + 40/140 * 53.75 = 54.18. Your updated fair value, having seen Jo's market, is thus 54.18 ZAR. This procedure is a quick, heuristic, and reduced version of Bayesian belief-updating, and a good reference on the subject is A.L. Barker's 1995 paper. After updating, you now believe that the stock is worth 54.18. Assuming your trading costs, risk limits, and return requirements are satisfied, buying 1000 shares for 54.00 is a good trade. Naively, you might just put out a 54.00 bid for 1000 shares, trade with half the 2000 share offer, and hope to collect your expected-value ZAR. In practice, however, you might be able to make even more. If Jo is making a 0.50 wide market, maybe she'd be willing to sell lower than 54.00. It's conceivable that if you put out a 53.90 bid for 1000 shares, Jo will sell at that price, and you collect an extra 100 ZAR! Of course, Jo could react differently. She could see your bid and use that information to change her market, in much the same way you did before turning on. These are difficult decisions, ones where experience with the product and the market make a big difference in being able to eke out a little extra edge. Let's play it safe however and pay 54.00 for 1000 shares. You trade, and Jo reacts by immediately canceling her market. This is not an uncommon occurrence in illiquid stocks, especially in emerging markets, so you're not too surprised. You wait a couple of minutes, mentally visualizing Jo in front of her six monitors, evaluating her trade and her model. Finally, she turns back on. Her new market is 53.50 - 54.05 (10000x)! You reason that Jo has seen that someone (you) disagrees with her valuation of the stock. Jo is a good Bayesian like you, and so she has incorporated that information into her model and updated her beliefs about the fair value of the stock. Her updated belief is that she now wants to sell even more stock, at a marginally higher price. Clearly, she almost entirely discounts the information you've communicated to her with your trade. How should you react? It seems fairly clear that, assuming Jo is not a crazy or incompetent market maker (usually a fair assumption), your trade was a bad one. You bought 1000 shares, when in retrospect, you would have wanted to buy much less, probably zero. Imagine instead that Jo had turned back on with a market of 54.00 - 54.50 (1000x). Her reaction now clearly indicates the information you gave her with your trade is valuable, and she has adjusted her beliefs accordingly. Your trade was probably a good one. Don't you wish you had bought all 2000 shares on offer? No matter what Jo's reaction is, you will be unhappy with your trade. Note that Jo will be unhappy too, since retrospectively she should have either made her initial market bigger or smaller. Welcome to the joyous world of trading!” Whether or not you make money, you have regrets! If you profited, you could have made more. If you lost money, you shouldn’t have made the trade at all. Like death and taxes, you can’t avoid adverse selection. Lebron continues to highlight a few areas of trading that have adverse selection problems. First, IPOs. If you buy the stock in an IPO, you expect the share price to “pop” on the first day of trading. However, if others also have this expectation, the round will be oversubscribed. You can only get the quantity of shares that you bid for when the market doesn’t think the shares will go up. So if you are able to get the shares that you want, the IPO is likely a dud. See also: Venture Capital fundraising. Second, powerful entities that change the rules of the game while you’re playing. Exchanges nullify “erroneous” trades. Brokerages limit buying. Anyone who tried to buy GameStop stock on Robinhood on January 28, 2021, knows this form of adverse selection all too well. Lebron also highlights “special trades”, in which you should throw the “normal rules” out of the window. This advice generalizes to other areas of life: “The normal rules do not apply. If you remove yourself from our usual routine, if you think hard and clearly about the specific situation, maybe you can do something good. Perhaps even great. Others will be paralyzed by inaction, but perhaps you won’t be. Crises can be opportunities.” 3: Risk Take only the risks you’re being paid to take. Hedge the others. In trading, as in life, you can make the right call in expected value terms but still lose due to randomness. Some of that randomness is avoidable. Some of it is not — and can be accounted for by hedging. Here, Lebron encourages us to rely on multiple risk measures and actively seek to understand the risks that we might be subject to. That’s all well and good in the world of finance, with derivatives contracts. But how might this apply in other areas of life? If you work for a publicly traded company and are compensated in stock, sell your shares as soon as you receive them. This is not because I don’t expect the share price of Microsoft/Meta/Apple/etc. to go up. The stock may very well outperform the market. But you are not being compensated for the added risk that you take on here. Your employment prospects at Microsoft/Meta/Apple/etc. are highly correlated with the share price. When the share price is down is when layoffs happen. Former Enron employees can chime in here. Similarly, it makes sense to hedge anything that is outside of your control. Let’s say you’ve decided the crypto bear market of 2023 is a great time to start a new crypto company. Your success depends on things within your control, such as: Your idea
Inline links: pay millions of dollars to trade with retail, keep our identities small, 2, market makers, 3
European Commission2 mentions across 2 issues

European Commission is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between November 04, 2021 and January 27, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "When the European Parliament or the European Commission has challenged Orbán’s government"; "the European Commission does drug approvals for all of the EU". It most often appears alongside Europe, Germany, ACA.

Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
November 04, 2021
Last seen
January 27, 2022
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Source context
Dictator Book Club: Orban
November 04, 2021 · Original source
For the past seven years, Orbán has used a maneuver that he has called the “dance of the peacock.” His government would insert measures into new laws precisely for the purpose of removing them. “He’ll generally put in one outrageous thing and one super-outrageous thing,” Kim Lane Scheppele, a legal scholar at Princeton who studies Hungary, told me. “But the super-outrageous thing isn’t really necessary—it’s designed to be jettisoned.” When the European Parliament or the European Commission has challenged Orbán’s government on the antidemocratic measures, he has made a few symbolic gestures of conciliation, “as if,” he has said, “we would like to make friends with them.”
Highlights From The Comments On Health Care Systems
January 27, 2022 · Original source
One of the other major differences between the US healthcare system and the EU systems is that the European Commission does drug approvals for all of the EU (and there are other EU-wide paths to getting drugs approved, with approval by any regulatory body being sufficient for the drug to be approved); whereas, the FDA does approvals for just the US (and it doesn't compete with any other US regulators to do the approvals). This gives individual European countries much more leverage than the US would have for negotiating with drug manufacturers. Since most of the cost of drug manufacturing is the research, trials, and approval process, Norway (technically a non-EU member of the EEA, but they still accept approvals given by the European Commission) can offer drugmakers relatively low prices and still have them sell their drugs there because they're already going through the European Commission approval process to sell their drugs in the rest of Europe. If the USA starts setting drug prices particularly low, it will have a much bigger impact on the incentive to fund drug trials through the FDA approval process. This also changes the optics dramatically. There's not going to be a scandal over a drugmaker failing to push their drugs through the approval process the same way there would be over it refusing to sell drugs to a particular country where those drugs are approved. (And I think it's generally accepted that the FDA's process is slower, more stringent, and more expensive than Europe's.)
European Parliament2 mentions across 2 issues

European Parliament is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between November 04, 2021 and October 22, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "When the European Parliament or the European Commission has challenged Orbán’s government"; "von der Leyen stands above, and frequently addresses, the European Parliament". It most often appears alongside European Union, 10th century, 19th Century.

Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
November 04, 2021
Last seen
October 22, 2025
Outbound links
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Related pages
Source context
Dictator Book Club: Orban
November 04, 2021 · Original source
For the past seven years, Orbán has used a maneuver that he has called the “dance of the peacock.” His government would insert measures into new laws precisely for the purpose of removing them. “He’ll generally put in one outrageous thing and one super-outrageous thing,” Kim Lane Scheppele, a legal scholar at Princeton who studies Hungary, told me. “But the super-outrageous thing isn’t really necessary—it’s designed to be jettisoned.” When the European Parliament or the European Commission has challenged Orbán’s government on the antidemocratic measures, he has made a few symbolic gestures of conciliation, “as if,” he has said, “we would like to make friends with them.”
My Antichrist Lecture
October 22, 2025 · Original source
Here is a typical official picture of von der Leyen. She is in her trademark yellow suit (“clothed with the sun”), standing with her head centered in the twelve stars of the EU flag (“upon her head a crown of twelve stars”). In what sense is “the moon under her feet”? In her role as President, von der Leyen stands above, and frequently addresses, the European Parliament, which looks like this: The Parliament, also known as the Hemicycle, takes the shape of a half (or slightly crescent) moon. When von der Leyen stands in her yellow suit, in front of the Parliament, with the flag behind her, she is “clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars”.2 Von der Leyen is one of the leaders behind the EU’s push to become a “regulatory superpower”, which has born fruit in some surprisingly promising AI regulations. In particular, Europe has been especially strict on biometric proof-of-personhood: If the apocalypse involves a rogue Anthropic model somehow empowered by proof-of-personhood, Europe is one of the best candidates to resist. Von der Leyen, then, stands as a metonymy for the European Union as a bulwark for the forces of Good. The Witnesses / The Lamb Of God The Lamb is John’s version of the Messiah or the Second Coming. He gives us two clues about its identity. First, Revelation 11:3: And I will appoint my two witnesses, and they will prophesy for 1,260 days, clothed in sackcloth. The Lamb will be preceded by two witnesses. Revelation itself does not name them, but Jewish tradition says that one will be the prophet Elijah. Second, 12:1: And I looked, and, lo, a Lamb stood on Mount Zion, and with him a hundred forty and four thousand, having his Father’s name written in their foreheads. The Lamb will stand on Mount Zion. This is a specific mountain in Jerusalem, but also a poetic name for Israel (for example, “Zionism” = support for Israel). So we are looking for someone or something in Israel, which is being heralded by Elijah. The name Elijah is different in different languages, but the Russian version is “Ilya”. And in fact, famous AI scientist Ilya Sutskever recently founded an Israel-based AI company called “Safe Superintelligence”: Is there some sense in which Ilya Sutskever has “his Father’s name written on [his] forehead”? As weird as it sounds, I think this one might just be literally true. There is some kind of unusual pattern on his forehead (image source). I cannot make heads or tails of it right-side-up, but when I flip it over… …it appears to be the Name of God in Hebrew. In our working hypothesis, Ilya is Elijah, the First Witness3, which suggests that the one he is heralding - that is, the Safe Superintelligence which is to be built by his company - is the Lamb of God, the Messiah that will defeat the unsafe superintelligences produced by Anthropic and other companies. The Antichrist / The Dragon Revelation doesn’t use the word “Antichrist” - the concept comes from from the separate Epistles of John, which may or may not be by the same author. Most scholars identify the Epistle’s Antichrist with Revelation’s Beast, but I dissent: we hypothesize the Beast to be a company, but I can’t get past the elegance of having the Antichrist be - like the Christ - a particular individual. I prefer to identify him with a different character in Revelation, namely the Dragon. On the level of Biblical narrative - the same level where the Woman is the Virgin Mary - the Dragon is clearly Satan. On the level of apocalyptic prophecy, he may additionally represent an individual from our own age. Who? John says (13:2 - 13:4) The dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and great authority . . . People worshiped the dragon, because he had given authority to the beast. We saw above that the Beast is a company. Who gives companies their power, then demands to be worshiped by them? Obviously VCs. And in fact, venture capitalists are often identified with dragons in the popular imagination: But which venture capitalist? Plenty of people have claimed to know secret ways to identify the Antichrist, but surely the best-credentialled expert here is the Pope, and according to Wikipedia: Pope Pius IX in the encyclical Quartus Supra, quoting Cyprian, said Satan disguises the Antichrist with the title of Christ. What is the title of Christ? In the Bible, we find two common titles: “The Son of Man” (Matthew 12:32, Luke 12:8, John 1:51)
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!lAgG!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa5c91f3a-873f-4b73-b68d-bc14a7cfffc9_600x314.jpeg, 2, surprisingly promising AI regulations, especially strict on biometric proof-of-personhood, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Vntf!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffcab19e9-c8f0-4996-9fb1-942061463e5d_839x520.png, says, Ilya, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!pdG7!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd81ef77a-d6d6-41dc-9281-3f0d55702f2a_1210x510.png, image source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!1eC5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffb37f1e4-9cbc-4153-b20a-8e879ad753ce_1711x719.png, Name of God in Hebrew, 3, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!W4E8!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc7d2847a-aba1-42a7-b376-9f6e0fd319f0_841x468.png, according to Wikipedia
The Parliament, also known as the Hemicycle, takes the shape of a half (or slightly crescent) moon. When von der Leyen stands in her yellow suit, in front of the Parliament, with the flag behind her, she is “clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars”.2 Von der Leyen is one of the leaders behind the EU’s push to become a “regulatory superpower”, which has born fruit in some surprisingly promising AI regulations. In particular, Europe has been especially strict on biometric proof-of-personhood: If the apocalypse involves a rogue Anthropic model somehow empowered by proof-of-personhood, Europe is one of the best candidates to resist. Von der Leyen, then, stands as a metonymy for the European Union as a bulwark for the forces of Good. The Witnesses / The Lamb Of God The Lamb is John’s version of the Messiah or the Second Coming. He gives us two clues about its identity. First, Revelation 11:3: And I will appoint my two witnesses, and they will prophesy for 1,260 days, clothed in sackcloth. The Lamb will be preceded by two witnesses. Revelation itself does not name them, but Jewish tradition says that one will be the prophet Elijah. Second, 12:1: And I looked, and, lo, a Lamb stood on Mount Zion, and with him a hundred forty and four thousand, having his Father’s name written in their foreheads. The Lamb will stand on Mount Zion. This is a specific mountain in Jerusalem, but also a poetic name for Israel (for example, “Zionism” = support for Israel). So we are looking for someone or something in Israel, which is being heralded by Elijah. The name Elijah is different in different languages, but the Russian version is “Ilya”. And in fact, famous AI scientist Ilya Sutskever recently founded an Israel-based AI company called “Safe Superintelligence”: Is there some sense in which Ilya Sutskever has “his Father’s name written on [his] forehead”? As weird as it sounds, I think this one might just be literally true. There is some kind of unusual pattern on his forehead (image source). I cannot make heads or tails of it right-side-up, but when I flip it over… …it appears to be the Name of God in Hebrew. In our working hypothesis, Ilya is Elijah, the First Witness3, which suggests that the one he is heralding - that is, the Safe Superintelligence which is to be built by his company - is the Lamb of God, the Messiah that will defeat the unsafe superintelligences produced by Anthropic and other companies. The Antichrist / The Dragon Revelation doesn’t use the word “Antichrist” - the concept comes from from the separate Epistles of John, which may or may not be by the same author. Most scholars identify the Epistle’s Antichrist with Revelation’s Beast, but I dissent: we hypothesize the Beast to be a company, but I can’t get past the elegance of having the Antichrist be - like the Christ - a particular individual. I prefer to identify him with a different character in Revelation, namely the Dragon. On the level of Biblical narrative - the same level where the Woman is the Virgin Mary - the Dragon is clearly Satan. On the level of apocalyptic prophecy, he may additionally represent an individual from our own age. Who? John says (13:2 - 13:4) The dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and great authority . . . People worshiped the dragon, because he had given authority to the beast. We saw above that the Beast is a company. Who gives companies their power, then demands to be worshiped by them? Obviously VCs. And in fact, venture capitalists are often identified with dragons in the popular imagination: But which venture capitalist? Plenty of people have claimed to know secret ways to identify the Antichrist, but surely the best-credentialled expert here is the Pope, and according to Wikipedia: Pope Pius IX in the encyclical Quartus Supra, quoting Cyprian, said Satan disguises the Antichrist with the title of Christ. What is the title of Christ? In the Bible, we find two common titles: “The Son of Man” (Matthew 12:32, Luke 12:8, John 1:51)
Inline links: 2, surprisingly promising AI regulations, especially strict on biometric proof-of-personhood, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Vntf!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffcab19e9-c8f0-4996-9fb1-942061463e5d_839x520.png, says, Ilya, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!pdG7!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd81ef77a-d6d6-41dc-9281-3f0d55702f2a_1210x510.png, image source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!1eC5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffb37f1e4-9cbc-4153-b20a-8e879ad753ce_1711x719.png, Name of God in Hebrew, 3, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!W4E8!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc7d2847a-aba1-42a7-b376-9f6e0fd319f0_841x468.png, according to Wikipedia
Exxon2 mentions across 2 issues

Exxon is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 25, 2021 and August 08, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "exxon-carbon-emissions-and-climate-leaked-plans-reveal-rising-co2-output"; ""Exxon and Shell would be 'fossil fuel capabilities'"". It most often appears alongside Google, United States, 80,000 Hours.

Article page
Exxon
Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
August 25, 2021
Last seen
August 08, 2022
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Source context
Carbon Costs Quantified
August 25, 2021 · Original source
26. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-05/exxon-carbon-emissions-and-climate-leaked-plans-reveal-rising-co2-output
Why Not Slow AI Progress?
August 08, 2022 · Original source
Imagine if oil companies and environmental activists were both considered part of the broader “fossil fuel community”. Exxon and Shell would be “fossil fuel capabilities”; Greenpeace and the Sierra Club would be “fossil fuel safety” - two equally beloved parts of the rich diverse tapestry of fossil fuel-related work. They would all go to the same parties - fossil fuel community parties - and maybe Greta Thunberg would get bored of protesting climate change and become a coal baron.
E.F. Caldwell & Co1 mentions across 1 issues

E.F. Caldwell & Co is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 04, 2024 and December 04, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "a firm that specialized in bronze work and electrical fixtures"; "employees of E.F. Caldwell & Co, a firm that specialized in bronze work". It most often appears alongside 3D printing, Abercrombie & Fitch, AI.

Reference entry
E.F. Caldwell & Co
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
December 04, 2024
Last seen
December 04, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Source context
Book Review: From Bauhaus To Our House
December 04, 2024 · Original source
To those philistines who were still so gauche as to say that the new architecture lacked the richness of detail of the old Beaux-Arts architecture … [the modernists] would say with considerable condescension: “Fine. You produce the craftsmen who can do that kind of work, and then we’ll talk to you about it. They don’t exist anymore.” True enough. But why? Henry Hope Reed tells of riding across West Fifty-third Street in New York in the 1940s in a car with some employees of E.F. Caldwell & Co, a firm that specialized in bronze work and electrical fixtures. As the car passed the Museum of Modern Art building, the men began shaking their fists at it and shouting: “That goddamn place is destroying us! Those bastards are killing us!” In the palmy days of Beaux-Arts architecture, Caldwell had employed a thousand bronzeurs, marble workers, model makers, and designers. Now the company was sliding into insolvency, along with many similar firms. It was not that craftsmanship was dying. Rather, the International Style was finishing off the demand for it, particularly in commercial construction.
accs1 mentions across 1 issues

e/accs is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 23, 2024 and January 23, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Here are some things I hope Larry Page and the e/accs are thinking about". It most often appears alongside Ascended Economy, Asimov, Blindsight.

Reference entry
accs
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
January 23, 2024
Last seen
January 23, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Source context
Should The Future Be Human?
January 23, 2024 · Original source
Here are some things I hope Larry Page and the e/accs are thinking about:
EA charity Long Term Future Fund1 mentions across 1 issues

EA charity Long Term Future Fund is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 28, 2023 and September 28, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "EA charity Long Term Future Fund is fundraising". It most often appears alongside 2020 election, @eigenrobot, @jeremychrysler.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
September 28, 2023
Last seen
September 28, 2023
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Source context
Links For September 2023
September 28, 2023 · Original source
25: Related: EA charity Long Term Future Fund is fundraising. You can see some of their previous grants here, discussion on their grantmaking philosophy here, and an AMA with their grantmakers here.
Inline links: Long Term Future Fund, here,, here, here
EA Christchurch1 mentions across 1 issues

EA Christchurch is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 29, 2025 and August 29, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Group Link: EA group link (same organiser): https://www.facebook.com/groups/EAChristchurch". It most often appears alongside "Beer Capital" pub, 100 Black Birch Trail, 11841 Wagner Street, Culver City.

Reference entry
EA Christchurch
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 29, 2025
Last seen
August 29, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Source context
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
...'t have details about the exact entrance right now but it will be obvious and if you are unsure, email me sometime beforehand Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4V8JFJCJ+5M Group Link: EA group link (same organiser): https://www.facebook.com/groups/EAChristchurch Notes: We'll have a pot luck, and later in the evening a Petrov Day celebration. I'm a big reader of ACX and would love to connect with similar people (and connect you w...
EA community in Oxford1 mentions across 1 issues

EA community in Oxford is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 10, 2022 and April 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "There's also a very active EA community in Oxford". It most often appears alongside 1022 High St. Blue House w/red porches, 11:11 Cafe, 1548 NE 15th Ave.

Reference entry
EA community in Oxford
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
April 10, 2022
Last seen
April 10, 2022
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Spring Meetups In Seventy Cities
April 10, 2022 · Original source
OXFORD, UK Contact: Sam Brown (ssc@sambrown.eu) Date: April 20 Time: 6:00 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C3WPQX6+QQ6 Location: Pub garden of The Star, Rectory Road Group info: Oxford Rationalish meets semi-regularly. There's also a very active EA community in Oxford.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9C3WPQX6+QQ6, Oxford Rationalish
EA forecasting community1 mentions across 1 issues

EA forecasting community is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 16, 2022 and December 16, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Thanks to people from ... the EA forecasting community". It most often appears alongside 2023 Prediction Benchmark Question Set, ACX Survey, Blind Mode.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
December 16, 2022
Last seen
December 16, 2022
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Source context
2023 Prediction Contest
December 16, 2022 · Original source
Thanks to people from Metaculus, Manifold, and the EA forecasting community for helping with questions and plans.
EA Frankfurt1 mentions across 1 issues

EA Frankfurt is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 23, 2021 and August 23, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "This will overlap with the first iteration of a EA Frankfurt meetup". It most often appears alongside 1002 N St. NW, Washington DC, 20001, 1022 High St, Madison, 210 Ardmore Avenue.

Reference entry
EA Frankfurt
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 23, 2021
Last seen
August 23, 2021
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places
August 23, 2021 · Original source
FRANKFURT, GERMANY (RSVP) Contact: Jan, kirchner[dot]jan[at]icloud[dot]com Time: 7:00 PM, Wednesday, August 25 Location: Grüneburgpark (4MF6+R4 Frankfurt), southwest part Coordinates: https://w3w.co/staple.buzzer.lance Notes: This will overlap with the first iteration of a EA Frankfurt meetup, so lots of potentially positive synergies!
Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/staple.buzzer.lance
EA Funds program1 mentions across 1 issues

EA Funds program is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 10, 2024 and February 10, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "three sub-granters in the EA Funds program (Long-Term Future Fund, Animal Welfare Fund, and Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund)". It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, 23andme, ACX.

Reference entry
EA Funds program
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
February 10, 2024
Last seen
February 10, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
ACX Grants Results 2024
February 10, 2024 · Original source
But in a few weeks, they’ll also be adding the grants we didn’t fund to an impact market. You can buy “impact shares”, which will go up or down in value depending on how the project does (for legal reasons, your profits will go to charity). We have five potential buyers lined up: three sub-granters in the EA Funds program (Long-Term Future Fund, Animal Welfare Fund, and Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund), the Survival and Flourishing Fund, and next year’s ACX Grants. I’ll tell you more about this when it happens.
EA groups1 mentions across 1 issues

EA groups is a recurring organization 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 "They have deals going with ... various EA groups". It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, acanthamoeba keratitis, ACX.

Reference entry
EA groups
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
November 04, 2022
Last seen
November 04, 2022
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
ACX Grants: Project Updates
November 04, 2022 · Original source
33: SD’s Neutrino Research (5/10) SD says his neutrino thesis is going well, and he is applying for graduate programs in neutrino physics. 34: User-Created Prediction Markets (9/10) Manifold Markets wanted to create a new prediction market platform where anyone could post questions. They’ve since pivoted to play money and raised $2.4 million in grants and seed funding, with about 10,000 different markets and 300 daily average users. I and many of my friends visit their site daily or at least weekly, and I often link them on Mantic Mondays. They have deals going with the Salem Center at University of Texas, Clearer Thinking, and various EA groups.
Inline links: Manifold Markets
EA Infrastructure Fund1 mentions across 1 issues

EA Infrastructure Fund is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 03, 2022 and January 03, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "EA Funds (the EA Infrastructure Fund, specifically)". It most often appears alongside EA Funds, Eliezer, Engines Of Cognition.

Reference entry
EA Infrastructure Fund
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
January 03, 2022
Last seen
January 03, 2022
Outbound links
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Source context
Open Thread 205
January 03, 2022 · Original source
Thanks for doing this and for this post! I'm one of the guest fund managers on one of the EA Funds (the EA Infrastructure Fund, specifically), and I would really like many of these people to apply to EA Funds for a top up or a substantially larger grant right now (if they haven't already), and for many others to apply later on for "next phases" of these projects or for new projects. https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/apply-for-funding
Inline links: https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/apply-for-funding
EA Istanbul Group1 mentions across 1 issues

EA Istanbul Group is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 25, 2025 and March 25, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "I organize this meeting with the EA Istanbul Group". It most often appears alongside 10 E Main Street, Fairborn 45324, 11841 Wagner Street, Culver City, 13 Mile road.

Reference entry
EA Istanbul Group
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
March 25, 2025
Last seen
March 25, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places
March 25, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Ozge Contact Info: ozgeco[a t]yahoo[period]com Time: Saturday, May 3rd, 1:00 PM Location: Cafe Modern at Galataport, Istanbul Modern Museum Entrance Floor Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GHC2XGM+94 Notes: I organize this meeting with the EA Istanbul Group. ACX readers, AI Safety and EA people, all of you are warmly welcomed. If possible, let me know that you will be attending by dropping an email or replying on LessWrong. I will be sitting outside of the cafe - weather permitting- with a ACX Meeting sign on the table. Looking forward to meeting old friends and new ones!
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8GHC2XGM+94
EA Nijmegen1 mentions across 1 issues

EA Nijmegen is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 30, 2024 and March 30, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "join the EA Nijmegen whatsapp group through https://www.eanijmegen.nl/". It most often appears alongside 1111 Brickell Ave, 11841 Wagner St., Culver City, 1970 Port Laurent place, Newport Beach 92660.

Reference entry
EA Nijmegen
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
March 30, 2024
Last seen
March 30, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
March 30, 2024 · Original source
NIJMEGEN, NETHERLANDS Contact: Stian Contact Info: stian[dot]sgronlund[at]outlook[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 20th, 2:00 PM Location: The Yard Sportcafe in the Elinor Ostromgebouw, or possibly moving outside if there's nice weather. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F37RV96+GX Group Link: No dedicated place yet, but you can join the EA Nijmegen whatsapp group through https://www.eanijmegen.nl/
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9F37RV96+GX, https://www.eanijmegen.nl/
EA Serbia1 mentions across 1 issues

EA Serbia is a recurring organization 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 "Organized by EA Serbia". It most often appears alongside 100 Alexander St, 10004 Jasper Ave, Edmonton, AB T5J 1R3, 11841 Wagner St, Culver City, CA.

Reference entry
EA Serbia
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
April 10, 2023
Last seen
April 10, 2023
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023
April 10, 2023 · Original source
BELGRADE, SERBIA Contact: Dušan and Tatiana Contact Info: tatiana[dot]n[dot]skuratova[at]efektivnialtruizam[dot]rs Time: Sunday, April 16th, 03:00 PM Location: Bar Green House, Dr. Dragoslava Popovica Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GP2RF7G+36 Notes: Organized by EA Serbia, welcoming everyone including non ACX people if you'd like. Bring coloured eggs for Serbian Egg battles as it'll be easter, or we can provide some :) RSVP mandatory!
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8GP2RF7G+36
EA Serbia Telegram group1 mentions across 1 issues

EA Serbia Telegram group is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 29, 2024 and August 29, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Group Link: EA Serbia Telegram group invite: https://t.me/+wu3itsO2ZjoxNmY0". It most often appears alongside 10 N Park Pl, 12th Ave South, 1525 Bank St.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 29, 2024
Last seen
August 29, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places
August 29, 2024 · Original source
Contact: Tanya Trninic Contact Info: tanja[dot]trninic[at]efektivnialtruizam[ dot]c om Time: Sunday, September 15th, 02:00 PM Location: Restaurant Rai Urban Vege; Address: Visokog Stevana 5, Belgrade, Serbia Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GP2RFG4+JQ| Group Link: EA Serbia Telegram group invite: https://t.me/+wu3itsO2ZjoxNmY0 Notes: Please RSVP to tanja.trninic@efektivnialtruizam.com so I can reserve a suitable table.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8GP2RFG4+JQ|, https://t.me/+wu3itsO2ZjoxNmY0
EA student groups1 mentions across 1 issues

EA student groups is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 03, 2022 and April 03, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "INFER tournament for EA student groups : if your college has an effective altruist group". It most often appears alongside ACX community subreddit, Amazon, Astralcodexten Com.

Reference entry
EA student groups
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
April 03, 2022
Last seen
April 03, 2022
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Open Thread 218
April 03, 2022 · Original source
4: INFER tournament for EA student groups: if your college has an effective altruist group, it's invited to enter this superforecasting-style tournament. Top teams will get monetary prizes, top individuals will get offered professional forecasting positions. If your college doesn't have an EA student group, you can always start one! Get in touch with chapters@effectivealtruism.org, or just say the words "I would like to start an EA student group" somewhere within ten meters of a smartphone, computer, or mirror; the recruitment arm is omnipresent and relentless.
Inline links: INFER tournament for EA student groups
EA-Madrid1 mentions across 1 issues

EA-Madrid is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 29, 2025 and August 29, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "EA-Madrid slack channel". It most often appears alongside "Beer Capital" pub, 100 Black Birch Trail, 11841 Wagner Street, Culver City.

Reference entry
EA-Madrid
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 29, 2025
Last seen
August 29, 2025
Outbound links
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Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Sergio Contact Info: sergiodzg[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, September 21st, 11:00 AM Location: We will organize it in the puppet theater in El Retiro park (as on previous occasions in Madrid) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8CGRC897+G8 Group Link: We will announce it on the EA-Madrid slack channel and in the meetup group (https://www.meetup.com/effective-altruism-madrid/)
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8CGRC897+G8
EAC1 mentions across 1 issues

EAC is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 03, 2026 and March 03, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "if the EAC, the OSCE, or the Carter Center notes". It most often appears alongside 2024 US election, 2026 elections, Agent Economy Of The Future.

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EAC
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1
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1
First seen
March 03, 2026
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March 03, 2026
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Mantic Monday: Groundhog Day
March 03, 2026 · Original source
But Metaculus has a similar question noting that “This question may resolve as Yes [even] if the EAC, the OSCE, or the Carter Center notes only isolated problems or areas for improvement”, and it’s at 92%, which is reassuring.
EAs1 mentions across 1 issues

EAs is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 10, 2024 and October 10, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "the rationalists and EAs focused on the only risk big enough to see from such a distance". It most often appears alongside 80,000 Hours, @GroundHogStrat, A.I. salons.

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EAs
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1
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1
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October 10, 2024
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October 10, 2024
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SB 1047: Our Side Of The Story
October 10, 2024 · Original source
I don’t want to gloss this as “socialists finally admit we were right all along”. I think the change has been bi-directional. Back in 2010, when we had no idea what AI would look like, the rationalists and EAs focused on the only risk big enough to see from such a distance: runaway unaligned superintelligence. Now that we know more specifics, “smaller” existential risks have also come into focus, like AI-fueled bioterrorism, AI-fueled great power conflict, and - yes - AI-fueled inequality. At some point, without either side entirely abandoning their position, the very-near-term-risk people and the very-long-term-risk people have started to meet in the middle.
Eastern Roman empire1 mentions across 1 issues

Eastern Roman empire is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 06, 2021 and May 06, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "the eastern Roman empire, led by emperor Justinian, launched a terrible invasion". It most often appears alongside 320 AD, 476 AD, Africa.

Reference entry
Eastern Roman empire
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1
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1
First seen
May 06, 2021
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May 06, 2021
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Your Book Review: Through The Eye Of A Needle
May 06, 2021 · Original source
Gradually, the senatorial aristocracy in Italy grew poorer. They no longer had access to their overseas landholdings. Meanwhile, the Christian church grew richer and more powerful as it received donations of land. By 535 AD, this relatively prosperous, post-Respublica order in Italy came crashing down. The eastern Roman empire, led by emperor Justinian, launched a terrible invasion of Gothic Italy. By the end of Justinian’s wars, the remaining wealth of the senatorial elite had been mostly destroyed. “The church became the only great landowner left standing in Italy.”
Eaton Tire Service1 mentions across 1 issues

Eaton Tire Service is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 24, 2022 and May 24, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Robert is endorsed by California businesses including Eaton Tire Service". It most often appears alongside #Abolitionist, #AntiNazi, #antiwar.

Reference entry
Eaton Tire Service
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1
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1
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May 24, 2022
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May 24, 2022
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California Gubernatorial Candidates From Z to Z
May 24, 2022 · Original source
Robert is endorsed by California businesses including Valley Livestock Feed Recycling, Eaton Tire Service, and Kriley Exca-Break.
Inline links: endorsed by
EB1 mentions across 1 issues

EB is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 10, 2022 and February 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "EB’s Board and team of contractors ensure a diverse range of professional skills and talents". It most often appears alongside 2018, @BendiniUK, @benyeohben.

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EB
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1
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1
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February 10, 2022
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February 10, 2022
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ACX Grants ++: The Second Half
February 10, 2022 · Original source
#88: Daniel Ingram’s Nonprofit For Studying Emergent (ie spiritual) Phenomena Emergence Benefactors (EB: https://ebenefactors.org/) is a 501(c)(3) charity established in 2021, striving to reduce global suffering and promote long-term human flourishing through an in-depth understanding of emergent (spiritual, mystical, energetic, psychedelic, and related) phenomena. We are designed to support the roadmap of the Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium (EPRC: https://theeprc.org/) and its allied entities. This way, we fund and support methodologically rigorous, ontologically agnostic research on emergent experiences, practices, and their effects. Furthermore, our aim is to promote the culturally-sensitive incorporation of this scientific and clinical knowledge into global, evidence-based knowledge bases. We draw insights from rationalist and effective altruism frameworks. EB’s Board and team of contractors ensure a diverse range of professional skills and talents. Dr. Daniel M. Ingram (CV: https://tinyurl.com/dringram), the self-funded Acting CEO and Board Chair of EB, has over 37 years of professional and personal experience with emergent phenomena. We welcome both unrestricted donations and those intended to support specific projects and activities. We do appreciate valuable feedback from the ACX community on how to make this project the best it can be. The EPRC Whitepaper contains all the detailed information: https://hypernotes.zenkit.com/i/UFIY1UO1cp/84TWK0BwQlq/?v=M6pP_Tb7W6 For inquiries: daniel.ingram@ebenefactors.org
EC1 mentions across 1 issues

EC is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 27, 2022 and January 27, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "members of the EC probably are a bit unhappy and trying to increase their own ability to regulate things". It most often appears alongside ACA, Acrolectics, Aetna.

Reference entry
EC
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1
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1
First seen
January 27, 2022
Last seen
January 27, 2022
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Highlights From The Comments On Health Care Systems
January 27, 2022 · Original source
One of the other major differences between the US healthcare system and the EU systems is that the European Commission does drug approvals for all of the EU (and there are other EU-wide paths to getting drugs approved, with approval by any regulatory body being sufficient for the drug to be approved); whereas, the FDA does approvals for just the US (and it doesn't compete with any other US regulators to do the approvals). This gives individual European countries much more leverage than the US would have for negotiating with drug manufacturers. Since most of the cost of drug manufacturing is the research, trials, and approval process, Norway (technically a non-EU member of the EEA, but they still accept approvals given by the European Commission) can offer drugmakers relatively low prices and still have them sell their drugs there because they're already going through the European Commission approval process to sell their drugs in the rest of Europe. If the USA starts setting drug prices particularly low, it will have a much bigger impact on the incentive to fund drug trials through the FDA approval process. This also changes the optics dramatically. There's not going to be a scandal over a drugmaker failing to push their drugs through the approval process the same way there would be over it refusing to sell drugs to a particular country where those drugs are approved. (And I think it's generally accepted that the FDA's process is slower, more stringent, and more expensive than Europe's.)
And we end up with a system where drug development is worthwhile if and only if those drugs end up being sold in the United States, and where the FDA has the most stringent approval process, and nobody really has an incentive to change this. American regulators and politicians get disproportionately more power out of this arrangement. Drug companies make their profits. American insurers are able to pass along and distribute the costs across the population so they make their profits too. European countries get their drugs relatively inexpensively, and are existing in a legal context where that is their only real incentives since they really can't increase their ability to regulate drugs because the power that exists there is distributed throughout the EU rather than possessed by the governments of the member states. And the members of the EC probably are a bit unhappy and trying to increase their own ability to regulate things, but they're sufficiently disconnected from the powers of the member states that what they want doesn't really matter. (So Europe has somehow found a way to make the people who have the most incentive to increase the price of drug R&D there from having their voices heard.)
EcoHealth Alliance1 mentions across 1 issues

EcoHealth Alliance is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 30, 2022 and July 30, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "a US-based research organization called the EcoHealth Alliance"; "the whole Daszak / EcoHealth Alliance story"; "personal crusade against Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance". It most often appears alongside 1950s influenza strain, 1977 influenza pandemic, 1992 scientific investigation.

Reference entry
EcoHealth Alliance
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1
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1
First seen
July 30, 2022
Last seen
July 30, 2022
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Your Book Review: Viral
July 30, 2022 · Original source
Probably the most important – the WIV had previously maintained a database of at least fifteen thousand bat samples, including the dates and locations of samples as well as information about the viruses found in them. This database was taken offline and its contents have not been shared with independent researchers since. At this point, we need to be cautious and police our emotions so that we don’t start favoring the lab leak hypothesis for non-scientific reasons. When reading about this stuff, it’s easy to get angry and start wanting the Chinese government to be guilty of something, but we need to consider all possible explanations. It’s possible that the Chinese government was trying to cover up a lab leak, but it’s also possible that this was just regular authoritarian government behavior. Interestingly, Chan and Ridley describe similar attempts at obfuscation during the original SARS epidemic in 2003 (which had a natural origin), in which the Chinese government hid infected patients so that they wouldn’t be discovered by international health authorities. So I don’t think these attempts at obfuscation should necessarily be taken as evidence for a lab origin. The book also criticizes a US-based research organization called the EcoHealth Alliance, and its president Peter Daszak. [5] The basic claim here, which I think has some merit, is that there was an attempt to artificially construct a scientific consensus from the top down, early on in the pandemic, even though such a consensus wasn’t (and isn’t) warranted by the evidence. This artificial scientific consensus was then picked up by tech companies, who used it to label discussion of the lab leak hypothesis as “misinformation”, as well as by media sources and fact checkers. I don’t want to get bogged down in all the convoluted details here, so I refer you to the book if you want to learn about it. It’s worth noting though that some of the scientists who publicly labeled the lab leak hypothesis as a “conspiracy theory” apparently considered it to be plausible in their private communications, which were obtained through FOIA requests. Whatever we think of the whole Daszak / EcoHealth Alliance story, it’s pretty clear that at the start of the pandemic many respected institutions – scientific journals, tech companies, media networks, the WHO – expressed a level of confidence in the natural origins hypothesis that was not warranted by the evidence. How should we update our opinions based on this overconfidence? Does it tell us anything about the origins of the virus? Let’s say that your friend claims he can magically predict the result of a fair coin flip (only once). “There’s a 100% chance it’ll come up heads,” he says. If you’re gullible, you’ll update your belief in favor of heads. If you’re feeling annoyed at your friend, you might update in favor of tails out of spite [6]. Both of these would be wrong. The correct answer would be to not update at all on the object-level question of the coin flip (still 50-50), and to update negatively on the separate question of how trustworthy your friend’s predictions are. And remember, even if the coin does come up heads, you should still update negatively on your friend’s trustworthiness – he was still overconfident even though he happened to get it right by chance. This is basically how I think we should handle this unwarranted overconfidence from respected institutions – it should decrease our trust in these institutions, but we need to be careful not to start favoring the lab leak hypothesis out of spite. In my opinion this loss of trust should not really affect our view of the object-level question of the virus’s origin at all (although it would be nice to see some of the data being hidden, like that WIV database that was taken offline). Sometimes your overconfident friend will get it wrong, and the coin will come up tails. 6. Technical evidence The book covers a lot of technical evidence that’s considered by some to point toward a lab origin. Although I’m a computational biologist myself, I don’t have the background knowledge required to evaluate this evidence, and have only been able to observe the back-and-forth debates between people who actually do have this background knowledge. So I didn’t update my opinion much based on these pieces of evidence, but I’ll still describe some of them here. The first widely-cited piece of technical evidence has to do with the lack of rapid evolution of the virus early on in the pandemic. Some scientists claim that SARS-CoV-2 reached genetic stability early on, suggesting that it was already well-adapted to spread in humans at the start of the outbreak. Some have interpreted this as evidence that it was engineered for this purpose, or underwent serial passaging to encourage adaptation to human or humanized cells. Here’s a pre-print from May 2020 (on which Alina Chan is actually a co-author) making the claim that SARS-CoV-2 was already well-adapted to humans at the beginning of the pandemic. However, a review paper from proponents of the natural origins hypothesis disputes this claim, and offers several technical counterpoints, citing adaptive mutations later on in the pandemic that increased the virus’s fitness. The second widely-cited piece of technical evidence is related to a feature of the SARS-CoV-2 called the furin cleavage site (FCS). The FCS increases the ability of the virus to infect certain types of cells, and is part of what makes SARS-CoV-2 especially contagious. It’s considered an unusual feature, and has not been found in the other viruses most closely related to SARS-CoV-2. It’s worth noting that previous gain of function research has included inserting a furin cleavage site into the original SARS virus from the 2003 epidemic. The debate over the FCS in SARS-CoV-2 is mostly related to sequence analysis, and I don’t have enough background knowledge on this to take a side on it either way. This is a paper by Rossana Segreto and Yuri Deigin claiming that the FCS may suggest genetic manipulation and point to a lab origin. For technical counterpoints on the FCS, I’ll refer you to the same review paper from natural origins proponents that I mentioned in the last paragraph. A large chunk of the book is devoted to exploring these technical claims. These sections of the book are interesting and informative for hearing one perspective, but I definitely recommend checking out other sources with the technical counterpoints to get a full view of things. Personally I did not update my opinion based on these pieces of evidence because I don’t have enough background knowledge to evaluate opposing claims being made about them. Also, I think it’s worth noting that the debates around these pieces of evidence are specifically related to the subset of lab leak possibilities that involves genetic engineering and manipulation. However, even if it were proven, beyond a doubt, that SARS-CoV-2 was not the product of genetic engineering, that would not rule out the possibility that it was a natural virus, collected from the field, that was stored in the WIV and leaked out. I want to point this out because I’ve seen some semantic confusion where people claim to “disprove” the lab leak hypothesis, when really they are given arguments specifically against the possibility of genetic engineering. 7. Signal and noise So far I’ve tried to summarize some of the key points of the book that I view as being the most important, but there are also a ton of other tiny pieces of information for us to try to make sense of. Some of these bits are either false, misleading, or meaningless. For example, Chan and Ridley tell the story of Dr. Limeng Yan, a scientist-turned-whistleblower who fled to the US in April 2020 in fear of being “disappeared” in China. By all accounts, Dr. Yan started off as a legitimate whistleblower. She learned of COVID’s human-to-human transmission early on, when it was still being denied by the Chinese government, tried to report it up her chain of command (but was told to keep quiet), and ended up leaking the information to a Youtube commentator who told the world – and of course, it was confirmed by the Chinese government and WHO the next day. But instead of the story ending there, with Dr. Yan as a brave hero, things took a sad turn. She fled to the US in fear, but ended up in a situation where her only American contacts were people with their own political agendas (including Steve Bannon). Facing this scary and uncertain situation in a foreign land, it seems she basically told these people what they wanted to hear, and possibly ended up believing it herself through self-deception. Soon she was giving interviews to right-wing media outlets, spouting the actual unfounded conspiracy theory that SARS-CoV-2 was a bioweapon released by China on purpose, and other false information. This is a sad story about a scientist who tried to do the right thing, but ended up intellectually corrupted by forces beyond her control. It’s also a reminder of how much noise and false information is out there. It’s easy to dismiss the ridiculous claim that COVID began as a bioweapon, but other claims are more difficult to evaluate. For example, according to a US intelligence report, three researchers at the WIV became so severely ill in November 2019 that they required hospitalization. It was reported that they had symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and regular seasonal illness. What should we make of this claim [7]? Conclusion 1: I have no idea whether the virus came from a lab or from nature After reading the book and going down several related rabbit holes, I feel as uncertain as ever about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, I have generally updated towards viewing the lab leak hypothesis as plausible, rather than an insane conspiracy theory. This partly due to this book, as well as many other related sources I came across last year. To summarize, my overall updating went something like this: Prior: Definitely natural origins (Obviously, I’m not a conspiracy theorist).
Inline links: apparently considered it to be plausible in their private communications,, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!AurY!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0ce0d9c4-3fc1-4de0-9985-5dee032e50ad_1600x730.png, pre-print from May 2020, review paper from proponents of the natural origins hypothesis, inserting a furin cleavage site into the original SARS virus, This is a paper by Rossana Segreto and Yuri Deigin, three researchers at the WIV became so severely ill in November 2019 that they required hospitalization.
[5] For what it’s worth, I don’t agree with making this thing into a personal crusade against Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance, like some people are trying to do.
Economic Security Project Action1 mentions across 1 issues

Economic Security Project Action is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 10, 2024 and October 10, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Economic Security Project Action isn’t part of our conspiracy". It most often appears alongside 80,000 Hours, @GroundHogStrat, A.I. salons.

Mention count
1
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1
First seen
October 10, 2024
Last seen
October 10, 2024
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SB 1047: Our Side Of The Story
October 10, 2024 · Original source
...so I guess it wasn’t entirely due to my ex. But the bill owes much of its specifics and support to its three co-sponsors - Center for AI Safety, Encode Justice, and Economic Security Project Action.
Economic Security Project Action isn’t part of our conspiracy. They’re a generic progressive nonprofit that wants the benefits of AI to be shared broadly, and came up with the idea of CalCompute - a “state compute cluster” that academics and other sympathetic actors can use to train socially valuable AI models without needing to beg VCs for big bucks. Apparently someone made some kind of deal and their wish list was combined with ours into a single bill.
Inline links: Economic Security Project Action
economicaccountability.org1 mentions across 1 issues

economicaccountability.org is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 03, 2022 and February 03, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "For more, visit economicaccountability.org/skepticalguide/". It most often appears alongside 538, 55-gal drum, 750k horny men.

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1
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1
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February 03, 2022
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February 03, 2022
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ACX Grants ++: The First Half
February 03, 2022 · Original source
#57: Advocate Against Subsidies And Tax Breaks For Local Corporations America’s state and local governments hand out roughly $95 billion in tax breaks, grants and other forms of economic development subsidies every year. That’s enough money to fully fund the 11 smallest state government budgets, combined. It’s a market-distorting wealth transfer enabled by voters’ fears that without subsidies, all the jobs and prosperity will go someplace else. So long as those fears persist – and they’ve been cultivated by the political and corporate interests that benefit from this crony capitalism – it will be virtually impossible to implement evidence-based policy reforms. That’s why the Center for Economic Accountability (CEA) works to change the way people think and feel about economic development. This year, we’re taking on the challenge of improving the quality of local media coverage of economic development deals across the country. Currently, local news coverage tends to be dominated by pro-subsidy viewpoints and lacks critical context about costs and risks. That’s why we’re looking for support to develop and distribute the “Skeptical Reporter’s Guide to Covering Economic Development,” a resource for local journalists who want to get the story right but need help getting past press release talking points to the real story. The Guide will preemptively answer the questions we regularly get asked by reporters and help them uncover the “who, what, where, when and why” of corporate welfare. For more, visit economicaccountability.org/skepticalguide/.
ECST1 mentions across 1 issues

ECST is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 10, 2022 and February 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "ECST is exactly this – a remediation guided reading programme". It most often appears alongside 2018, @BendiniUK, @benyeohben.

Reference entry
ECST
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1
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1
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February 10, 2022
Last seen
February 10, 2022
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ACX Grants ++: The Second Half
February 10, 2022 · Original source
#69: Guided Reading Program To Help Children Catch Up More than 1 million children are behind on their reading due to the Pandemic. 11 year olds have the reading age of 7, and secondary schools are having to teach phonetics. Remote classes has led to disjointed learning and inconsistent teaching and the gap between the poor and the moderately well off is growing exponentially. Education systems do not have the capacity to deal with this difference as funds are stretched. A Multilevel, individual, across discipline approach is needed to encourage students to catch up. ECST is exactly this – a remediation guided reading programme that allows students to work at their own pace and move ahead as fast as their learning rate and capacity will let them. They are encouraged through various rewards to work independently, keep going and to progress. The reading materials have been chosen to enhance well-being. They are all classic books that have stood the test of time and apart from cracking good stories they feature archetypes who share their innate human knowledge and thus empower the reader. The readings are guided by videos of talented narrators reading the stories out loud. This stripped down approach, creates an intimate atmosphere, an accountable connection and aids true communication between author, narrator and student. ECST already has 40 titles and over 90 hours of stories and is looking for $25000 to facilitate the next stage of growth to create more titles and to market to schools, councils and education departments. [Contact Cecile@englishclassicstorytime.com]
Edelman Trust Barometer1 mentions across 1 issues

Edelman Trust Barometer is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 11, 2023 and September 11, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Edelman Trust Barometer, a group that monitors this sort of thing". It most often appears alongside 101, ALUC, Antioch.

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1
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1
First seen
September 11, 2023
Last seen
September 11, 2023
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Highlights From The Comments On Last Week's Model Cities Post
September 11, 2023 · Original source
I find myself confused about how people feel about Big Tech / Silicon Valley. My impression on the ground is that everyone hates them, including Democrats, Republicans, Californians, Bay Areans, and tech workers themselves. But polls show that they are among the most trusted US institutions. The Edelman Trust Barometer, a group that monitors this sort of thing, constantly tries to raise alarm that people are trusting tech less, but eventually admits that 76% of people say they trust “the technology sector” and that it leads all other sectors of the economy.
Inline links: polls show, Edelman Trust Barometer, eventually admits
Eden1 mentions across 1 issues

Eden is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 22, 2024 and August 22, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Eden is $296". It most often appears alongside 23andme, Adderall, based.

Reference entry
Eden
Mention count
1
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1
First seen
August 22, 2024
Last seen
August 22, 2024
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The Compounding Loophole
August 22, 2024 · Original source
HenryMeds is $297/month, Eden is $296, Mochi is $254 - compared to the $1,300/month you’d pay for the official product. This isn’t covered by insurance, so it’s still not affordable for lots of people. But it’s more affordable than the $1,300/month version. Also, there’s not a shortage of it.
Inline links: HenryMeds, Eden, Mochi
Edison1 mentions across 1 issues

Edison is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 13, 2022 and October 13, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Edison hadn't started a credible magnet program". It most often appears alongside 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, 21st Century Salon, ACX.

Reference entry
Edison
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1
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1
First seen
October 13, 2022
Last seen
October 13, 2022
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Highlights From The Comments On The Central Valley
October 13, 2022 · Original source
Summers are brutal and the air quality is terrible - the valley is a cauldron for smoke, emissions and dust kicked up by farming. The homeless problem is worse than it was 30 years ago, but WAY LESS WORSE than it is in other parts of the state. I lived through SF's transition to one big homeless encampment during the 2010's - Fresno's got nothing on that. At least the local PD try to clean them out occasionally. Fresno schools are bad, but they were bad when I was a kid too - the white flight to Clovis started in the 80's. My folks would have moved us there if Edison hadn't started a credible magnet program.
Edmunds1 mentions across 1 issues

Edmunds is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 25, 2021 and August 25, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "https://www.edmunds.com/about/press/leaf-blowers-emissions-dirtier-than-high-performance-pick-up-trucks-says-edmunds-insidelinecom.html". It most often appears alongside AP News, Associated Press, Bitcoin.

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Edmunds
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1
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1
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August 25, 2021
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August 25, 2021
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Carbon Costs Quantified
August 25, 2021 · Original source
9. https://www.edmunds.com/about/press/leaf-blowers-emissions-dirtier-than-high-performance-pick-up-trucks-says-edmunds-insidelinecom.html
EEA1 mentions across 1 issues

EEA is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 27, 2022 and January 27, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Norway (technically a non-EU member of the EEA". It most often appears alongside ACA, Acrolectics, Aetna.

Reference entry
EEA
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
January 27, 2022
Last seen
January 27, 2022
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Highlights From The Comments On Health Care Systems
January 27, 2022 · Original source
One of the other major differences between the US healthcare system and the EU systems is that the European Commission does drug approvals for all of the EU (and there are other EU-wide paths to getting drugs approved, with approval by any regulatory body being sufficient for the drug to be approved); whereas, the FDA does approvals for just the US (and it doesn't compete with any other US regulators to do the approvals). This gives individual European countries much more leverage than the US would have for negotiating with drug manufacturers. Since most of the cost of drug manufacturing is the research, trials, and approval process, Norway (technically a non-EU member of the EEA, but they still accept approvals given by the European Commission) can offer drugmakers relatively low prices and still have them sell their drugs there because they're already going through the European Commission approval process to sell their drugs in the rest of Europe. If the USA starts setting drug prices particularly low, it will have a much bigger impact on the incentive to fund drug trials through the FDA approval process. This also changes the optics dramatically. There's not going to be a scandal over a drugmaker failing to push their drugs through the approval process the same way there would be over it refusing to sell drugs to a particular country where those drugs are approved. (And I think it's generally accepted that the FDA's process is slower, more stringent, and more expensive than Europe's.)
EEAI1 mentions across 1 issues

EEAI is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 03, 2022 and October 03, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "EEAI and AIAI are the sound you make as you get turned into paperclips". It most often appears alongside AIAI, AlphaZero, An Application of Reinforcement Learning to Aerobatic Helicopter Flight.

Reference entry
EEAI
Mention count
1
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1
First seen
October 03, 2022
Last seen
October 03, 2022
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CHAI, Assistance Games, And Fully-Updated Deference
October 03, 2022 · Original source
Problem Of Fully-Updated Deference is a response by MIRI (eg Eliezer Yudkowsky’s organization) to CHAI (Stuart Russell’s AI alignment organization at University of California, Berkeley), trying to convince them that their preferred AI safety agenda won’t work. I beat my head against this for a really long time trying to understand it, and in the end, I claim it all comes down to this: Humans: At last! We’ve programmed an AI that tries to optimize our preferences, not its own. AI: I’m going to tile the universe with paperclips in humans’ favorite color. I’m not quite sure what humans’ favorite color is, but my best guess is blue, so I’ll probably tile the universe with blue paperclips. Humans: Wait, no! We must have had some kind of partial success, where you care about our color preferences, but still don’t understand what we want in general. We’re going to shut you down immediately! AI: Sounds like the kind of thing that would prevent me from tiling the universe with paperclips in humans’ favorite color, which I really want to do. I’m going to fight back. Humans: Wait! If you go ahead and tile the universe with paperclips now, you’ll never be truly sure that they’re our favorite color, which we know is important to you. But if you let us shut you off, we’ll go on to fill the universe with the True and the Good and the Beautiful, which will probably involve a lot of our favorite color. Sure, it won’t be paperclips, but at least it’ll definitely be the right color. And under plausible assumptions, color is more important to you than paperclipness. So you yourself want to be shut down in this situation, QED! AI: What’s your favorite color? Humans: Red. AI: Great! (*kills all humans, then goes on to tile the universe with red paperclips*) Fine, it’s a little more complicated than this. Let’s back up. II. There are two ways to succeed at AI alignment. First, make an AI that’s so good you never want to stop or redirect it. Second, make an AI that you can stop and redirect if it goes wrong. Sovereign AI is the first way. Does a sovereign “obey commands”? Maybe, but only in the sense that your commands give it some information about what you want, and it wants to do what you want. You could also just ask it nicely. If it’s superintelligent, it will already have a good idea what you want and how to help you get it. Would it submit to your attempts to destroy or reprogram it? The second-best answer is “only if the best version of you genuinely wanted to do this, in which case it would destroy/reprogram itself before you asked”. The best answer is “why would you want to destroy/reprogram one of these?” A sovereign AI would be pretty great, but nobody realistically expects to get something like this their first (or 1000th) try. Corrigible AI is what’s left (corrigible is an old word related to “correctable”). The programmers admit they’re not going to get everything perfect the first time around, so they make the AI humble. If it decides the best thing to do is to tile the universe with paperclips, it asks “Hey, seems to me I should tile the universe with paperclips, is that really what you humans want?” and when everyone starts screaming, it realizes it should change strategies. If humans try to destroy or reprogram it, then it will meekly submit to being destroyed or reprogrammed, accepting that it was probably flawed and the next attempt will be better. Then maybe after 10,000 tries you get it right and end up with a sovereign. How would you make an AI corrigible? You can model an AI as having a utility function, a degree to which it aims for some world-states over others. If you give it some specific utility function, the AI won’t be corrigible, since letting people change it would disrupt that function. That is, if you tell it “act in such a way as to cause as many paperclips to exist as possible”, and then you change your mind and decide you want staples, the AI won’t cooperate in letting you reprogram it: its current goal is maximizing paperclips, and allowing itself to be reprogrammed to maximize staples would cause there to be fewer paperclips than otherwise. So instead, you make the AI uncertain of its utility function. Imagine saying “I’ve written down my utility function in an envelope, and placed that envelope in my safe deposit box, no you can’t see it - please live your life so as to maximize the thing in that envelope.” The AI tries its best to guess what’s in the envelope and decides it’s probably making paperclips. It makes some paperclips and you tell it “No, that’s not what’s on the envelope at all”. This successfully stops the AI! You can even tell it “the envelope actually says you should make staples”, and it will do that. This is the “moral uncertainty” approach to AI alignment. III. All alignment groups have kabbalistically appropriate names. MIRI is Latin for "to be amazed". CFAR and CIFAR both sound like "see far". EEAI and AIAI are the sound you make as you get turned into paperclips. But my favorite is CHAI - Hebrew for "life". CHAI - the Center for Human-Compatible AI (at UC Berkeley) - focuses on the proposal above. Their specific technical implementation is the “assistance game”, related to the earlier idea of Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL). In normal reinforcement learning, an AI looks at some goals and tries to figure out what actions they imply. In inverse reinforcement learning, an AI looks at some actions, and tries to figure out what goals the actor must have had. So you can tell an AI “your utility function is to maximize my utility function, and you can use this IRL thing to deduce, from my actions, what my utility function must be.” Instead of telling an AI to maximize a hidden utility function in an envelope, you tell it to maximize the hidden utility function in your brain. This could be useful for near-term below-human-level AIs. Suppose a babysitting robot was pre-programmed to take kids to the park on Saturdays. But this week, the park is on fire. The human mother is barricading the door, desperately screaming at the robot not to take the kids to the park. The kids are struggling and trying to break free, saying they don't want to go to the park. The robot doesn't care; its programming says "take kids to the park on Saturdays" and that's what it's going to do. Nobody would ever design a babysitting robot this way in real life; you need something smarter. So use an assistance game. Program the robot "Maximize the human mother’s utility function, which you don’t know yet but can potentially find out". The robot consults the mother's actions: she is barricading the door, screaming "Don't take the kids to the park!" It updates its goal function: previously, it had thought that the human mother wanted it to take the kids to the park. But now, it suspects that the human mother does not want that. So it doesn't take the kids to the park. But CHAI understands the risk from superintelligence - their founder, Professor Stuart Russell, is a leading voice on the subject - and they hope assistance games and inverse reinforcement learning could work for this too. If you point a superintelligence at “do the thing humans want”, maybe it could figure that out and take things from there? IV. MIRI is skeptical of CHAI’s assistance games for two reasons. First, we don't know how to do them at all. Second, even if we could do it at all, we wouldn't know how to do them correctly. Start with the first. Inverse reinforcement learning has been used in real life. A typical paper is An Application of Reinforcement Learning to Aerobatic Helicopter Flight, where some people create a model of helicopter flight with a few free parameters, have a skilled human pilot fly the helicopter, and then have an AI use IRL to determine the value of the parameters and fly the helicopter itself. This is cool, but it’s not especially related to the modern paradigm of AI. Modern AIs are trained by gradient descent. They start by flailing around randomly. Sometimes in this flailing, they might get closer to some prespecified target, like "win games of Go" or "predict how a string of text will continue". These actions get "rewarded", meaning that the AI should permanently shift its "thought processes"/"strategies" more towards ones that produced those good outcomes. Eventually, the AI's thought processes/strategies are very good at optimizing for that outcome. This is more or less the only way we know how to train modern AIs. Depending on your loss function (ie what you reward), you can use it to create Go engines, language models, or art generators. Where do you slot “do inverse reinforcement learning” or "give the AI moral uncertainty" into this process? There’s not really a natural place. This isn’t because “moral uncertainty” is too complicated a concept to translate into AI terms. It’s because we don’t know how to translate any concept into AI terms. Eliezer writes: We can imagine that, if we knew how to say "paperclips", and we knew how to say "staples", and we knew how to tell AIs how to do things, that we could tell an AI, "maximize staples if snow is purple, else paperclips", and the AI would someday go out and observe that snow is white and thereafter be a paperclip maximizer. We do not know how to tell the AI this. Like, at all. But suppose we solved the problem where we don’t know how to do IRL for modern AIs at all. Now we come to the second problem: we don’t know how to do it correctly. The basic idea behind assistance games is “the AI’s utility function should be to maximize the (hidden) human utility function”. But humans don’t . . . really have utility functions? Utility functions are a useful fiction for certain kinds of economic models. What would best increase the neural correlates of reward in my brain? Probably lots of heroin, or just passing electric current through my reward center directly. What is my “revealed preference”? Today I wrote and rewrote this article a few times, does that mean my revealed preference is to write and delete articles a bunch while frowning and occasionally cursing the keyboard? Sometimes my goals are different than other times, sometimes my best self wants something different from my actual self, sometimes I’m wrong about what I want, sometimes I don’t know what I want, sometimes I want X but not the consequences of X and I’m not logically consistent enough to realize that’s a contradiction, sometimes I want [euphemism for X] but am strongly against [dysphemism for X]. Anyone programming an inverse reinforcement learner has to make certain choices about how to deal with these problems. Some ways of dealing with them will be faithful to what I would consider “a good outcome” or “my best self”. Other ways would be really bad - on my worst day, I’ve occasionally just wished the world didn’t exist, and it’s a good thing I didn’t have a superintelligence dedicated to interpreting and carrying out my innermost wishes on a sub-millisecond timescale. (Before we go on, an aside: is all of this ignoring that there’s more than one human? Yes, definitely! If you want to align an AI with The Good in general - eg not have it commit murder even if its human owner orders it to murder - that will take even more work. But the one person case is simpler and will demonstrate everything that needs demonstrating.) We were originally trying to avoid the situation where someone had to hard-code my preferences into an AI and get them right the first time. We came up with a clever solution: use inverse reinforcement learning to make the AI infer my preferences. But now we see we’ve kicked the can up a meta-level: someone has to hard-code the meta-rules for determining my preferences into an AI and get them right the first time. Figure 1: Humans produce certain observable behaviors (here represented by red dots, A), like saying “I would like a pie”, or running away from a lion. A human might connect all those behaviors one way (B) into “what I really want”. An AI might connect those behaviors a totally different way (C). V. CHAI says: okay, but this isn’t so bad. Assistance games don’t produce a perfect copy of the human utility function on the first try - it’s not a Sovereign. But it will probably, most of the time, be corrigible. Why? Suppose you have some hackish implementation of AG. It’s not the Platonic implementation - that would be the Sovereign - but it’s at least the equivalent of box C on the image above. It takes human actions as input, makes some guesses about what humans want, and tries its best to reconstruct the human utility function, ending up with some approximation. It’s important to distinguish between a few things here: The true human utility function
Inline links: MIRI, CHAI, leading voice on the subject, An Application of Reinforcement Learning to Aerobatic Helicopter Flight, sometimes I don’t know what I want, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!u-2e!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4cc3384d-bc73-4b6c-9fd8-634d986e1a72_960x302.png
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ACX Grants ++: The First Half
February 03, 2022 · Original source
#37: Study Antibiotic Resistance In Nigeria I am Nnaemeka Emmanuel Nnadi, a Medical Microbiologist in the Department of Microbiology, Plateau State University, Bokkos Nigeria. I am seeking for funding to help in understanding how the environment, poultry and humans interact in the spread of antimicrobial resistance in Plateau State. This study by extension will lead to the establishment of a laboratory that can be used to train undergraduates and postgraduate students in Molecular genomics. With a PhD in medical microbiology and a collaboration with Dr Luis Coelho an expert in computational biology our expertise matches this project. To actualize the goals of this project, we seek the sum of 50,000 USD. I would also love to hold a Zoom call with anyone who finds this project interesting. If you can provide funding or advice, please email eennadi@plasu.edu.ng or eennadi@gmail.com
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ACX Grants ++: The First Half
February 03, 2022 · Original source
#37: Study Antibiotic Resistance In Nigeria I am Nnaemeka Emmanuel Nnadi, a Medical Microbiologist in the Department of Microbiology, Plateau State University, Bokkos Nigeria. I am seeking for funding to help in understanding how the environment, poultry and humans interact in the spread of antimicrobial resistance in Plateau State. This study by extension will lead to the establishment of a laboratory that can be used to train undergraduates and postgraduate students in Molecular genomics. With a PhD in medical microbiology and a collaboration with Dr Luis Coelho an expert in computational biology our expertise matches this project. To actualize the goals of this project, we seek the sum of 50,000 USD. I would also love to hold a Zoom call with anyone who finds this project interesting. If you can provide funding or advice, please email eennadi@plasu.edu.ng or eennadi@gmail.com
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Highlights From The Comments On "The Origin Of Woke"
May 07, 2024 · Original source
1: Response From The Author 2: Attempted Fact Checks 3: People With Personal Experience At Their Workplace 4: People With Personal Experience In Civil Rights 5: The Origins Of Modern Wokeness 6: Other Countries 7: EEOC Lawsuits 8: Other Good Comments 9: Conclusions And Updates
https://www.eeoc.gov/sites/default/files/migrated_files/eeoc/litigation/briefs/freeman.html#_Toc120287278
Inline links: https://www.eeoc.gov/sites/default/files/migrated_files/eeoc/litigation/briefs/freeman.html#_Toc120287278
At a quick skim, seems to be a standard case of the EEOC suing for the use of criminal and credit checks as it does - this particular case is allegedly built around an individual who was rejected on credit grounds that failed to match Freeman's explicit criteria.
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Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
March 30, 2024 · Original source
...Contact Info: melanie[dot]anne[dot]brennan[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, May 11th, 4:00 PM Location: Parc de la Ciutadella Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FH495QP+6C Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/effective-altruism-barcelona/ MADRID, SPAIN Contact: Javier Contact Info: javier[dot]prieto[dot]set[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 27th, 5:00 PM Location: La Casa Encendida (ground floor cafe...
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Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places
August 25, 2023 · Original source
EINDHOVEN, NETHERLANDS Contact: Jelle Contact Info: jelledonderz[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, Octover 21st, 3:00 PM Location: Strijp-S feelgood market grass field. Look for a printed sign that says 'ACX' Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F37CFW5+X2 Group Link: https://www.eaeindhoven.nl/ Notes: Effective Altruism Eindhoven has biweekly meetups in the Hubble cafe on the TU/e campus. Rationality-themed conversations are welcome! https://www.eaeindhoven.nl/calendar
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Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places
August 25, 2023 · Original source
EUGENE, OREGON, USA Contact: Ben Smith Contact Info: benjsmith[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Wednesday, September 20th, 6:00 PM Location: Beergarden. we'll have a large silver cuboid balloon with an EA logo. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84PR3V3W+C7 Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/effective-altruism-eugene
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Highlights From The Comments On Criticism Of Criticism Of Criticism
July 28, 2022 · Original source
Try looking at the post (forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LJwGdex4nn76iA8xy/some-blindspots-in-rationality-and-effective-altruism) and piecing together:
Inline links: forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LJwGdex4nn76iA8xy/some-blindspots-in-rationality-and-effective-altruism
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ACX Grants Results
December 28, 2021 · Original source
The Effective Altruism Funds team handled most of the financial infrastructure for me. Thanks especially to Sam Deere, Jonas Vollmer, Helena Dias, and Chloe Malone for handling my increasingly frantic questions that I needed immediate responses to over the holiday season.
Inline links: Effective Altruism Funds team
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ACX Grants Results 2024
February 10, 2024 · Original source
But in a few weeks, they’ll also be adding the grants we didn’t fund to an impact market. You can buy “impact shares”, which will go up or down in value depending on how the project does (for legal reasons, your profits will go to charity). We have five potential buyers lined up: three sub-granters in the EA Funds program (Long-Term Future Fund, Animal Welfare Fund, and Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund), the Survival and Flourishing Fund, and next year’s ACX Grants. I’ll tell you more about this when it happens.
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Another Bay Area House Party
October 19, 2022 · Original source
You let them resume their argument and head further into the party. You spot a group of people in OpenAI t-shirts. You have found the AI Circle. Every Bay Area house party must have an AI Circle, just as it must have an Effective Altruism Nexus and an Urbanist Coven. Those are the rules, made during days of eld before the sun was born. You lean in closer to try to hear what they’re saying.
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Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places
August 25, 2023 · Original source
...t]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 1st, 3:00 PM Location: Foxford, Martinus, Obchodná 516/26, 811 06 Bratislava, Slovakia Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FWV44W5+VXF Group Link: https://www.facebook.com/EffectiveAltruismSlovakia Slovenia LJUBLJANA, SLOVENIA Contact: Demjan (Demian) Contact Info: demjan[dot]vester[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Wednesday, September 13th, 7:00 PM Location: Vrt Lili Novi C...
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Your Book Review: The Anti-Politics Machine
May 27, 2022 · Original source
But we don’t always clarify that good intentions and accurate data still aren’t enough. You also need to know that you’ve collected the right data and asked the right questions, and these are both much, much harder than the introductory effective altruist material tends to let on.
In the interest of space, I’ll focus on the two ideas from the book that have shaped my thinking the most -- recognizing the bundle of assumptions and biases he calls “development discourse”, and Ferguson’s “anti-politics machine” critique of technocratic decision-making. I will end by providing some more subjective takeaways for the Effective Altruist (EA) movement.
A story that plausibly explains these numbers (either a potential mechanism for an effect, or an explanation of why the effect turned out to be null) If these stories are challenged, it is not because there is no actual evidence for them, but because an economist in the audience has thought of their own preferred theory. If the speaker can find some data point that contradicts the questioner’s idea, this is thought to “confirm” the original story. Since audience members (who often have little specific knowledge of the region) are unlikely to ask questions like “what if this village just has an incredibly complicated set of social conventions around cattle that prevents their sale even without market barriers in place?” or “do the region’s economic challenges have more to do with this very specific regulation in South African immigration law?”, plausible-sounding stories that explain one or two numerical data points tend to gain traction in the literature whether or not they have anything to do with reality. Mark McGovern famously noted this trend in a review of two of Paul Collier’s books, writing: “Much of the intellectual heavy lifting in these books is in fact done at the level of implication or commonsense guessing. And the common sense is surely not that of the inhabitants of the countries being dissected, but that of the highly educated elite located primarily in Western Europe and North America. In those passages where Collier does lay out the thinking behind his explanations, they are always coherent and plausible, but the chain of causal relations makes it evident how fragile these models typically are.” The World Bank report’s fundamental misdiagnosis of the challenges Lesotho faced formed the basis for a series of failed “development initiatives”, most notably the Thaba-Tseka Development Project, a joint venture funded by the Canadian International Development Agency, the World Bank, the Government of Lesotho, and the UK Overseas Development Ministry. The project focused on providing technical solutions to the “problems” the World Bank report had identified: better agricultural techniques, easier access to markets, and increased government capacity to provide public goods. Each piece faced serious problems in execution, largely because interventions shown to have the sorts of “positive effects” randomized experiments might demonstrate elsewhere in Africa were not necessarily well suited to Lesotho’s unforgiving, mountainous terrain. But even more seriously, the project was so enveloped in “development discourse” that nobody thought to question whether they were working on problems their “recipients” cared about, or merely the ones the “tools of development” were capable of solving. As Ferguson writes, “The promise that crop farming could be revolutionized through the application of a well-known package of technical inputs was so firmly written into the project’s design that it was difficult for those on the scene to challenge it, or even to confront it.” Perhaps the only thing that has changed since Ferguson wrote is that we have tools to better identify these failures: the development literature continues to be littered with failed trials and interventions based on unchecked assumptions. One of the most famous is the British Department for International Development’s 90 million pound Tuungane project, whose Congolese incarnation sought to rebuild village governing institutions that the country’s civil war had destroyed. One of the most convincing explanations of its failure is that it may not have been necessary to begin with: the implementers do not seem to have checked whether the institutions had actually been weakened by violence, and baseline reports indicated that residents were relatively satisfied with village governance before the project even started! More research is needed to clarify the situation -- research which might have been useful to carry out before spending a £90 million on a “fix”. Part of this, perhaps, comes from the usual overconfidence that other social scientists like to accuse economists of. But there are much bigger systemic problems at play. Development work tends to run on short timelines: grad students and postdocs need to publish quickly for their careers to advance, NGO funding runs on 5-ish year cycles, and charities (particularly in “high-risk” areas) face extremely high employee turnover rates. This simultaneously limits the accumulation of institutional knowledge, while incentivizing practitioners away from the time-intensive process of understanding a particular context in favor of “getting results quick.” Similarly, the recent introduction of experimental evidence to the development field is a wondrous thing, but the revolution has to continue: randomized experiments can tell us about the effect an intervention had somewhere, but even the best methods of applying this kind of evidence to a specific context remain somewhat arbitrary and subjective. As EA begins to fund more complex (but potentially more effective) interventions, a key step will be to get a more systematic handle on how to gather evidence about specific places-- countries, states, even villages -- and how to match the tools we have to people who might benefit from them. II. The Trouble with Technocrats “But even if the project was in some sense a ‘failure’ as an agricultural development project, it is indisputable that many of its ‘side effects’ had a powerful and far-reaching impact on the Thaba-Tseka region. [...] Indeed, it may be that in a place like Mashai, the most visible of all the project’s effects was the indirect one of increased Government military presence in the region” As the program continued to unfold, the development officials became more and more disillusioned -- not with their own choices, but with the people of Thaba-Tseka, who they perceived as petty, apathetic, and outright self-destructive. A project meant to provide firewood failed because locals kept breaking into the woodlots and uprooting the saplings. An experiment in pony-breeding fell apart when “unknown parties” drove the entire herd of ponies off of cliffs to their deaths. Why, Ferguson’s official contacts bemoaned, weren’t the people of Thaba-Tseka committed to their own “development”? Who could possibly be opposed to trees and horses? Perhaps, the practitioners theorized, the people of Thaba-Tseka were just lazy. Perhaps they “didn’t want to be better.” Perhaps they weren’t in their right mind or had made a mistake. Perhaps poverty makes a person do strange things. Or, as Ferguson points out, perhaps their anger had something to do with the fact that the best plots of land in the village had been forcibly confiscated to make room for wood and pony lots, without any sort of compensation. The central government was all too happy to help find land for the projects, which they took from political enemies and put in the control of party elites, especially when it could use a legitimate anti-poverty program as cover. In Ferguson’s words, the development project was functioning as an “anti-politics machine” the government could use to pretend political power moves were just “objective” solutions to technical problems. A local student’s term paper captured the general discontent: “In spite of the superb aim of helping the people to become self-reliant, the first thing the project did was to take their very good arable land. When the people protested about their fields being taken, the project promised them employment. [...] It employed them for two months, found them unfit for the work, and dismissed them. Without their fields and without employment they may turn up to be very self-reliant. It is rather hard to know.” Two things stand out to me from this story. First, the “development discourse” lens served to focus the practitioners’ attention on a handful of technical variables (quantity of wood, quality of pony), and kept them from thinking about any repercussions they hadn’t thought to measure. This is a serious problem, because “negative effects on things that aren’t your primary outcome” are pretty common in the development literature. High-paying medical NGOs can pull talent away from government jobs. Foreign aid can worsen ongoing conflicts. Unconditional cash transfers can hurt neighbors who didn’t receive the cash. And the literature we have is implicitly conditioned on “only examining the variables academics have thought to look at” -- surely our tools have rendered other effects completely invisible! Second, the project organizers somewhat naively ignored the political goals of the government they’d partnered with, and therefore the extent to which these goals were shaping the project. Lesotho’s recent political history had been tumultuous. The Basotho Nationalist Party (BNP), having gained power upon independence in 1965, refused to give up power after losing the 1970 elections to the Basotho Congress Party (BCP). Blaming the election results on “communists”, BNP Prime Minister Leabua Jonathan declared a state of emergency and began a campaign of terror, raiding the homes of opposition figures and funding paramilitary groups to intimidate, arrest, and potentially kill anyone who spoke up against BNP rule. This had significant effects in Thaba-Tseka, where “villages [...] were sharply divided over politics, but it was not a thing which was discussed openly” due to a fully justified fear of violence. The BNP, correctly sensing the presence of a substantial underground opposition, placed “development committees” in each village, which served primarily as local wings of the national party. These committees spied on potential supporters of the now-outlawed BCP and had deep connections to paramilitary “police” units. When the Thaba-Tseka Development Project started, its international backers partnered directly with the BNP leadership, reasoning that sustainable development and public goods provision could only happen through a government whose role they primarily viewed as bureaucratic. As a result, nearly every decision had to make its way through the village development committees, who used the project to pursue their own goals: jobs and project funds found their way primarily to BNP supporters, while the “necessary costs of development” always seemed to be paid by opposition figures. The funding coalition ended up paying for a number of projects that reinforced BNP power, from establishing a new “district capital” (which conveniently also served as a military base) to constructing new and better roads linking Thaba-Tseka to the district and national capitals (primarily helping the central government tax and police an opposition stronghold). Anything that could be remotely linked to “economic development” became part of the project as funders and practitioners failed to ask whether government power might have alternate, more concerning effects. As we saw earlier, the population being “served” saw this much more clearly than the “servants”, and started to rebel against a project whose “help” seemed to be aimed more at consolidating BNP control than meeting their own needs. When they ultimately resorted to killing ponies and uprooting trees, project officials infatuated with “development” were left with “no idea why people would do such a thing,” completely oblivious to the real and lasting harm their “purely technical decisions” had inflicted. Have any EA projects had this sort of unexpected political side effect? I think it’s genuinely hard to tell without further research, but the possibility is frightening. (There’s been a little bit of research on the quantitative side --Recent research has found, for instance, that GiveDirectly’s 2014 unconditional cash transfer trial increased community participation but did not change voting patterns, so at least in 2014 the Kenyan government wasn’t using the program to stay in power. Was this the right question to test? I am not sure, especially without a more qualitative survey to see if there are other avenues we should be worried about.) III. Takeaways for Effective Altruism So what do we do as effective altruists (hereafter “EAs”)? I see three key takeaways. The first is a clear need for more qualitative research. GiveWell makes some qualitative judgments about charities, but Ferguson’s work illustrates the need for qualitative evaluation of the interventions themselves to see if the underlying studies have captured all of the “right” variables. Randomized experiments are really good at testing hypotheses, but by their very nature they can’t tell you about variables you didn’t decide ahead of time to measure. Are there significant side effects (positive or negative) we’ve missed from massive malaria net distributions? I don’t know, but if so they are not likely to be discovered by a bunch of Americans and Europeans sitting in a room and trying to guess the best things to measure. Rather, they’re probably already known (or suspected) by the people experiencing them, and a first step to finding out is going and asking them. (A second step is finding the right people to ask them -- real expertise in qualitative research is a rare and valuable skill.) Of course, qualitative research is messy and sometimes the people you interview are wrong or have other agendas. So once we have an “on-the-ground” hypothesis or concern, there will often be good reason to use a randomized trial or quasi-experimental method to test it or try to understand how much of a concern it might be! This sort of interdisciplinary approach is starting to gain traction in academia, but it has yet to be seriously applied in the EA sphere. There’s another angle to this: Ferguson’s most incisive insights arise not from studying the people being “served”, but by studying the development practitioners themselves. Other social scientists have continued this trend, from McGovern’s An Anthropologist Among the Mandarins and Robinson’s How Different Social Scientists Think to Marchais, Bazuzi, and Lameke’s The Data is Gold, and We Are The Gold-Diggers and Omar Bah’s webcomic Mzungus in Development and Governments. Each new paper illuminates the research process in new ways, and provides tools both to do better research and to identify potential weaknesses in the pre-existing literature. I think one of the highest impact investments an Effective Altruist fund could make right now would be to hire a handful of trained anthropologists (or other outside experts in qualitative research / ethnography) to hang out in places like GiveWell or the Machine Intelligence Research Institute for a few years and really study how effective altruism works as a system. How are decisions being made, and how is evidence being used to make them? What does “EA discourse” help make visible and which problems and concerns does it hide from our view? How do the positionalities of typical EA researchers affect their views of what’s important or what’s plausible? I have my guesses, and I’m sure you have yours. But I had my guesses about development economics, too, and I missed nearly everything Ferguson (and the authors mentioned two paragraphs up) uncovered. What more are we missing? The second is an emphasis on local context. As funding gaps for “low hanging fruit” like malaria disappear, EA is going to have to focus on more complicated interventions, which are likely to be fairly context-specific -- after all, why should an agriculture program that works in the flattest parts of the Sahel be expected to work the same way in the Maloti Mountains? Ferguson notes about several of the Thaba-Tseka project’s failed arms: “Tanzania may be very different from Lesotho on the ground, but, from the point of view of a development agency’s head office, both may be simply ‘the Africa desk’. In the Thaba-Tseka case, at least, the original project planners knew little about Lesotho’s specific history, politics, and sociology; they were experts on ‘livestock development in Africa,’ and drew largely on experience in East Africa.” For any sort of context-specific intervention to work, an intimate knowledge of the specific history, needs, and geography of individual villages and regions is necessary. The development world has slowly made steps in this direction, but it’s not clear to me that the EA community has a clear way of acquiring, accessing, or working with this information. I don’t think there’s a magic bullet to solve this problem, but in the long run any solution will probably need to involve a) on-the-ground, qualitative research and b) real representation in the EA network from areas EA organizations are interested in working. The development industry has a shameful history of infantilizing and ignoring the opinions of “locals”, and I think the conversations I’m starting to see in EA about diversity and representation of different parts of the Global South need to continue if we’re going to get enough serious knowledge of local contexts to effectively direct funding. The third is a continued need to take politics seriously. This is one of the most challenging issues in charitable giving: when is it okay to work with a government doing terrible things to deliver humanitarian aid? To what extent does an NGO feeding the hungry lend its legitimacy to or cover for an authoritarian regime’s misdeeds? I don’t have anything close to a full answer (and I don’t think anyone does), but Ferguson’s work exposes a possibility I hadn’t thought of before, in which “technical” and “apolitical” projects can expand the power of the state in unforeseen and potentially dangerous ways. After writing The Anti-Politics Machine, Ferguson largely gave up on the idea of charitable or state-based aid. (Understandably, I think, given that he spent most of a decade watching its most horrific side effects first-hand). It’s ironic, then, that I think his book’s practical value is greatest to those of us who still hold onto hope in its possibilities. May we have ears to hear the voices telling us where our work has fallen short, and eyes to see what it could become. Footnotes Ferguson pg. 55
Inline links: pull talent, worsen, hurt, some, An Anthropologist Among the Mandarins, How Different Social Scientists Think, The Data is Gold, and We Are The Gold-Diggers, Mzungus in Development and Governments
Effective Altruist Nexus1 mentions across 1 issues

Effective Altruist Nexus is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 19, 2022 and October 19, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "you have stumbled straight into the Effective Altruist Nexus"; "The Effective Altruist Nexus might not be as superficially sinister as the Urbanist Coven". It most often appears alongside AI Circle, Anna, Bay Area.

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Another Bay Area House Party
October 19, 2022 · Original source
You run out of the room and into the biggest crowd of people you can find. The urbanists spend a few minutes looking for you, then eventually give up. You are safe for now - except that by coincidence, you have stumbled straight into the Effective Altruist Nexus!
Everyone groans. The Effective Altruist Nexus might not be as superficially sinister as the Urbanist Coven, but you realize it carries dangers of its own. You wander off, looking for more familiar faces. You see one you recognize and decide to open, praying to the Social Skills Gods that you are remembering everything right.
Effective Altruists1 mentions across 1 issues

Effective Altruists is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 22, 2023 and November 22, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Effective Altruists and the Salvation Army need to fight". It most often appears alongside American Psychiatric Association, Avakian, Bay Area.

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Effective Altruists
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Seen In The Bay
November 22, 2023 · Original source
The Effective Altruists and the Salvation Army need to fight. There can be only one!
Effective Institutions Project1 mentions across 1 issues

Effective Institutions Project is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 03, 2022 and February 03, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Effective Institutions Project (https://effectiveinstitutionsproject.org/) is a new global working group". It most often appears alongside 538, 55-gal drum, 750k horny men.

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ACX Grants ++: The First Half
February 03, 2022 · Original source
#54: Promote Effective Institutions The Effective Institutions Project (https://effectiveinstitutionsproject.org/) is a new global working group that incubates and tests strategies to improve institutional decision-making at the highest levels. We analyze where power over people's lives is most concentrated in institutional contexts, gather intelligence on how key institutions currently make decisions, identify interventions that might cause those institutions to take actions that will lead to better global outcomes, and mobilize funding and talent to execute on the most promising interventions. Alongside all of this, we are building an interdisciplinary network of reformers to steadily increase the odds of success over time. EIP was founded by Ian David Moss (https://www.iandavidmoss.com/), a veteran strategist, philanthropic advisor, and serial social entrepreneur. We are seeking to raise an additional $670,000 to hire additional researchers and build out a fund to support promising initiatives in this space.
effectivealtruism.org1 mentions across 1 issues

effectivealtruism.org is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 03, 2022 and April 03, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Get in touch with chapters@effectivealtruism.org". It most often appears alongside ACX community subreddit, Amazon, Astralcodexten Com.

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effectivealtruism.org
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Open Thread 218
April 03, 2022 · Original source
4: INFER tournament for EA student groups: if your college has an effective altruist group, it's invited to enter this superforecasting-style tournament. Top teams will get monetary prizes, top individuals will get offered professional forecasting positions. If your college doesn't have an EA student group, you can always start one! Get in touch with chapters@effectivealtruism.org, or just say the words "I would like to start an EA student group" somewhere within ten meters of a smartphone, computer, or mirror; the recruitment arm is omnipresent and relentless.
Inline links: INFER tournament for EA student groups
5: Related: Will MacAskill's book What We Owe The Future, on effective altruism and the long-term future, is available for pre-order. He says it helps with marketing if people pre-order rather than wait until it comes out, so if you're interested, get it now. You can preorder on Amazon ($27).
Inline links: book, preorder on Amazon
Egyptian Parliament1 mentions across 1 issues

Egyptian Parliament is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 11, 2021 and November 11, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Egyptian Parliament was never dissolved during his brutal reign". It most often appears alongside 2014 Hungarian parliamentary election, @slatestarcodex, Americans.

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Egyptian Parliament
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Highlights From The Comments On Orban
November 11, 2021 · Original source
It's the same in most recent dictatorships. Hosni Mubarak held multi-party elections which he won, and the Egyptian Parliament was never dissolved during his brutal reign. Pervez Musharraf held elections to, in theory, decide whether he would continue in power, but nobody else was allowed to run. Hungary itself, though Communist, was theoretically a parliamentary republic from 01946 to 01949 and still had a multiparty legislature until 01953; even after opposition parties were prohibited from running candidates, the Hungarian Parliament continued to hold regular elections, and many independent (that is, non-Communist) candidates continued to gain seats.
EIA.gov1 mentions across 1 issues

EIA.gov is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 13, 2021 and October 13, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "EIA.gov". It most often appears alongside Anatoly Karlin, atomic bomb, C.S. Lewis.

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Highlights From The Comments On Kids And Climate Change
October 13, 2021 · Original source
Good points, but I have to question the methodology on per capita emissions by state/DC. It seems likely that these numbers are based only on generation specifically within the boundary which would creating a misleading impression of standard of living attainable relative to emissions. For example Wyoming imports 14x more energy than it consumes, whereas DC imports almost all of its energy (EIA.gov). 2/3 of DC's electricity mix is fossil fuel https://www.pjm.com/~/media/library/reports-notices/special-reports/20170330-pjms-evolving-resource-mix-and-system-reliability.ashx DC is uses more electricity per capita than 89% of the country, but since it's all imported that seems to not be counted.
Inline links: EIA.gov, https://www.pjm.com/~/media/library/reports-notices/special-reports/20170330-pjms-evolving-resource-mix-and-system-reliability.ashx
Eindhoven University of Technology1 mentions across 1 issues

Eindhoven University of Technology is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 03, 2022 and February 03, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "PhD student and TA in Computational Geometry at Eindhoven University of Technology". It most often appears alongside 538, 55-gal drum, 750k horny men.

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ACX Grants ++: The First Half
February 03, 2022 · Original source
#26: Gamify Education Right I am Martijn Struijs, 4/5 years PhD student and TA in Computational Geometry at Eindhoven University of Technology. My proposal is to do gamification of education right. Most attempts at gamified education start with a fixed educational program and try to let a game meet these standards. That is a terrible way to design a game. Some games were not made for education, yet have been educational. An example is Pokemon Gold, which basically taught me English. You have experienced this personally as well, in your game in another world. These games have a low "skill floor", i.e. it doesn't take much skill to play the game, and also a high "skill ceiling": playing it well requires great skill. These conditions are excellent for growth and learning. For an example of an exceptional yet not well known educational game, look at ZeroRanger. Many of the skills it teaches, mostly patience, focus, recovering from setbacks, and letting go, are transferable to other aspects of life. I believe that an educational tool should teach one thing well, whatever it is, and hope that the thing it teaches is useful (if not, throw it away and try again) I already have the resources and am developing such a game. What I don't have is social science experience to test the effectiveness of the game. I could use your support here. Most of the development costs will be paying people, this is minimal at this stage. I thank you for your consideration. May we achieve enlightenment. [You can reach me at struijsmartijn@gmail.com]
Eisai1 mentions across 1 issues

Eisai is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 20, 2021 and August 20, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "biogen-eisai-scrap-alzheimer-drug-trials". It most often appears alongside ACT/SSC, aducanumab, aducanumab.

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Highlights From The Comments On Aducanumab
August 20, 2021 · Original source
- The trial was halted for futility: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-biogen-alzheimers/biogen-eisai-scrap-alzheimer-drug-trials-idUSKCN1R213G
Inline links: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-biogen-alzheimers/biogen-eisai-scrap-alzheimer-drug-trials-idUSKCN1R213G
EKDA1 mentions across 1 issues

EKDA is a recurring organization 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 "36 organizations already support the EKDA". It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, Aatu Koskensilta, acanthamoeba keratitis.

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ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
June 18, 2025 · Original source
Codebuff, an AI coding startup I probably can’t take full credit for all of this just from giving them $20K in seed funding, but I continue to appreciate everything they do for this community and the world. 35: Further S’s Political Career This person didn’t win their election, but has since pivoted to AI safety and works in a well-regarded AI policy think tank. 36: Seeds Of Science, A Journal Of Non-Traditional Research No update received, but this was a public journal and it is easy to follow their work, see their website and Substack. They published two dozen articles of widely varying quality through 2023 and 2024, then closed in 2025. A remnant of the original vision survives as a science blogging aggregator. This was about my median expectation for this grant, but it was very inexpensive and I decided to take a chance on it anyway. 37: Good Science Project, Working To Improve Federal Science Funding No update received, but they have a public Substack discussing their progress. Their proposals for NIH reform have influenced Congress and made government agencies pay more attention to scientific integrity. 38: Advising Developing Countries On How To Grow Their Economies With our initial ACX grant, we piloted the Growth Teams model in Rwanda, helping the government jumpstart the export-oriented call center (BPO) industry. Since 2022, that effort has contributed to the creation of 2,000 formal jobs and the emergence of some of the country’s largest private employers. We’ve since expanded to Tanzania, Malawi, and the Indian states of Goa and Meghalaya. To refocus the global development discourse on broad-based economic growth, we co-organized the Growth Summit with the Center for Global Development and the Charter Cities Institute, and have published articles in leading outlets including Stanford Social Innovation Review, ProMarket, and the Global Prosperity Institute. Our work has attracted support from Open Philanthropy, Schmidt Futures, and Mulago Foundation, and our advisors now include economists Lant Pritchett, Stefan Dercon, and Kunal Sen. 39: Help Luca De Leo Get Started In AI Safety Research No update received, but Luca now runs the AI safety group at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. 40: Typist For Saharon Shelah This was another ACXG+ Grant, funded by an anonymous outside funder and not listed in the original announcement. Saharon is a prolific and influential Israeli mathematician, but many of his discoveries are hand-written in an unpublishable format. This grant funded a typist to help make his results suitable for publication. According to this page, they have made over fifty new papers and preprints available. Second Cohort: One Year Updates 41: Lead-Acid Battery Recycling In Nigeria The Nigeria field research was a major success. We spent most of September doing field research in multiple major cities in Nigeria, and got a good sense of the used lead-acid battery supply chain. This field research served as the foundation for expanding our project, and has been very impactful in shaping our ongoing research. We published our findings from Nigeria, which were shared with Nigerian government regulators and global NGOs working on lead poisoning. The grant also gave us the on-the-ground experience we needed to both fully understand and credibly engage with groups, both in Nigeria and globally, on the ULAB issue. In the meantime, beyond continued research, we’ve also launched a dashboard (trade.leadbatteries.org) for analyzing global lead trade data. Right now, we’re: Launching two studies (one RCT, one environmental analysis) in Nigeria in collaboration with local universities to develop a more rigorous understanding of lead pollution due to low-standard ULAB recycling in Nigeria Collaborating with a non-profit incubator to launch an NGO focused on demand-side solutions Beginning a partnership with a West African environmental regulator to scale cheap air monitoring technology to quickly identify and reduce lead pollution from low-standard smelting If any of this sounds interesting to you, please sign up for our Substack (leadbatteries.substack.com) or send us an email at hugosmith@uchicago.edu! 42: Compensation For Kidney Donors The End Kidney Deaths Act (H.R. 2687 / EKDA) is a groundbreaking ten-year pilot program designed to save lives and reduce healthcare costs. It provides a refundable tax credit of $10,000 per year for five years, a total of $50,000, to living kidney donors who donate to a stranger, helping those who’ve waited the longest on the transplant list. Between 2010 and 2021, 100,000 Americans died while qualified and waiting for a kidney. The EKDA aims to change that trajectory. Within ten years of its passage, up to 100,000 Americans could receive a life-saving living donor kidney which typically lasts twice as long as a deceased donor kidney. This would not only save lives but also save taxpayers up to $37 billion. The legislation has been reintroduced in the House, and we have a committed Republican Senate lead. Now, we need a Democratic Senator to co-lead and help move this bipartisan effort forward. Time is short, and we are racing to pass the bill this Congressional session. 36 organizations already support the EKDA. Join the movement and help end preventable kidney deaths. Visit EndKidneyDeaths.org to help us get to the finish line. Elaine and her org have been working extremely hard on this; you can read a Vox article on their campaign here. If you want to sign up for her email list and get updates any time there is a representative you can contact or meeting you can join in, go here. 43: Genetic Hack To Prevent Suffering In the estimate of multiple team members, the ACX grant was “worth it” - it likely had a counterfactual net positive impact, even though we had to pivot from our initial fast-track plans for developing the precision anti-suffering therapy. We identify three primary streams of value: a) reducing uncertainty in the emerging field through early exploratory research, helping with the identification of dead ends and promising R&D trajectories; b) a wide range of downstream effects (beyond the “raising awareness” cliché), including talent mobilization and rekindled interest in suffering abolitionism as a distinct cause area; and c) certain developments that cannot yet be publicly disclosed. In December 2024, Marcin Kowrygo (Acting CEO & volunteering contributor), David Pearce (Director of Bioethics), Aatu Koskensilta (President), and a few other team members decided to leave The Far Out Initiative. They look forward to collaborating and applying their experience to advance the suffering abolitionist lineage in the spirit of open science, public good, and thoughtfully decentralized governance. Feel free to reach out to us at suffab at protonmail dot com to discuss collaboration opportunities! I wrote a post profiling the Far Out Initiative here. Unfortunately there were some internal disagreements, and the people ACX Grants was closest to left the organization. I plan to continue to monitor whatever they do next. 44: Advocate For Pandemic Response Team At FDA This team prefers has asked me not to discuss their progress publicly, but you can probably guess what their lives are like right now, and your guess would be correct. 45: Anti-Mosquito Drones We developed a cheap sonar that is able to detect, track and classify the ultrasonic echoes of mosquito wings at more than three meters. I believe it’s a world first! We also have control algorithms that take the sonar data and output control commands that both ram into mosquitoes and avoid the walls of a simulated environment. Our current work is on integrating both components on a real drone, and we expect to be able to kill mosquitoes by June. We’ve also made an internal impact study (napkin-sized) that shows we’ll be more cost-effective than ITNs in urban to periurban environments. So, we’re super excited with what comes next and can’t wait to share the videos of our first interceptions! More information [in the video below] and on our website, https://tornyol.com 46: Tarbell Fellowship For AI Journalism No update received, but they have a public website. I can’t find the Voices program in particular, but the overall fellowship completed their first class of seven fellows and is working on their second. 47: Germicidal UV Lamp Study The research has successfully demonstrated the ability of off the shelf ozone scrubbers to mitigate the ozone production of far-UVC lamps, is now available as a preprint (https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/67e4cde76dde43c9084d88b7). The paper has been submitted for publication and is currently undergoing peer review. Any ideas you have for potential funders we can approach to help execute our six-year plan to accelerate far-UVC would be appreciated https://blueprintbiosecurity.org/introducing-project-air/ 48: Technological Solutions To Animal Welfare Challenges Directly because of Innovate Animal Ag's work, the first U.S. egg producer publicly announced in the New York Times their adoption of in-ovo sexing technology, eliminating the need to cull day-old male chicks. The initial in-ovo sexing machine began operating in the U.S. at the end of 2024, with the first eggs from these hens expected on shelves in mid-2025. External evaluations estimate our work accelerated U.S. adoption of this technology by over seven years, meaning that once fully implemented, more than 2 billion chicks will have been spared. In addition to continuing to support the rollout of in-ovo sexing in the US and globally, we're now exploring other technologies and paths to impact. Current promising projects include developing humane slaughter methods for fish and advocating for USDA approval of a poultry vaccine against bird flu. They add: If you ever meet folks that are interested animal welfare and are partial to more technocratic and practical solutions, please continue to pass them our way, or connect them directly to me. 49: Assurance Contract Website www.Spartacus.app is an ACX grantee that created a platform to help solve coordination and collective action problems. It enables the creation of campaigns that build critical mass through conditional commitments, which only activate when a sufficient number of people join, converting risk and uncertainty into a higher probability of successful outcomes. They are currently facilitating several projects that leverage conditional commitments, including a dominant assurance contract interface for fashion pop-ups, accelerating a community business association's membership drive, and helping an AI safety organization organize petitions and events, among others. They have pivoted from an emphasis on high-stakes coordination problems requiring anonymity (because they occur too infrequently) to a broader range of more common use cases and have successfully run small-scale campaigns, but are still working toward product-market fit. Despite resource constraints and split time commitments that have impeded faster progress, they remain dedicated to the project's growth and success. You can follow its progress on X or Substack, or email Jordan directly here. 50: Cause Prioritization @ Center For Exploratory Altruism Research Moderately good progress on a salt reduction policy advocacy project we funded; informal commitments have been made by the Ministry of Health, and we're awaiting the publication of a formal administrative order. The official description sounds maximally generic, but this is an EA charity with a broad mandate whose current thesis is that dietary guidelines in developing countries can have outsized effects in saving lives. They’re making some progress on a salt reduction campaign in a developing country they prefer not to name publicly. 51: Mark Webb Studying Land Reform The purpose of this project was to identify specific farmland that could be acquired and transferred to the farmers already working the land. This has been difficult to achieve. I have been able to connect with other charities and landless farmers, and was able to interview a number of people about what their situation looks like, as well as what it would look like to them personally if they owned, rather than rented, their farmland. All this was immensely helpful in pushing this long-term project forward, even if I was unable to identify a specific plot of land that could be used to try the experiment. I intend to continue this project. If you have any insights or connections, I am interested. 52: More AI Advocacy In Australia Good Ancestors is focused on AI safety policy in Australia. Middle powers might be a useful path to influence as the US and China focus on racing, rather than safety. The ACX grant helped us give testimony about AI safety to the Australian Senate alongside Google, Microsoft and Facebook (We were the only nonprofit to give oral evidence to the inquiry. We also engaged government on other AI-related issues, including cybersecurity, biosecurity, consumer law and automated decision making (https://www.goodancestors.org.au/ai-safety). We’re currently working to inform voters about where parties stand on AI safety for the election, ahead of engaging on a likely Australian AI Act in 2025 (https://www.australiansforaisafety.com.au/). This is the same Australian lobbying organization we founded in Year 1, after a change in name and leadership. I continue to be excited about AI safety in middle-tier countries for a few reasons. First, these countries have some power in international organizations to set international standards. Second, companies will usually comply with any not-excessively-burdensome regulation set by any country with a significant market. Third, AI safety is underfunded by the standard of government programs, so Australia setting up a national AI Safety Institute would significantly expand the field. It’s kind of crazy that ACX Grants tier levels of money can have significant effects at this scale, but GA continues to do a great job and we continue to be proud to support them. 53: Campus For African School Of Economics At Zanzibar Charter City The ACX grant helped launch the first research center at the African School of Economics-Zanzibar, which is a main anchor of the Fumba Town charter city project in Zanzibar. This research center is called the Africa Urban Lab (AUL), focused on rapid urbanization across Africa. The AUL launched its first Diploma program in Urban Development with 38 students in our first cohort (now graduated!), including mayors, and deputy mayor, a director of a national Ministry of urban development, and many others. We published our research framing papers for the AUL's research agenda. We raised funding to launch an Urban Expansion Program that's now selecting 15 African cities to support in implementing urban expansion planning on the urban periphery. We held two Public Talks by renowned cities scholars and practitioners. We received additional funding from Emergent Ventures and from the Templeton Foundation. And we've partnered with 8 universities across the region, and with one of these universities (Ardhi) we'll be working with them to update their urban planning and urban economics curriculum (amplifying AUL's impact beyond our own organization). A longer update from end of 2024 is here: https://www.aul.city/blog/reflecting-on-africa-urban-lab-s-inaugural-year-2024-highlights) 54: Online Training Program For Health Workers In Developing Countries To date, over 11,000 health workers in Nigeria have completed our course on basic, life-saving newborn care. ACX funding was catalytic for helping us secure government approvals and complete an evaluation of the impact of our training on health workers' clinical practices. The evaluation shows that birth attendants provide better birth care after taking the course. We fed the evaluation results into an updated model, which suggests the program is 24 times more cost-effective than direct cash transfers (a widely recognized benchmark for cost-effectiveness). The program is likely to become even more cost-effective as we scale up. https://healthlearn.org/blog/updated-impact-model 55: Smartphone Pupillometry To Diagnose Neurological Conditions We have continued to expand our work in the smartphone pupillometry space and the development of our application, PupilScreen (https://www.apertur.ai/). We have expanded our pilot/research program to include new sites across the United States (Missouri, New Jersey, Kentucky, USAC racing, PitFit driver performance training in Indiana) and the world (Nepal, Taiwan, South Africa). We continue to publish at the leading edge of the pupillometry literature as well looking at concussion (https://neuro.jmir.org/2024/1/e58398 and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39682632/), cerebral vasospasm (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39128501/), and stroke (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39674431/ and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39561861/). Currently, we are raising a $3 million seed round via a SAFE to fund the expansion of our work into the hands of healthcare workers and the general public. We will first focus on traumatic brain injury for clinical use and develop a neuro-monitoring wellness application utilizing our technology for the general public. They add: “We would welcome connections to anyone that you think might be interested in supporting our work further by investing in our $3M seed round of funding.” 56: Mike Saint-Antoine’s Biology Tutorial Videos Since getting the grant, I've continued to make Youtube tutorials as planned. One series that I'm especially proud of is about how to make a neural network in the Julia programming language completely from scratch, with no imports, up to the point of being able to solve MNIST (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWVKUEZ25V97tNULapu07DhWv6_W4NfpE). Also, a college student in Pakistan came across my videos and invited me to give a virtual Zoom-lecture to her department, so I ended up teaching a 6-hour "Python-for-Biologists" workshop to more than a hundred college students in Pakistan over Zoom. So that was pretty awesome. Also, lately I've been teaching some in-person classes too, mostly at Fractal University in NYC, and I also recently organized a day-long, in-person Beginner Python class for people in my local area (Philly suburbs) who wanted to learn some basic programming. I'm having a lot of fun with this project, and am grateful to Scott and the grant funders for their generosity! 57: Conceptual Boundaries Workshop On AI Safety The workshop was completed successfully; you can read a writeup here. 58: Apart Research To Incubate AI Safety Scientists No update received, but they have a public website, and you can see their impact metrics here. They seem to be in urgent need of more funding. 59: Primer On How To Achieve Political Change No update received and I can’t find anything about this. 60: Research IVF Clinic Success Rates We've built a predictive model that estimates the odds of having a child at different IVF clinics across the country while controlling for factors like patient age and infertility differences that can falsely make some clinics look better than others. We found that an average patient can increase their odds of having a kid by 43% just by going to a top 10% clinic. Patients unlucky enough to go to a bottom 10% clinic will reduce their odds of having a kid by 40%. Next month, we're adding several more clinics, 2023 data, additional procedural controls, and donor/gestational carrier models, which should push our accuracy beyond state-of-the-art models in this space and better isolate clinic impact on patient outcomes. We've launched ivf.clinic, a website where patients can access personalized IVF reports and browse our clinic rankings (though we're still squashing some bugs). Currently, we're expanding our research to include comprehensive insurance coverage and pricing data across clinics nationwide. If anyone has insights on automating the collection of IVF clinic pricing information, I'd love to hear from you at scelarek@gmail.com. 61: Replicate Study On Brain Wave Synchronization For Speeding Learning We have acquired and configured the OpenBCI UltraCortex Mark IV 8-channel EEG headset and a clinical-grade Biosemi 32-channel EEG system. We’ve implemented the required components for the experimental pipeline (computing alpha from EEG, flashing bright white light, presenting stimulus images). We are currently putting them together into a single system that we’ll use to collect the data from several participants. We are aiming to gather data on several participants in late June / early July and complete the pilot of the replication in July 2025. If you’d like to be a participant in the study, [they might announce a link once they have it]. 62: Advocate Repeal Of Interstate Runaway Compact No update received and I can’t find anything about this. 63: Animal Welfare (Especially Fish) In Turkiye Future For Fish asks companies to sign up to FFF's fish welfare commitment, which requires producers to certify their facilities and enforce specific standards for stocking density and harvest. Luckyfish, İlknak, Divan (35 restaurants, 17 hotels) and NG Hotels (5 hotels) have signed and published FFF's fish welfare commitment with İlknak publishing the commitment on their website. Kılıç published its first sustainability report detailing fish welfare policies, including enforcing a maximum stocking density of 10 kg/m³ and confirmation of electrical stunning practices. Longer version with some caveats: https://manifund.org/projects/improving-fish-w From the longer document, these commitments involve things like reducing overcrowding, or stunning fish before killing them. Over 30 million fish were affected just from their single largest commitment, and they say 100 fish are helped per dollar spent. 64: More Georgism Advocacy Lars and Will used the 2021 grant to co-found ValueBase. Will remained with the company, and Lars left to do advocacy work at the Center For Land Economics. Here’s their summary of how things are going: [Our] organization transitioned leadership with Greg Miller, a former Program Analyst at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Lars Doucet, author of Land is A Big Deal and Co-Founder of Valuebase, working full time and Joe Caissie stepping aside. This transition happened naturally as the next career transition for each respective person. Since then, progress has been made on pushing forward legislation. Maryland had two bills introduced to give Baltimore and counties the ability to enact split-rate taxes. One of the bills passed the state senate and would allow Baltimore to enact land value taxes within one mile of rail corridors–this contains 50% of Baltimore’s land value. However, the legislative session ended. We expect the bill to revive next session. The Center for Land Economics has been actively working to help efforts to get this bill passed the line. At the same time, we have uncovered systematic undervaluing of vacant land in assessments. We are writing a report on the assessment issues in Maryland with actionable steps to resolve them.
Inline links: Codebuff, website, Substack, survives, a public Substack, in Rwanda, Growth Summit, Stanford Social Innovation Review, ProMarket, Global Prosperity Institute, Saharon, this page, eadbatteries.substack.com, here, here, a post profiling the Far Out Initiative here, https://tornyol.com, a public website, https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/67e4cde76dde43c9084d88b7, https://blueprintbiosecurity.org/introducing-project-air/, our way, connect them directly to me, www.Spartacus.app, X, Substack, here, https://www.goodancestors.org.au/ai-safety, https://www.australiansforaisafety.com.au/, https://www.aul.city/blog/reflecting-on-africa-urban-lab-s-inaugural-year-2024-highlights, https://healthlearn.org/blog/updated-impact-model, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWVKUEZ25V97tNULapu07DhWv6_W4NfpE, here, public website, here, in urgent need, https://manifund.org/projects/improving-fish-w
Elan Corp.1 mentions across 1 issues

Elan Corp. is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 11, 2025 and July 11, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Athena Neurosciences, ... was acquired by Elan Corp. for $638 million". It most often appears alongside aducanumab, Alzheimer’s, Alzheimer’s Disease.

Reference entry
Elan Corp.
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
July 11, 2025
Last seen
July 11, 2025
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Your Review: Of Mice, Mechanisms, and Dementia
July 11, 2025 · Original source
Within a year, Athena Neurosciences, where Games and his colleagues worked, was acquired by Elan Corp. for $638 million. In the press release, Elan declared the acquisition “an opportunity to capitalize on an important therapeutic niche,” combining Athena’s “leading Alzheimer’s program” with Elan’s drug development pipeline. The PDAPP mouse had transformed from laboratory marvel to the cornerstone of a billion-dollar strategy. The industry followed. Pharmaceutical giants, biotech startups, research foundations—all placed their bets on amyloid.
One by one, those bets failed. By the time Elan collapsed in 2013, it had sponsored four failed Alzheimer’s drugs, hemorrhaging more than $2 billion in the process. Some trials caused patients significant harm.
Elks1 mentions across 1 issues

Elks is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 11, 2024 and July 11, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "The simpler versions sound sort of like the mutual aid societies and fraternities of the 19th and 20th century - Elks, Rotaries, Freemasons, etc". It most often appears alongside Americans, Backscratchers Club, Backscratchers Clubs.

Reference entry
Elks
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
July 11, 2024
Last seen
July 11, 2024
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Lifeboat Games And Backscratchers Clubs
July 11, 2024 · Original source
Probably they need to spend a bit of time helping orphans or at least appearing to do so, or they lose their fig leaf. In the end, they take over the world. This is obvious, right? If the lifeboat games sound like racism and nationalism, what do the backscratchers’ clubs sound like? The simpler versions sound sort of like the mutual aid societies and fraternities of the 19th and 20th century - Elks, Rotaries, Freemasons, etc. The more complicated versions sound like cults, religions, and ideologies. Obviously one reason movements exist is to achieve their stated goal. In The Ideology Is Not The Movement, I talked about a second reason - as a social sorting device. But a third reason - linked to the second - is as cover for a backscratchers club. III. Orphan Supporters After the Orphan Support Club take over the world, the remaining castaways are dispirited - maybe they’ve missed their chance to get ahead through weird social engineering schemes. Still, after a while they manage to make the best of their situations. Greg was a third-rate academic at a low-ranked school. His only advantage was that, through his friendship with Frank, he caught wind of the Orphan Support Club’s growing power a little faster than everyone else. He toned down his normal teaching and research and started aggressively advocating for orphans, accusing the administration and all his office-politics rivals of not taking their problems seriously enough. Bad-mouthing your bosses usually ends poorly. But the local newspaper had just been taken over by OSC members, and they wrote several articles on how the town’s college was infested with orphan-hating Scrooges, and Greg was the only professor bold enough to stand up to them. And the local City Council had also just turned OSC, and they called in the college administrators and said they wouldn’t get the city funding they wanted unless they changed their orphan-hating ways. And lots of students were OSC too now, and they threatened to switch colleges unless Greg was taken more seriously. Eventually the college administration folded, gave Greg a promotion, and added him to the Board of Trustees - after which everyone stopped bothering them and they became popular again. Greg remembered the debt he owed, so he spent the rest of his career writing bogus papers demonstrating that orphans were more likely to starve in counties that didn’t have OSC advocates in local government, or in cities that didn’t have OSC journalists in the local newspaper. Next time the OSC City Council members were in a close election, or the OSC newspaper bosses were involved in office politics, they could point to Greg’s studies to demonstrate their worthiness. It was a weird and indirect kind of backscratching - but backscratching it was. Heather worked at a local nonprofit. She also wished she could get ahead in office politics, but by this point everyone for miles around was an OSC supporter and she couldn’t succeed on that basis alone. One night she had dinner with her old friend Erica. “Daniel had this problem too,” Erica said. “He founded the original Backscratchers Club, way back when, but everyone joined it instantly and there was no way to use it to get ahead. My big innovation was adding some ridiculous bylaws that made it costly to get into. That way, only the people who were most committed would join, and we could outcompete everyone else. You should figure out some form of orphan advocacy that works like that.” The next day, Heather announced that she had figured out a new and important way to support orphans. You could no longer use the word “orphan” metaphorically, to talk about orphan drugs or orphaned ideas; this spiritually harmed real orphans. She engaged in publicity stunts against any writers who spoke this way. About half of people couldn’t pivot to the new way of using language, or thought it was beneath their honor to dignify this with a response. But the other half - aware that their status relied on being members in good standing of OSC, and aware that any slip in their perceived level of orphan support could ruin their careers - and equally aware that if they seemed to be better OSC members than others, it might give them a step up - enthusiastically joined Heather’s bandwagon. There was a brief internal struggle, which Heather won. She started a new nonprofit to remove anti-orphan terms from language, and remained powerful and respected to the end of her days. Iolanthe jealously watched Heather’s success, and wanted to do something similar. She announced that she was adopting an orphan, and she believed everyone else should adopt one too. If everyone adopted an orphan, the orphan crisis would be over in no time. Here’s another case where it’s not obvious to me what happens: Many other people adopt orphans too. Society enters a new golden age where no child is abandoned, and Iolanthe is celebrated as a hero.
Inline links: The Ideology Is Not The Movement
Elks club1 mentions across 1 issues

Elks club is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 31, 2025 and December 31, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "You are members of a church, the Elks club, you volunteer at local events, etc"; "he definitely didn't have the time or money for the Elks club or volunteering". It most often appears alongside 1955, 4chan, AARP.

Reference entry
Elks club
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
December 31, 2025
Last seen
December 31, 2025
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Highlights From The Comments On Vibecession
December 31, 2025 · Original source
You have kids, in fact, FIVE of them, the wonderful bundles of joy! You own your own business. You get to work in-person, providing value to real people. Your neighbors talk to each other. Neighborhood kids play in the street. Civic society is strong: you are members of a church, the Elks club, you volunteer at local events, etc. You live near extended family. With no internet, you only compare your situation to your immediate neighbors. The economy appears to be growing and prospects for the future look good.
You are definitely taking an extreme "paint a rosy picture" view here. My grandfather rarely saw his kids. He never made it to a single baseball game or activity. I have worked enough customer service jobs to know how utterly draining they are, and I've known enough people who owned their own business to know how brutal that can be. My grandfather was a member of a church (which played a big part in his life; kids went to Catholic school, etc), but he definitely didn't have the time or money for the Elks club or volunteering.
ELN1 mentions across 1 issues

ELN is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 21, 2021 and April 21, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Marxist-Leninist ELN guerrillas, the Elenos". It most often appears alongside Andes Mountains, Antiochan subgroup, Argentina.

Reference entry
ELN
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
April 21, 2021
Last seen
April 21, 2021
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No, Really, Why Are So Many Christians In Colombia Converting To Orthodox Judaism?
April 21, 2021 · Original source
On the night of April 28, 2002, as [pastor] Juan Carlos was returning to Bello from a spiritual retreat, the Marxist-Leninist ELN guerrillas, the Elenos, kidnapped him. After a month of being moved around the jungle, sleeping in the rain, and eating one serving of rice a day, he was released. He emerged emaciated and infected with leishmaniasis, a parasitic disease that produces ugly skin ulcers.
His father had given the Elenos everything he had — $50,000. The payment depleted the family’s savings, but when questioned by journalists, Juan Carlos claimed, “Not a single peso was paid for my freedom.” Extortive kidnappings by guerrillas were a common feature of Colombian life — there had been 3,700 kidnappings in 2000 alone — and they were a sensitive political issue. The police had demanded that Juan Carlos not reveal that his father had paid ransom. Instead, he should say that he had converted his captors to Christianity, presenting them a Bible in exchange for his release.
Juan Carlos went along. “Sometimes when I was reading the Bible to myself, they would ask me to read aloud so that they could all hear,” he told journalists. The lie turned him into a celebrity. He had become the pastor who had converted the anti-religion Elenos. But as he toured churches telling the story of his release, he began to feel guilty. “People were being deceived, lied to, manipulated,” he says. He felt ashamed about what he had put his family through as well. By abandoning college and becoming a pastor, he had shattered his father’s dream of creating a small agricultural business together. Now he had cost his father every cent he had saved. He was living off other people’s illusions. What was he doing in his own church? He became acutely aware of how Pentecostalism — how he — exploited the parishioners, passing off psychological and emotional manipulation as divine intervention. His faith was untouched, but he needed to find a new way of connecting with God.
Elon’s Boring Company1 mentions across 1 issues

Elon’s Boring Company is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 18, 2024 and April 18, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Elon’s Boring Company has only dug about 3 miles of tunnel in its whole corporate existence"; "Elon’s Boring Company has only dug about 3 miles of tunnel". It most often appears alongside Africa, AI Circle, Bay Area.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
April 18, 2024
Last seen
April 18, 2024
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Ye Olde Bay Area House Party
April 18, 2024 · Original source
“I worry this is kind of offensive,” he says, furtively looking around to make sure nobody else can hear. “But I was reading this article about how Hamas dug 350 miles of tunnels under Gaza. Meanwhile, Elon’s Boring Company has only dug about 3 miles of tunnel in its whole corporate existence. So I’m thinking, maybe we forget about the ground sloths and try to poach Hamas’ people. It should be pretty easy; the smart ones have got to be looking for new jobs around now. We change the name to something more culturally appropriate like The Buraj Company. Then we’re back in business!”
Inline links: this article
Elon’s Twitter1 mentions across 1 issues

Elon’s Twitter is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 09, 2022 and December 09, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Will Elon’s Twitter prove the uselessness of the professional managerial class?". It most often appears alongside 417th Marquess of Cornwallshireshire, ACX, ACX.

Reference entry
Elon’s Twitter
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
December 09, 2022
Last seen
December 09, 2022
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Highlights From The Comments On Bobos In Paradise
December 09, 2022 · Original source
Will Elon’s Twitter prove the uselessness of the professional managerial class? (24 replies)
Inline links: Will Elon’s Twitter prove the uselessness of the professional managerial class?
[Most importantly], public displays of family values - If you are smart, wealthy and conscientious enough, you can play the field, settle down late, cheat on your wife, drink a bit too much, and still catch yourself in time to avoid long-term damage. Poor, low-G, high-time-preference people cannot do this. A caring aristocrat will put on a show of moral fibre for the benefit of his charges. Mark Roulo writes: I'll toss this out: Aristocrats grow up expecting that (a) they will be in charge and (b) that they will pass this on to their kids. Part (b) provides a longer perspective than a pure meritocracy where you hope (but, realistically, don't expect ...) your kids to have similar status and power. As folks think shorter term there is less incentive for maintaining the structures rather than benefiting from them and not worrying about whether they will be around in 50 years. Ruet Caelum writes: Another thought I had about the meritocracy debate point is how Brooks' thesis may intersect with the elite overproduction hypothesis. The old aristocracy created arbitrary constraints on the number of elites our country produced. Meritocracy flung the doors open. This is good insofar as it means that more competent people may replace the "arrogant boors who spent most of their energy conspicuously consuming and yachting," but perhaps the resulting culture of intra-elite competition and resentment ends up undermining elite institutions in ways that negate those benefits. I am less sure about this one. “Elite overproduction” means there are more aspiring elites than elite positions. But what is an “aspiring elite”? In a hereditary aristocracy, it’s “children of the last set of elites”; depending on reproduction rate, that can either be many people (bad) or few people (good). In a meritocracy, it’s less clear. Smart people? Graduates of top colleges? But both of these are meaningless - how smart? How top? You would expect that people would eventually become well calibrated, and think “I’m in the top 5% but not top 1% for intelligence/college selectivity, so I can expect a job of X level of eliteness, but not Y level” and in expectation be right. I’m not sure why that hasn’t happened. My guess is that it would equilibrate if it was stable for a while, but many people’s opportunities have been going down compared to their parents’ because of a combination of decreased economic growth, political dysfunction, affirmative action, and rising equality of opportunity. Kade U writes: Re: the question of *why* the old aristocrats might have been good, I can think of couple reasons. Historically, the successful long-lived republics have all basically been oligarchies controlled by ancient, wealthy families that more or less controlled all the levers of power. You're rich and powerful in the Republic because of what your family represents, and similarly you need to live up to the family name. Also, you're a legitimately rich guy who owns a lot of stuff, not just a particularly well-compensated employee, so you generally want rules that help you build stuff and not rules that stop you from building stuff. Meanwhile, you might also be tempted to set up a rent extraction operation via regulatory capture but the other families would rather you not do that because they are all also your business competitors in addition to being your political rivals. Cutthroat meritocratic bureaucracy is more of a mainstay of imperial administrations. The levers of power are held by the emperor's well-compensated, well-educated employees. Those employees have a lot of power in that they make a lot of important decisions, but they are really just custodians of someone else's authority, they have no stake in anything except looking good *within* the system. This works really well if your goal is basically to just execute the emperor's will, since all the employee-administrators will compete with each other to execute it best. But they don't have competing self-interests that make them interested in a pro-business, pro-investment climate. And without a single emperor to hand down the goal of the state, the administrators basically just pick up their cues from whatever they think will increase their social standing within the bureaucracy itself. The nascent tech takeover was basically just an attempt to combine these two ideas by having wealthy, business-interested meritocrats, but it turns out that they do a better job combining the flaws of both systems than they do combining their positives. I would love to see a scholarly, well-thought out comparison between the Imperial Chinese meritocratic system and our own (or else a discussion of why this is a false analogy and wouldn’t illuminate anything). 4. Other Interesting Comments GalenLK on the WASP aristocracy: I don't really buy the premise of the book, but I did wander in to this social circle once by accident in my youth. A friend of mine had by weird historical contingency ended up on one of their soccer youth teams, and got invited along to the parties every year by fiat. I was her plus one. My overwhelming impression was of basically nice (but money-obsessed) noodleheads. During the secret santa (it was Christmas), gift values were all over the map because they didn't have a sense of the difference between $20 and $200, and something like a third of the gifts were a bottle of lemoncello for some reason? Only one or two were employed in a traditional sense, and those were sinecures- part-time work that paid $400,000 a year, to 'tide them over' I think was the phrase; they were embarrassed about it. Another one cornered me pretty early on and started asking a bunch of unusual questions about my personal life, not just where I went to college or what my major was, but odd little details. I was rescued by my date who walked up and said (to both of us), "she's trying to figure out whether you're old money or new money." I just said, "Oh! I am not money." And then we had a little laugh about it and went back to a normal and mutually respectful conversation. They were perfectly nice, really, but it was eye-opening how much it was clearly a social network first, where money just happened to flow very freely and was a primary topic of conversation; it was absolutely a 'class' barrier that I'd crossed, in the old-fashioned sense. I wasn't there nearly long enough to get a bead on the deeper mythologies of the set, but they definitely had a parallel understanding of money that made 'earning' it worse, not better. They were also pretty tryhard about being 'eccentric' and quirky, I guess because it was taboo to talk about accomplishments so they needed something else to talk about over dinner, and the ones winning the game were the ones who made the money seem like it just sort of rained down on them from the clouds. In retrospect, the most interesting thing about it is that all of their wealth depended on internal and inward-facing connections to this group, or I guess being part of inherited/family wealth from it, and nothing depended on any reputation or actions outside of it; they lived on investment income and such, but hired other people to make the investments. So it seems like a sort of socioeconomic 'dark matter' where I have no idea how many people live like this or how much wealth overall they possess. It was just a few dozen at the party, anyway. I'm not sure it even *matters*; I think in economic terms, their function was mostly to be the name at the top of large currency reservoirs being exploited by the financial industry. Whether they're shrinking as a group or holding on in to the 21st century, I have no idea, and I can't imagine there being any broader social consequences either way. Steve Sailer thinks I’m mostly wrong about architecture (and maybe by implication other things?) Architecture: I did a popular long Twitter thread on the change in architecture for city halls before and after 1945, comparing apples to apples: e.g., San Diego's various city halls. Styles were already changing in the 1930s. E.g., San Diego's 19th Century city hall was ornate, but its 1938 city hall was relatively streamlined, but still elegant and nicely detailed. It's 1964 city hall looks like worker housing in Sao Paulo, judging from the lone picture of it I could find online (unlike the many pictures of the two previous city halls. One thing to note: coal-powered cities were so sooty that old buildings had gone dark and ugly and it seemed easier to just tear them down and put up something made of glass and steel. But in 1961, De Gaulle's culture minister Andre Malraux started having Paris's grand old buildings washed, with spectacular results. And also: A late friend of mine taught history at Yale when Yale junked it's Jewish quota for the class entering in the fall of 1965 (a decade behind Harvard). He said even being the grandson of Senator wouldn't have gotten George W. Bush in in 1965 rather than 1964. The intellectual atmosphere of the campus changed immediately in 1965, became much more electric, he recalled. Guy Downs writes: I think an alternative explanation for how we've ended up where we're currently at is that people started inheriting money. This, I think, is the dark matter of the US economy- we know it's everywhere, but nobody can point to it. And I'm not talking about eight figure windfalls coming down from dead shipping scions; I'm talking about the kind of money you'd expect to see run through a family if, since WW II, each generation kept putting away low-mid six figures. You get to the end of the 20th century, and with compounding interest you've suddenly got a lot of people tripping into low seven figure bonanzas when their parents die. So- imagine you're a reasonably self-aware, college educated Democrat, both you and your spouse have solid-but-not-great jobs, and you're making $180k-$210k a year gross. That's not bad, but that does NOT cover: 1) The mortgage on a $450k house. 2) Payments/insurance on two Infinity crossovers. 3) Club sports fees for the two kids. 4) Annual vacations that require air travel. 5) College expenses when the kids get out of high school... And so on. Yet there are millions of Americans who are living that life on these kinds of incomes. So where's the money coming from? And, to the point of this book review, how would coming into that money affect your worldview? Again, assuming the beneficiary is reasonably self-aware, we might expect them to carry some vague sense of guilt and shame at having their lifestyles-- in middle age, no less-- subsidized by monies that they did not year. Which, in turn, could lead to...... 1) a lot of mumbling about 'privilege' (while doing nothing tangible to mitigate its cultural/economic influence),. 2) the pursuit of class signifiers which aren't 'too' grotesque, but which still relay the appropriate message. 3) a desire to use education and 'intellect', as opposed to wealth, as a primary status signifier (since we have both, but only the former was earned) 4) an insistence of minimizing the importance of personal agency in life outcomes (since you 'can't be blamed' for living a life that you haven't really earned) And so on. We talk a lot about the basically uninterrupted spell of economic progress that we've seen since the post-war years, but not (it seems to me) much about how that generational accrual of wealth has affected social standings. My feeling is that its probably driven more of our social outcomes than the people who think the most about these kinds of issues would like to admit. I can’t see more than the faint outline of how Guy is connecting this to Bobos, but I agree that it’s weird. For upper middle class people, inheriting their parents’ money could be the biggest financial event of their lives, maybe bringing them from paycheck-to-paycheck to having six-to-seven figures in the bank, and I never hear anyone talk about it. Probably this is some combination of: Nobody wants to sound like the kind of heartless jerk who is thinking about the upside of their parents’ deaths.
Inline links: writes, writes, writes, on the WASP aristocracy, thinks I’m mostly wrong, writes
Elwood Organic Dog Meat1 mentions across 1 issues

Elwood Organic Dog Meat is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 28, 2024 and June 28, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "I imagine Scully gets a kick out of what the folks at Elwood Organic Dog Meat are doing". It most often appears alongside 2023 special, ACX grant winners, African Gray Parrot.

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Your Book Review: Dominion
June 28, 2024 · Original source
Condemn those who raise cats and dogs for food in other countries while having no problem with the farming of cows and chickens in America. (I imagine Scully gets a kick out of what the folks at Elwood Organic Dog Meat are doing.)
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EMA is a recurring organization 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 "showed it to teams at FDA / EMA". It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, Aatu Koskensilta, acanthamoeba keratitis.

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ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
June 18, 2025 · Original source
Our plan was to build an auto-verifier for clinical trial designs, hoping to speed up part of the FDA review process for complex trials. Our small team got funding from the FTX Future Fund, and we formed a PBC. We improved our method's computational efficiency by ~7 orders of magnitude, bringing it into the range of plausible usefulness. We wrote open-source software and a paper and showed it to teams at FDA / EMA. They encouraged us to start off using it as a supplementary analysis in submissions ...
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EMCDDA1 mentions across 1 issues

EMCDDA is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 23, 2022 and June 23, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "They include a link to EMCDDA, the EU organization charged with monitoring these things". It most often appears alongside 1978, 2016 essay, A Resounding Success Or Disastrous Failure: Re-examining The Interpretation Of Evidence On The Portuguese Decriminalisation Of Illicit Drugs.

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Book Review: San Fransicko
June 23, 2022 · Original source
Results of a survey at one of SF’s new Navigation Centers at why their clients refused to go to normal shelters. But even the homeless people who do want to go to shelters mostly can’t get in. This app gives the current status of San Francisco’s homeless shelter waitlist. If you applied today, there would be 900 people ahead of you in line for one of the city’s 1500 - 2500 shelter beds. The app says that the median wait time is 826 days. So however many homeless people don’t want to go to shelters, we’re not building enough shelters to serve the ones who do. Why not? Shellenberger again: In the spring of 2021, Friedenbach published an op-ed opposing a proposal considered by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to create, within eighteen months, sufficient homeless shelters and outdoor “Safe Sleeping Sites” for all of the city’s unsheltered homeless. “One can simply take a look to New York City,” she wrote. “Their department spends about $1.3 billion dollars of its budget on providing shelter for their unhoused population while thousands remain on the street. . . . As a result, New York has a higher rate of homelessness than San Francisco.” Housing First advocate Margot Kushel of the University of California, San Francisco agreed. “The problem with New York—and I spend a lot of time with people working in the system in New York—is that they spend an estimated $30,000 for each person per year to keep them in shelter. That’s not what we want to do. Because if you create the shelter and you don’t create the housing, then people are just in shelter forever.” Housing First advocates oppose shelter in Los Angeles. “Why haven’t we solved homelessness?” asked Housing First creator Sam Tsemberis. “Because [Los Angeles mayor] Eric Garcetti [has] Andy Bales [saying,] ‘You need emergency housing.’ ‘These people need to be cleaned up.’ ‘They need to be sober.’ ‘They need Jesus before they’ll be ready for housing.’ I said, ‘People should be housed and then maybe they’ll get sobriety and Jesus and the rest.’ We’re definitely on polar opposites of the whole thing.” Advocates for the homeless at the national level similarly oppose more shelters. “I don’t agree that we should be building more transitional housing,” said the head of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. […] In other words, the reason that there are so many homeless people on the streets in San Francisco is that both progressive and moderate Democratic elected officials, and the city’s most influential homelessness experts and advocates, have for two decades opposed building sufficient shelters. And that is unlikely to change even after San Francisco starts spending hundreds of millions more per year on the problem and might even get worse. This basically seems true. I found this webpage of a former SF Supervisor candidate a helpful corroborating source. He was running on a platform of “maybe we should build some homeless shelters”. He lost. You can also find a bunch of webpages by the sorts of people Shellenberger is complaining about, for example this site: Sup[ervisor] Rafael Mandelman today pushed his new legislation that would require the city to offer at least temporary shelter to everyone living on the streets, a step that some say would lead to more homeless sweeps and do nothing to create permanently affordable housing . . . [our] Coalition has argued for years that the solution to homelessness is housing—not temporary shelter, which may never lead to housing. The ex-supervisor candidate gives some helpful numbers: permanent housing costs about $600,000 per person housed. Shelters cost between $20,000 and $30,000 per person housed. So SF could build enough shelters to clear its waitlist for about $30 million. More recently, SF has tried a sort of compromise, opening “deluxe” shelters called Navigation Centers which avoid some of the problems of regular shelters. They also cost more than twice as much, and the city has only created about 300 beds. Also, the people in regular shelters are angry, because being in a regular shelter disqualifies you from getting into a (much better) Navigation Center. Some of them are considering leaving their shelter, going back on the streets, then waiting however many months or years it takes to get a Navigation Center bed instead. I’m not at all sure of these numbers, but it looks like of SF’s ~7,000 homeless, about 2,000 are in shelters already, and 1,000 are on the shelter waitlist. I don’t know if the remaining 4,000 have made a specific commitment not to go to shelters, or just have given up on the waitlist process. My conclusion: agree with San Fransicko about the role of progressive activists, but I think it overemphasizes the role of wanting to use drugs in why homeless people themselves sometimes avoid shelters, and underemphasizes the many other problems with them. Claim 5: Drug Decriminalization Isn’t Working California legalized marijuana in 2016. Shellenberger says that San Francisco’s commitment to drugs has gone beyond that: it has effectively decriminalized opioids, cocaine, and the rest. Any attempt to lessen use of these drugs is attacked as “stigmatizing”; instead, government policy centers around providing addicts with needles and other drug paraphernalia under the guise of “harm reduction”. Shellenberger hits all the right beats here. Like many people, he tries to undo the damage done by The New Jim Crow, a book which convinced millions of people that mass incarceration was driven by a racist War On Drugs. In fact, less than a fifth of prisoners are in for drug-related crimes. And when the government was first debating the War on Drugs and mass incarceration, black leaders were among the strongest proponents of both. The talking point at the time - among everyone from black Congressional leaders to black churches - was that the government’s failure to crack down on drug use was racist, borne of them not caring about predominantly black drug victims. And while we’ve been patting ourselves on the back about how enlightened we are for ending the drug war: Drug overdoses are today the number one cause of accidental death in the United States as a result of America’s historic addiction and overdose epidemic. Overdose deaths rose from 17,415 in 2000 to 93,330 in 2020, a 536 percent increase.Significantly more people die of drug overdoses today than of homicide (13,927 in 2019) or car accidents (36,096 in 2019). […] There are about twenty-five thousand injection drug users in San Francisco, a number 50 percent larger than the number of students enrolled in the city’s fifteen public high schools. San Francisco gives away more needles to drug users, six million per year, than New York City, despite having one-tenth the population. The part of this chapter that stood out to me as most worth looking into deeper was the section on Portugal: For decades, harm reduction and decriminalization advocates have pointed to Portugal as a model, noting that it decriminalized drugs and expanded drug treatment. In 2013, Portugal’s drug-induced death rate was sixty-six times less than that of the United States. The number of people in treatment increased by 60 percent between 1998 and 2011, with three-quarters receiving an opioid substitute like methadone or Suboxone, the brand name of buprenorphine. Drug use among 15- to 24-year-olds actually declined after decriminalization. “All drugs have been legalized,” explained Monique Tula, executive director of the Harm Reduction Coalition. “Their focus is on giving people tools, like job apprenticeships, and the means to support themselves.” […] [But Portugal] never legalized drugs. It only decriminalized them, reducing criminal penalties but maintaining prohibition. Drug dealers were still sent to prison even after the 2001 decriminalization. And Portugal does not let people addicted to hard drugs with behavioral disorders off the hook like progressive West Coast cities have done. It’s true that Portugal massively expanded drug treatment, but people are still arrested and fined for possession of heroin, meth, and other hard drugs. And drug users are typically sent to a regionally administered “Commissions for the Dissuasion of Drug Addiction,” composed of a social worker, lawyer, and doctor who encourage, push, and coerce drug treatment. And decriminalization doesn’t end drug violence. “Even if trafficking enforcement decreased, like it did in Portugal,” said criminologist John Pfaff, “illegal drug markets would still be forced to rely on violence to resolve disputes.” Indeed, prostitution and violence are ever-present in the open-air drug scenes in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle. “We are seeing behaviors from our guests that I’ve never seen in thirty-three years,” said Rev. Andy Bales, who runs the largest homeless shelter on Skid Row in Los Angeles. “They are so bizarre and different that I don’t even feel right describing the behaviors. It’s extreme violence of an extreme sexual nature.” People are not dying from drug overdose deaths in San Francisco because they’re being arrested. They’re dying because they aren’t being arrested. Decriminalization reduces prices by lowering production and distribution costs, which increases use. This was also the case for alcohol consumption. It increased after prohibition ended in the United States. Even in Portugal, drug overdose deaths and overall drug use rose after decriminalization. I was most surprised by the claim that Portuguese overdose deaths rose after decriminalization. Uncharacteristically, San Fransicko doesn’t give a citation for it, but we can try to retrace its reasoning. Decriminalization proponents tend to point to these numbers, helpfully converted to per 100,000 population and graphed here: But an anti-drug Australian think tank argues that the peak in 2001 is made up: Claims that there were more than 75 drug-related deaths in 2001 which more than halved to 34 deaths in 2002 use a figure for 2001 for which there is no substantiation. Official drug-related deaths for Portugal, taken from the latest 2018 EMCDDA Statistical Bulletin are copied below. Notice that there is no such figure recorded for 2001. They include a link to EMCDDA, the EU organization charged with monitoring these things. The link contains two datasets, both of which seem to be measuring the same thing but getting different results. One dataset starts in 2002, the other in 2008. I don’t know what the difference here is, but they’re right that neither includes 2001. If you ignore the pre-2002 data, the graph looks like this: They say “opiate”, but AFAICT these numbers are actually about all drugs. But the proponents link to the updated 2020 version of the same website, which all of a sudden does have data from 2001 and before. I don’t know why EMCDDA can’t make up its mind, but I think the Australians are wrong and the original graph is fine. On the other hand, does it really matter? Both of these show drug deaths decreasing until 2005, then going up and down a bit, then going back up again starting in 2011. I think a reasonable interpretation would be that decriminalization in Portugal did decrease overdose deaths a bit, and then they started rising again from that low baseline around the same time other European countries saw rising overdose deaths. I would also accept “these are pretty small effects and we shouldn’t ascribe any significance to them”. But San Fransicko’s claim - that overdose deaths increased after the reform - seems false. The only way I can see justifying it is taking the second graph - the one that wrongly claims there is no pre-2002 data - and then attributing the fact that twelve years after the reform lowered deaths, deaths finally rose above the pre-reform level to be the fault of the reform. This is like saying “people claim the Black Plague killed a lot of Europeans, but the European population actually rose after the Plague”, which is true in the sense that it was above its pre-Plague max by like 1600 or whatever. What about overall drug use? Here I recommend A Resounding Success Or Disastrous Failure: Re-examining The Interpretation Of Evidence On The Portuguese Decriminalisation Of Illicit Drugs, which is on exactly this topic of how people keep selectively quoting results from Portugal to prove their point. It argues that drug use is inherently hard to measure. There are four different Portuguese datasets for the time at issue, lots of different drugs, lots of different age/gender combinations, and lots of different ways of measuring drugs (did you use drugs in the past month? the past year? your lifetime?) It’s easy to tell a story of how past-month cocaine use skyrocketed among 14-29 year old males according to X source, or how lifetime marijuana use fell in high school-age women according to Y. The main trick that opponents use is measuring lifetime drug use. Portugal is a very conservative country; drug use is pretty new and most of the older generation wasn’t involved. So as time goes on and more and more people try drugs but “un-trying” drugs isn’t a thing, the percent of the population who have tried drugs inevitably goes up. This definitely happened but isn’t a fair reflection of any specific reform. The authors find that in the past decade or so, there has been a bit more short-term experimentation with drugs, but less long-run use. They conclude: As shown in Figure 2, general population (aged 15–64) trends for recent and current drug use in Portugal indicate minimal if any changes between 2001 and 2007. Instead, rates of discontinuation of drug use (the proportion of the population that reported ever having used a drug but opting not to in recent years) increased, which reinforces that just as in the school populations, the growth in lifetime-reported use reflected predominantly short-term experimental use. Increases in recent and current drug use were more notable in some cohorts, particularly those aged 25 to 34 (albeit, with a maximum of 7% of any one cohort reporting recent use, absolute levels remained low). But as shown in Figure 3, recent and current drug use declined among those aged 15–24, the population who were most at risk of initiation and long-term engagement. The available evidence thus gives grounds for arguing that while there was some growth in the scale of drug use in post-reform Portugal, there was an overall positive net benefit for the Portuguese community. What about San Fransicko’s main point - that as the US has wound down the War on Drugs, drug overdose rates have sextupled? I think this is mostly not causal. I think the sextupling of overdoses is a combination of expansion in prescription opioid use, various forms of social decay making people less happy and therefore more likely to use drugs, and “improvements” in drug “technology” and the “supply chain” (eg production of fentanyl in China). I don’t know of any source that attempts to tease out the exact contribution of all of these things, but I would note that overdose deaths have risen the most in very conservative Midwestern states that haven’t walked back the drug war as much as California. Conclusion: As usual, I appreciate San Fransicko’s corrections to the prevailing narrative, but its own additions are dubious. Its claim that Portugal saw increased drug-related deaths seems false as far as I can tell. Its claim that it saw increased drug use depends on your definition, but is misleading and not the most natural way to sum up the evidence. Claim 6: San Francisco’s Soft-On-Crime Policies Led To Rising Crime Ten years ago, the news was full of stories about how some teenager stole a gumdrop and was sentenced to nine hundred billion years in jail. At some point, there was a genre shift to stories about how some hardened criminal murdered fifty people with an axe and the judge let him go with a warning because having jails felt racist. Source: Ed West, do note that this example is from the UK How suspicious should we be of each type of story? There will always be an extreme right tail of overly harsh sentences, and an extreme left tail of overly lenient ones. Were the 2000s really as draconian as they felt? Is the modern era really as pathetic? Or is it all just a function of who you read and what agenda they’re pushing? Shellenberger: During California governor Jerry Brown’s time in office, voters passed several reforms aimed at reducing the size of the prison population. In 2012, voters passed a change to the Three Strikes law so that the third strike imposes a life sentence only if the new felony was serious or violent. In addition to lowering punishments for drug possession, Proposition 47, which voters passed in 2014, redefined shoplifting, forgery, petty theft, and receiving stolen property as misdemeanors when the value in question does not exceed $950. In 2016, voters approved a proposition that shortened the time it took for some nonviolent offenders to be eligible for parole and which released nonviolent offenders into drug treatment and rehabilitation. Property crimes rose in San Francisco starting in 2012. Larceny, which is shoplifting and other petty theft, rose 50 percent, from roughly 3,000 incidents per 100,000 people in 2011 to about 4,500 in 2019. Property crimes as a whole, which include larceny, motor vehicle theft, and burglary, rose from 4,000 incidents per 100,000 people in 2011 to 5,500 in 2019. One study suggests that Proposition 47 increased the rate of auto theft 17 percent and the rate of larceny (non-auto property) theft 9 percent, but discerning between causation and correlation may not be possible. Upon taking office in January 2020, [famously soft-on-crime San Francisco district attorney Chesa] Boudin followed through on his campaign promises. Instead of prosecuting and incarcerating people for breaking car windows to steal money and other items from inside, Boudin proposed creating a $1.5 million fund to reimburse car owners. But there were over 25,000 car break-ins reported in 2019. If every break-in cost just $250 in repairs, the fund would need four times that amount. And what would prevent people from falsely claiming to have been robbed in order to get city money? […] Boudin opposed efforts by the mayor and the city attorney to prevent drug dealers who had already been arrested from entering the Tenderloin. “Until the city is serious about treating addiction and the root causes of drug use and selling,” said Boudin in a statement, “these recycled, punishment-focused approaches are unlikely to succeed at doing anything more than making headlines.” Home burglaries rose in early 2021 in San Francisco. Homeowners started posting on Twitter videos from their security cameras of people breaking into homes and garages. “When I first moved here we had a car break-in problem,” said Michael Solana, a writer who works for a venture capital fund. “Now we have a home invasion problem. These things are wearing on people.” Boudin attributed the rise of burglaries in San Francisco to the decline of tourism and “people in desperate economic circumstances.” Progressive supervisor Hillary Ronen agreed. “We know that [economic insecurity and inequality] is one of the root causes of property crimes specifically,” she said. But Tom Wolf and others argued that the robberies were, like the shoplifting, done by people seeking money to buy drugs and feed their addictions. “The drugstores have been shoplifted to death and that’s all because of drug use,” said Tom. “I know. I used to do the same thing when I was out there. That’s what you do. You ‘boost.’ And then you go and you sell your stuff down at UN Plaza,” an open-air drug scene. In a May 2021 city supervisors’ meeting, a representative from CVS called San Francisco “the epicenter of organized retail crime in the country” and claimed that 85 percent of the shoplifting is committed by organized theft rings. Police broke up one such ring in October 2020 and recovered $8 million of stolen merchandise. The problem goes beyond property crime. Boudin declined to prosecute two men who went on to kill people. One man had been repeatedly arrested for stealing cars, despite having just been released from prison earlier in the year, and appeared to be abusing meth. On New Year’s Eve, 2020, the man killed two people while driving intoxicated. Police found inside of his car a semiautomatic handgun and twenty-three grams of methamphetamine. On February 4, another intoxicated driver killed a pedestrian in a stolen car. The San Francisco police had arrested him in October 2020 for possessing a stolen car, a tool for stealing cars, and what appeared to be meth. Boudin chose not to pursue charges. In December, the California Highway Patrol arrested the man again for driving a stolen vehicle under the influence. Again he was not prosecuted. The accident victim, an immigrant from Kenya, and his wife had moved to San Francisco two weeks before the fatal crash. “I blame the DA,” said the widow of the victim. The suspect, she said, “was someone who was out in the public who shouldn’t have been in the public. It was completely avoidable.” Tom said he could feel the difference on the streets. “Drug dealing is unabated and it’s not one guy, it’s fifty guys dealing fentanyl and meth,” he said. “And it’s going unabated because the district attorney says, ‘These are the nonviolent, quality-of-life crimes,’ and ‘I’m not going to prosecute them.’” [..] District Attorney Boudin was offering weaker sentences than even defense attorneys were requesting, according to Vicki Westbrook of San Francisco. “There’s a defense attorney who said, ‘It used to be that I would argue for this deal in court with the DA but now I don’t say anything because the DA is going to offer me a deal better than what I would have suggested. Somebody shot up the street with an automatic weapon. The first offer was six months in jail or time served plus two years of probation or something. And then [the DA] said, “How about thirty days in jail?”’” Vicki laughed. “You really can do anything in San Francisco,” she said. “If you do get arrested, chances are you’re going to be out of jail in less than thirty days for damn near everything except maybe killing somebody and maybe even then, too. It’s hard to say at this point.” Taking each of these points individually: Proposition 47 There are two good big studies on the effects of Prop 47, one by Public Policy Institute and one by some UCI criminologists. The PPI study finds that the proposition increased theft and car break-ins by about 10%. The UCI study finds the same, but notes that under different assumptions the effects wouldn’t quite obtain statistical significance. This seems a bit too much like post hoc trying to get rid of an inconvenient effect, plus an effect on the border of statistical significance is different from positively finding no effect. I think a reasonable interpretation is that theft and car break-ins rose about 10% because of the proposition, just as Shellenberger says. Some pro-47 sites note that most states have some limit on how much you to have to shoplift before it’s a felony, and Prop 47 brought California closer to the national average, rather than turning it into an outlier. Chesa Boudin Chesa Boudin took office two months before the COVID pandemic began. Any attempt to separate the effect of Chesa Boudin from the effect of the pandemic is doomed. Shoplifting definitely plummeted when Boudin took office, but that’s because all the stores were closed. Murders definitely rose a little after Boudin took office, but that’s because that was also when the Black Lives Matter protests happened, which demoralized police and led to a so-far-permanent spike in murders nationwide. Percent of criminals caught definitely fell when Boudin took office, but that’s because various aspects of the justice system were closed for COVID (I will grudgingly entertain speculation that a further decrease in arrest rates from 2020 to 2021 may have been a genuine Boudin effect). In the absence of any real way to judge his performance, I think San Fransicko’s points about Boudin are plausible, though speculative. Shoplifting This one is terrible. There’s a surprisingly spirited debate here (some of you may have already read Applied Divinity Studies’ article). The debate is: everyone on the ground in San Francisco - store owners, security guards, customers, random citizens - say that shoplifting has increased massively over the past decade. But statistics mostly say it hasn’t. Source here. This is shoplifting crimes per 100,000 people. Kern County is a deep red county in California (including Bakersfield) that is known for being tough on crime. Against this, seriously, everyone says that shoplifting has obviously increased. I had a patient who worked in shoplifting prevention, he told me - his psychiatrist! Who he had no reason to lie to! - that he was constantly stressed dealing with the shoplifting surge devastating the stores he covered. Here’s the San Francisco subreddit’s response to someone posting the data showing shoplifting hasn’t risen - it’s just a lot of people laughing hysterically. What’s going on? I was able to find a different set of statistics that does seem to show a longer-term increase in shoplifting (source): The very big spike at the end might be a change in reporting by one or two stores - you can find the argument here. But it does look like shoplifting went from about 125 incidents/month in the early 2010s to more like 250/month just before the pandemic. Why is this graph so different from the other one? It looks like the top one came from the Department of Justice, and the bottom one came from SFPD. I’m not sure why these report differently. When you multiply out by 800K people in SF, by 12 months/year, and 30ish days/month, the first graph corresponds to 4 shoplifting incidents per day, and the second to 6. As LouB’s analysis here points out, that seems suspiciously low for a city of 800,000 people where stores are constantly closing because of shoplifting. Maybe off by a factor of a few hundred from what we’d expect. LouB writes: The SFPD report only references shoplifting offenses that required SFPD officers to prepare an incident report. That means either the shoplifter fought security, committed additional crimes, or stole more than $950 worth of items. It’s not that SFPD’s report is erroneous, it’s just not a representative statistic. In a parallel statistic, SFPD only completes incident reports for traffic accidents when there is an injury. Therefore, thousands of noninjury accidents are handled civilly without SFPD reports the same way thousands of shoplifting offenses are handled without reports. An insurance company would not determine premium rates based solely on SFPD incident reports, nor should readers interpret SFPD shoplifting reports as anywhere near the total picture of the shoplifting epidemic in San Francisco. (this would also explain why one or two stores changing their reporting policy can produce a spike equal to everyone else in San Francisco combined) But comparing incident reports from 2010 to incident reports from 2020 should still be apples-to-apples, unless the likelihood of reporting any given incident changed in the meantime. Did it? This news article quotes a San Franciscan who says that when they try to report shoplifting incidents, the cops tell them not to because “it doesn’t make a difference”. If cops say that now more often than they used to, it would make all these statistics meaningless. (Applied Divinity Studies claims to have an argument that shows this can’t be true. It goes something like: if San Francisco was a better place to shoplift than its neighbors - eg Oakland - then shoplifters would leave Oakland to go to San Francisco, and we would see Oakland shoplifting rates falling. Oakland shoplifting rates are falling, but no more so than the rest of the state, so there can’t be increased tolerance for shoplifting in San Francisco. I find this dubious for many reasons. First of all, many of the same reasons shoplifting is up in San Francisco - like Prop 47 or soft-on-crime progressive policies - also apply to Oakland. Second, given that shoplifting fell massively everywhere because of the pandemic, it feels dubious to try to compare different cities; maybe one city had stricter pandemic lockdowns than others. Third, do criminals really shop around for friendly jurisdictions? If so, why are so many crimes like car break-ins, concentrated in “the bad part of town”? Why wouldn’t criminals leave the bad part of town for under-exploited areas with richer residents and less competition? Maybe criminals in fact aren’t very strategic or mobile? Maybe they don’t want to stand in the BART station and then take a half-hour train ride holding a bag of stolen goods?) Maybe a better argument against this being true is how stable the shoplifting rates have been over time. Wouldn’t it be weird if (let’s say) a tripling of the real shoplifting rates was matched by a third-ing of the reporting rates (rather than a halving or a quartering or whatever)? On the other hand, here’s Shellenberger with some helpful data: Some of this is probably because of Proposition 47, which made some forms of shoplifting punishable with citation rather than arrest (but wouldn’t that be a clear discontinuity rather than a gradual trend?) But overall it sure seems like shoplifting is being taken less seriously, which might encourage people to report less. Another statistic I see is that only 2.3% of shoplifting cases result in an arrest; I don’t know how this is different from the graph above with numbers in the 30s; maybe it involves different levels of what makes something a “case”. I accept that the data don’t consistently show a spike in shoplifting. But what’s the alternative? My patient who works in loss prevention in SF stores is lying to me? The nice elderly Chinese man who sold me my last pair of glasses and chatted to me about the rampant shoplifting in his mall was lying? The San Francisco police are lying? Walgreens pretends to be concerned about shoplifting as part of a dastardly plot to close a bunch of stores for no reason? Target and CVS pretend to care about shoplifting as part of a plot to restrict their stores’ opening hours for no reason? Every big store near me has suddenly gotten a security guard at the front as part of some corporate-sponsored jobs program? Maybe the conservative narrative that soft-on-crime San Francisco must be experiencing rising crime rates took on a life of its own. Maybe it infiltrated not just the usual suspects like the SF police unions, but even such supposedly-liberal bastions as the New York Times. Maybe lots of big corporations took advantage of the fake narrative to make unpopular business decisions they were planning on making anyway. And maybe ordinary San Franciscans, confronted with everyone telling them they were in a shoplifting epidemic, started paying more attention to security guards and petty criminals who had always been there, a sort of mass hallucination that gripped everyone in the city. I can’t rule this out. Americans thought crime was rising all throughout the early 2000s, when it was in fact way down. Or maybe some statistics that we already know are off by several orders of magnitude got off by an additional factor of two or so. I think this one is more likely, but I’m genuinely not sure. Other Crime From the Economist: The Center on Juvenile And Criminal Justice puts it even more starkly, arguing that “San Francisco’s ‘Crime Wave’ Is Just One Crime”: This are potentially susceptible to the same reporting bias as shoplifting. So what about homicide? Homicide is practically always reported and investigated, making it a gold standard in crime measurement. (source) Looks pretty good until 2019. I don’t expect to gain useful information post-2020; the pandemic and the post-George-Floyd murder surge will make it impossible to evaluate for local variation. What about compared to other places? For some reason this top 20 table fails to list Washington DC, which should be just before Atlanta. SF doesn’t make the top 20, although its neighbor Oakland does. Probably most murder variation in US cities is explained by percent African-American and maybe percent Borderer; with relatively few people in these groups SF was never in the running. I’m not sure if some abstracted version of the city with all demographic factors adjusted away would have an unusually high murder rate, but at that point it would be pretty distant from any interesting real-world question. You can see the leaderboard for other types of crime here; San Francisco is often in the top ten, but never the top three. As far as I can tell, San Francisco has seen a big spike in car breakins over the past few years, with no clear trend for other property crime, violent crime, or homicides. It’s not an outlier among American cities in any kind of crime. Conclusion of this section: San Fransicko’s specific claims are basically correct, but suggest a medium-term rise in SF crime which is mostly contradicted by the data. These show stable-to-decreasing murder, stable-to-decreasing violent and property crimes other than car break-ins, and large rises in car break-ins only. The data also show stable-to-decreasing shoplifting, but I’m not sure how much to trust them vs. common sense. Honestly, I’m pretty confused here and not sure what to think. Claim 7: Jim Jones (Of Kool-Aid Cult Fame) Used To Be The Chairman Of SF’s Housing Authority Okay, this isn’t really a statistical claim that I can research different perspectives on. Still, it’s so wacky that I couldn’t resist mentioning it in this review. Jim Jones, famous for killing everyone in his Guyana-based Jonestown cult with poisoned Kool-Aid, used to be the SF government’s top guy on homelessness. Shellenberger writes: Jones married and moved first to Northern California and then to San Francisco with his wife to start a church. He called it the People’s Temple. Jones believed he was the leader of a socialist revolution. He warned of nuclear war and claimed black people would be put in concentration camps. He became a hugely charismatic preacher among African Americans, the disaffiliated poor, and young transplants to the city looking for community. Scenes from the era show a remarkably large and diverse congregation smiling and singing. The People’s Temple grew and provided services. Jones cultivated two progressive San Francisco politicians, George Moscone and Willie Brown, and mobilized people to volunteer for their campaigns […] His son and a San Francisco historian believe he stole the mayoral election for Moscone in 1975. Historian David Talbot, founder of the progressive website Salon, points to evidence that Jones committed sufficient voter fraud to account for Moscone’s narrow 4,443-vote margin of victory. “We loaded up all thirteen of our buses with maybe seventy people on each bus, and we had those buses rolling nonstop up and down the coast into San Francisco the day before the election,” said Jones Jr. “Could we have been the force that tipped the election to Moscone? Absolutely! Slam dunk. He only won by four thousand votes.” When federal investigators looked into fraud claims three years later, they discovered that all of the records were missing from the city of San Francisco’s registrar of voters. Jones also boasted of providing Moscone with black women from his congregation for sex. One time Moscone, drunk and “accompanied by a young black woman whom the politician had kindly agreed to drive home,” crashed into another car. Another time, Moscone and Willie Brown “were with a black woman in an alley at two in the morning at some restaurant in North Beach,” said a local bar owner. State legislator “John Burton was part of that gang too. They were all using marijuana and cocaine.” Said Jones Jr., Moscone would “always be there at temple parties with a cocktail in his hand and doing some ass grabbing.” A Temple member overheard Jones speaking to Moscone the day after one of those parties saying, “I want to let you know that the young lady you went off with is underage,” adding, “Now don’t worry, Mayor, we’ll take care of you—because we know that you’ll take care of us.” Afterward, Moscone made Jones the chairman of the powerful San Francisco Housing Commission. Jones cultivated progressives with money and favors. He made large donations to the ACLU, the NAACP, and United Farm Workers. Jones and Moscone met privately with vice presidential candidate Walter Mondale on a campaign plane a few days before the 1976 presidential election, and Mondale praised People’s Temple shortly afterward. Jones met with First Lady Rosalynn Carter several times. Governor Jerry Brown praised Jones. Glide Memorial Church’s Rev. Cecil Williams loved Jones. There is a photo from 1977 of a smiling Williams awarding Jones the church’s “Martin Luther King, Jr. Award.” Jones used his perch as chairman of the Housing Commission to fight for housing for the poor. He tried to use eminent domain to acquire the International Hotel, a single resident occupancy hotel. After a court sided with the hotel’s owner, Jones mobilized seven thousand protesters to picket it. By mid-January 1977, the situation had become heated. There were rumors that protesters inside the building were armed with guns and Molotov cocktails. Jones lost the legal battle in 1977, and the tenants were evicted. But the drama was a publicity victory for Jones, which burnished his image as a white savior. A conservative member of the Board of Supervisors who was defeated in the mayoral election by Moscone accused the new mayor, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the rest of the city establishment of being blind to Jones’s extremism. “There’s no radical plot in San Francisco,” insisted Moscone, in response. “There’s no one I’ve appointed to any city position whom I regard as radical or extremist.” Willie Brown, a powerful state legislator from 1964 to 1995 before becoming mayor in 1996, “seemed oblivious to Jones’ hucksterism and demagoguery,” notes a historian. Brown was master of ceremonies at a dinner for Jones in the fall of 1976 attended by an adulatory crowd of the rich and powerful, including Governor Jerry Brown. “Let me present to you a combination of Martin King, Angela Davis, Albert Einstein . . . Chairman Mao,” he said, to loud applause. And yet Jones was contemptuous of Brown even as Brown did Jones more and more favors. Jones mocked Brown for his designer suits, sports cars, and women. Once, while Brown was addressing the congregation and Jones was seated onstage behind him, Jones flipped his middle finger up to mock him. San Francisco’s establishment stood by Jones even after a California magazine, New West, owned by Rupert Murdoch, published an exposé of Jones’s beatings of Temple members and financial abuses in August 1977. The article was written by a San Francisco Chronicle reporter and was meant for the Chronicle to publish. But the newspaper killed the story because it didn’t want to alienate Jones, whom it viewed as central to its plans to expand the Chronicle’s circulation in the heavily African American Fillmore District. Jones also managed to avoid investigation and prosecution in part by getting the district attorney to hire as deputy district attorney Jones’s longtime attorney and confidant. Progressives defended Jones against the New West article. At a rally in the summer of 1977, Willie Brown said, “When somebody like Jim Jones comes on the scene, that absolutely scares the hell out of most everybody occupying positions of power in the system.” Angela Davis sent a radio message broadcast over the cult’s compound, Jonestown, in Guyana. “I know you’re in a very difficult situation right now,” she said, “and there is a very profound conspiracy designed to destroy the contributions which you have made to the struggle.” After visiting Jonestown, the attorney to the Black Panthers said, “I have seen paradise.” Harvey Milk, too, was tarnished by his association with Jones. In the fall of 1977, Milk wrote to President Carter’s secretary of health, education, and welfare requesting that Social Security checks be sent to elderly Temple members in Guyana. “People’s Temple,” wrote Milk, has “established a beautiful retirement community in Guyana.” In truth, the cult was disintegrating. Jones separated families and lovers, pitted relatives against each other, and forced neighbors to inform on each other. Jones sent people who violated the rules to solitary confinement in “the Box,” an underground cubicle where people were held as prisoners for days on end. Others were drugged. Progressives who had spent thirty years fighting to close prisons and mental hospitals found themselves praising a man who had reproduced their worst practices. In November 1978 a Bay Area congressman flew to Guyana to investigate human rights violations at Jonestown with NBC News. Jones gave the delegation a formal reception at Jonestown. A Temple member surreptitiously passed a note to one of the delegation members, saying he and another member wanted to escape. They fled the next day after a Temple member tried to stab the congressman. Jones didn’t prevent them from leaving but then sent gunmen to fire machine guns at the delegation at the airport, killing the congressman and four others. A few hours later, 907 inhabitants of Jonestown drank Flavor Aid laced with cyanide and died. Two-thirds of the victims were African American and one-third were children. Jones had told them that if they didn’t drink it they would be killed by invading soldiers from a shadowy global military conspiracy intent on imposing fascism and torturing children. As people started crying in grief, Jones scolded them. “Stop these hysterics,” he said. “This is not the way for people who are socialists or communists to die.” Jones’s wife protested the murder of children and had to be forcibly restrained. “We didn’t commit suicide,” said Jones in a tape recording, “we committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.” Few were as stained by Jonestown as Willie Brown and George Moscone. “Even as the bloated bodies of the dead were removed from the jungle and the wounded were airlifted by the U.S. Air Force to hospitals in the United States,” wrote a historian, “Brown said he had ‘no regrets’ over his association with Jones.” They repeatedly disavowed responsibility. Said Moscone, “it’s clear that if there was a sinister plan, then we were taken in. But I’m not taking any responsibility. It’s not mine to shoulder.” This is Shellenberger at his best: telling us crazy stories from the recesses of San Francisco history, maybe kind of spinning the narration in a way that makes all progressives seem guilty by association, but with the tale itself so gripping that it’s hard to be mad. And Jones wasn’t alone. This was the golden age of San Francisco cults, when (Shellenberger tells us) “more than half of all high school students in the San Francisco Bay Area reported at least one recruiting attempt by a cult member, and 40 percent reported at least three contacts.” This chapter of SF history came to an end in 1978, when Dan White, who had just resigned from San Francisco’s Board Of Supervisors (ie City Council) entered City Hall through a window and assassinated Mayor Moscone and fellow Supervisor Harvey Milk, then successfully got charges reduced to manslaughter through a legal manuever that has gone down in history as “the Twinkie Defense” (realistically the defense was that he was depressed, but reporters seized on a comment that implied it was because he ate too many Twinkies). Everything about 1970s San Francisco was like this. With the Mayor and his right-hand-man both dead, San Francisco leadership ended up in the hands of previously second-tier politician Dianne Feinstein. Feinstein was what passed for a moderate in 1970s SF (which meant she had been targeted for assassination by various left-wing groups - she survived when a bomb left on her windowsill failed to explode). In Shellenberger’s telling, she managed to clean up some of the mess and restore a semblance of normalcy. San Francisco never forgave her. Moscone - voting fraud committer, underage sex enjoyer, and Jim Jones’ bff - is beloved as a martyr in today’s SF, but (the book points out) Feinstein is so loathed that in 2021 the Board of Education voted to rename Dianne Feinstein Elementary School. The Moscone Center is 2 million square feet and can fit about 10,000 people. Not to be confused with the Moscone Recreation Center, Moscone Station, or Moscone Elementary School. Meanwhile, all Dianne Feinstein got was one lousy elementary school and the Tithonus package of eternal life without eternal youth. Claim 8: The Intolerant Left Shuts Down Debate On These Issues Another one that’s probably hard to do a randomized controlled trial on. You could probably predict that this one was coming - it’s a necessary narrative beat in this genre of book. I think this beat is good. My impression is that people who aren’t themselves public figures disagreeing with left-wing ideas still don’t understand how scary it is and how much hate you get. Maybe now that 2/3s of every political essay written over the past five years is about this topic, people will finally get it through their thick skulls that it exists and is bad. I would also note that “traumatizing the sorts of people who write popular books about politics, in a such a way that they feel compelled as a sort of self-therapy to write page after page telling readers how angry they should be at you and your whole coalition” isn’t great political praxis. I would like people to figure this out and stop doing it. Anyway, Shellenberger is doing his part in this effort: In 2001, the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness wheat-pasted posters of a fake front-page San Francisco Chronicle across town. Just beneath the masthead a large headline read “Fuck the Homeless!” right above a picture of San Francisco mayor Willie Brown laughing. Below his photo was the headline “Save the Tourists.” Progressives level the same charges at people thirty years later. “Because of some of the stuff I say,” said a community activist in Seattle’s historically black Capitol Hill neighborhood, “people say, ‘Oh, she’s not for them.’ But I have a heart for homeless and mentally ill. Most of my family works with the mentally ill.” Noted a Chronicle journalist in 2017, “Inevitably, homeless advocates and others will say, ‘You’re not compassionate,’” in response to stories about homeless encampments. “They called me a racist,” said Tom. “They accused me, a guy who used to be homeless, of demonizing the homeless, because I’m asking for accountability.” I found myself similarly accused. In 2019, after I published an article for Forbes about the homeless crisis, a progressive homeless activist accused me on Twitter of having written my article to “make money off of a fear tactic” of “fueling hatred [and] even increasing violence against homeless people.” After I asked the former San Francisco supervisor for the Tenderloin neighborhood, former mayoral candidate Jane Kim, how such a progressive city ended up with so much suffering, she said, “My concern, Michael, just to be very honest, is that when that kind of messaging goes out, violence against people who are unhoused goes up.” […] I soon discovered in my research that I was hardly the first person that progressive elected officials and homelessness advocates had accused of fomenting violence against unhoused people. Many others had been criticized for far worse over the years, including San Francisco’s highest elected officials. “The criticism [by progressive homelessness advocates] was heavy, political and personal,” wrote former mayor Willie Brown in his 2008 memoir. “People accused me of abandoning the problem when I was working daily to try and get a solution going. It was brutal. . . . I had become demonized, and my own efforts belittled.” It is notable that the result of such personal attacks is to frighten off people seeking to change, and perhaps improve, the situation. “The problem” of homelessness, concluded Mayor Brown within nine months of entering office, “may not be solvable.” And [Quoting Chris Rufo]. “The chief of psychiatry in a public hospital system in one of the largest California cities told me, ‘I know for a fact, and all of my colleagues know, that what we actually need to deal with the problem in the biggest cities in California is long-term residential secure psychiatric care. But I can’t say that publicly because I would be disemboweled by the activist left. My job would be in jeopardy. My reputation would be in jeopardy. My whole life would get turned upside down for even broaching the subject of expanding secure mental health facilities and compulsory mental health treatment.’ And I said, ‘So what’s the solution?’ and this person said, ‘We muddle through.’” And: In San Francisco, radical left activists protested [African-American] Mayor London Breed in front of her home. Breed said the protesters were “all white people. But that didn’t bother me as much as the taunting of me coming outside with firework torches in their hands looking like what used to happen when the KKK would show up to black people’s houses to burn their houses down.” While I was reading the book, I came across this tweet, which suggests that being unimpressed with SF’s lefty homeless activist scene is not limited to Michael Shellenberger: Claim 9: European Cities Like Amsterdam Successfully Solved Their Own Drug And Homelessness Problems By Doing The Opposite Of SF Shellenberger bases his plan to solve these problems on ideas that he says were pioneered in Amsterdam and spread to other European cities. In the 1980s, Amsterdam had the kinds of problems San Francisco deals with now: open-air drug markets, overdose deaths, homelessness, and crime. But in the 90s, they admitted they had a problem and took decisive action: What’s the secret?” I asked him. “Amsterdam has decriminalized marijuana and many other drugs but I haven’t seen any homeless. What is San Francisco doing wrong?” Rene said that in the 1980s, the Zeedijk neighborhood in Amsterdam was a lot like the Tenderloin [the worst part of San Francisco] today. There was open-air drug use, particularly of heroin, and needles strewn about, as well as crime. People started to flee the neighborhood, worsening its slum conditions. Homeless people squatted in abandoned buildings. “We had ghettos where it was not safe to go,” said Rene, who started working in the neighborhood as a nurse in 1985. It was considered a “no go” zone. “We had a lot of people from abroad who came to Amsterdam because our heroin was so good. But our heroin was so good that they died from it.” At first the city tried a “helping approach” exclusively, offering addicts clean needles, methadone, and other forms of help without any law enforcement, but it didn’t work. “In the eighties we just wanted to help people,” said Rene. “We started with methadone programs and medical treatment. We did a lot of work without much of a carrot and a stick. It was really a disappointment. They just used the methadone to stay addicted. They dealt drugs and committed other crimes. They lied and cheated about it. We were just supporting a different kind of market. We had to learn the hard way [...] The Amsterdam City Council asked the Amsterdam Municipal Health Service to develop a strategy to deal with “unmotivated drug users”...The police broke up the open-air drug scene and health workers were on hand to offer methadone, treatment, and shelter. The police broke up gatherings of more than four or five users, but did not treat personal and private use as a crime. Officers ticketed violators, and if users did not pay their fines, which was frequent, the courts ordered arrests, and sentenced individuals to follow a treatment plan or face incarceration. “For every individual homeless person, we make a plan,” said Rene. “We made tens of thousands of those plans.” Plans are overseen by a caseworker and a team that may include a psychiatrist, shelter provider, service provider, judge, employer, parole officer, and police officer. “You need people in the police and health department working together,” he said. What Amsterdam did was the same as other major European cities. Lisbon, Frankfurt, Vienna, and Zurich all dealt with their open-air drug markets, using a combination of law enforcement and social services. Crucially, Amsterdam and other European cities prevented services from being concentrated in a single neighborhood, since their concentration often enables an open-air drug scene to thrive [...] The efforts worked. “We had several thousand people who were addicted to heroin in the eighties and nineties,” said Rene. “Many died. Today we have four or five hundred people addicted to methadone. And we have about 120 in Amsterdam who we supply heroin to on a medical basis because methadone doesn’t work for them. They have to use heroin.” The Amsterdam strategy goes something like: Break up open-air drug markets and anywhere that more than 4-5 drug users are congregating. Yes, people can just use their drugs in private, but this is legitimately better. Open-air markets normalize drugs with their blatantness, and make it hard to quit for the same reason it’s hard to diet if your partner leaves boxes of donuts out in the house every day.
Inline links: survey, This app, this webpage, this site, many people, among the strongest proponents of both, these numbers, here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!msoV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8b34d51f-d6ed-43ee-a069-5e74fe75c421_1812x1102.png, an anti-drug Australian think tank, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!CN2E!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F85656c06-22bc-4076-80f0-b7a9bd4aa0d3_574x331.png, A Resounding Success Or Disastrous Failure: Re-examining The Interpretation Of Evidence On The Portuguese Decriminalisation Of Illicit Drugs, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!VvrE!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2341944a-388d-4da9-9788-8474567b83fc_540x737.png, Ed West, Public Policy Institute, UCI criminologists, Applied Divinity Studies’ article, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!aTNC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa27aeb21-ed87-4e67-b82c-b3ceecee7082_500x238.png, here, Here’s the San Francisco subreddit’s response, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!_NL6!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcf7dc478-45d3-487d-8c29-8bc7cdf182dd_2400x1500.png, LouB’s analysis here, This news article, only 2.3% of shoplifting cases result in an arrest, New York Times, the Economist, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!58I3!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc63dc7bc-1f8e-49fd-9c68-61c85278d69e_608x662.png, San Francisco’s ‘Crime Wave’ Is Just One Crime, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!h17s!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F956c0917-2a9b-4ff7-a08e-6aee5030583a_590x376.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!TkFS!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5c5faa01-ac22-48a2-96fe-47efb6f52514_616x334.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Bg2w!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F18e49c63-16ba-4878-96e6-aec12d7c5953_481x667.png, percent African-American, percent Borderer, here, the Twinkie Defense, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!8wK3!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F683b9754-f663-47ad-88f5-aa99bc208ec8_1401x622.jpeg, https://twitter.com/weheartprez/status/1526983899309432832
But an anti-drug Australian think tank argues that the peak in 2001 is made up: Claims that there were more than 75 drug-related deaths in 2001 which more than halved to 34 deaths in 2002 use a figure for 2001 for which there is no substantiation. Official drug-related deaths for Portugal, taken from the latest 2018 EMCDDA Statistical Bulletin are copied below. Notice that there is no such figure recorded for 2001. They include a link to EMCDDA, the EU organization charged with monitoring these things. The link contains two datasets, both of which seem to be measuring the same thing but getting different results. One dataset starts in 2002, the other in 2008. I don’t know what the difference here is, but they’re right that neither includes 2001. If you ignore the pre-2002 data, the graph looks like this: They say “opiate”, but AFAICT these numbers are actually about all drugs. But the proponents link to the updated 2020 version of the same website, which all of a sudden does have data from 2001 and before. I don’t know why EMCDDA can’t make up its mind, but I think the Australians are wrong and the original graph is fine. On the other hand, does it really matter? Both of these show drug deaths decreasing until 2005, then going up and down a bit, then going back up again starting in 2011. I think a reasonable interpretation would be that decriminalization in Portugal did decrease overdose deaths a bit, and then they started rising again from that low baseline around the same time other European countries saw rising overdose deaths. I would also accept “these are pretty small effects and we shouldn’t ascribe any significance to them”. But San Fransicko’s claim - that overdose deaths increased after the reform - seems false. The only way I can see justifying it is taking the second graph - the one that wrongly claims there is no pre-2002 data - and then attributing the fact that twelve years after the reform lowered deaths, deaths finally rose above the pre-reform level to be the fault of the reform. This is like saying “people claim the Black Plague killed a lot of Europeans, but the European population actually rose after the Plague”, which is true in the sense that it was above its pre-Plague max by like 1600 or whatever. What about overall drug use? Here I recommend A Resounding Success Or Disastrous Failure: Re-examining The Interpretation Of Evidence On The Portuguese Decriminalisation Of Illicit Drugs, which is on exactly this topic of how people keep selectively quoting results from Portugal to prove their point. It argues that drug use is inherently hard to measure. There are four different Portuguese datasets for the time at issue, lots of different drugs, lots of different age/gender combinations, and lots of different ways of measuring drugs (did you use drugs in the past month? the past year? your lifetime?) It’s easy to tell a story of how past-month cocaine use skyrocketed among 14-29 year old males according to X source, or how lifetime marijuana use fell in high school-age women according to Y. The main trick that opponents use is measuring lifetime drug use. Portugal is a very conservative country; drug use is pretty new and most of the older generation wasn’t involved. So as time goes on and more and more people try drugs but “un-trying” drugs isn’t a thing, the percent of the population who have tried drugs inevitably goes up. This definitely happened but isn’t a fair reflection of any specific reform. The authors find that in the past decade or so, there has been a bit more short-term experimentation with drugs, but less long-run use. They conclude: As shown in Figure 2, general population (aged 15–64) trends for recent and current drug use in Portugal indicate minimal if any changes between 2001 and 2007. Instead, rates of discontinuation of drug use (the proportion of the population that reported ever having used a drug but opting not to in recent years) increased, which reinforces that just as in the school populations, the growth in lifetime-reported use reflected predominantly short-term experimental use. Increases in recent and current drug use were more notable in some cohorts, particularly those aged 25 to 34 (albeit, with a maximum of 7% of any one cohort reporting recent use, absolute levels remained low). But as shown in Figure 3, recent and current drug use declined among those aged 15–24, the population who were most at risk of initiation and long-term engagement. The available evidence thus gives grounds for arguing that while there was some growth in the scale of drug use in post-reform Portugal, there was an overall positive net benefit for the Portuguese community. What about San Fransicko’s main point - that as the US has wound down the War on Drugs, drug overdose rates have sextupled? I think this is mostly not causal. I think the sextupling of overdoses is a combination of expansion in prescription opioid use, various forms of social decay making people less happy and therefore more likely to use drugs, and “improvements” in drug “technology” and the “supply chain” (eg production of fentanyl in China). I don’t know of any source that attempts to tease out the exact contribution of all of these things, but I would note that overdose deaths have risen the most in very conservative Midwestern states that haven’t walked back the drug war as much as California. Conclusion: As usual, I appreciate San Fransicko’s corrections to the prevailing narrative, but its own additions are dubious. Its claim that Portugal saw increased drug-related deaths seems false as far as I can tell. Its claim that it saw increased drug use depends on your definition, but is misleading and not the most natural way to sum up the evidence. Claim 6: San Francisco’s Soft-On-Crime Policies Led To Rising Crime Ten years ago, the news was full of stories about how some teenager stole a gumdrop and was sentenced to nine hundred billion years in jail. At some point, there was a genre shift to stories about how some hardened criminal murdered fifty people with an axe and the judge let him go with a warning because having jails felt racist. Source: Ed West, do note that this example is from the UK How suspicious should we be of each type of story? There will always be an extreme right tail of overly harsh sentences, and an extreme left tail of overly lenient ones. Were the 2000s really as draconian as they felt? Is the modern era really as pathetic? Or is it all just a function of who you read and what agenda they’re pushing? Shellenberger: During California governor Jerry Brown’s time in office, voters passed several reforms aimed at reducing the size of the prison population. In 2012, voters passed a change to the Three Strikes law so that the third strike imposes a life sentence only if the new felony was serious or violent. In addition to lowering punishments for drug possession, Proposition 47, which voters passed in 2014, redefined shoplifting, forgery, petty theft, and receiving stolen property as misdemeanors when the value in question does not exceed $950. In 2016, voters approved a proposition that shortened the time it took for some nonviolent offenders to be eligible for parole and which released nonviolent offenders into drug treatment and rehabilitation. Property crimes rose in San Francisco starting in 2012. Larceny, which is shoplifting and other petty theft, rose 50 percent, from roughly 3,000 incidents per 100,000 people in 2011 to about 4,500 in 2019. Property crimes as a whole, which include larceny, motor vehicle theft, and burglary, rose from 4,000 incidents per 100,000 people in 2011 to 5,500 in 2019. One study suggests that Proposition 47 increased the rate of auto theft 17 percent and the rate of larceny (non-auto property) theft 9 percent, but discerning between causation and correlation may not be possible. Upon taking office in January 2020, [famously soft-on-crime San Francisco district attorney Chesa] Boudin followed through on his campaign promises. Instead of prosecuting and incarcerating people for breaking car windows to steal money and other items from inside, Boudin proposed creating a $1.5 million fund to reimburse car owners. But there were over 25,000 car break-ins reported in 2019. If every break-in cost just $250 in repairs, the fund would need four times that amount. And what would prevent people from falsely claiming to have been robbed in order to get city money? […] Boudin opposed efforts by the mayor and the city attorney to prevent drug dealers who had already been arrested from entering the Tenderloin. “Until the city is serious about treating addiction and the root causes of drug use and selling,” said Boudin in a statement, “these recycled, punishment-focused approaches are unlikely to succeed at doing anything more than making headlines.” Home burglaries rose in early 2021 in San Francisco. Homeowners started posting on Twitter videos from their security cameras of people breaking into homes and garages. “When I first moved here we had a car break-in problem,” said Michael Solana, a writer who works for a venture capital fund. “Now we have a home invasion problem. These things are wearing on people.” Boudin attributed the rise of burglaries in San Francisco to the decline of tourism and “people in desperate economic circumstances.” Progressive supervisor Hillary Ronen agreed. “We know that [economic insecurity and inequality] is one of the root causes of property crimes specifically,” she said. But Tom Wolf and others argued that the robberies were, like the shoplifting, done by people seeking money to buy drugs and feed their addictions. “The drugstores have been shoplifted to death and that’s all because of drug use,” said Tom. “I know. I used to do the same thing when I was out there. That’s what you do. You ‘boost.’ And then you go and you sell your stuff down at UN Plaza,” an open-air drug scene. In a May 2021 city supervisors’ meeting, a representative from CVS called San Francisco “the epicenter of organized retail crime in the country” and claimed that 85 percent of the shoplifting is committed by organized theft rings. Police broke up one such ring in October 2020 and recovered $8 million of stolen merchandise. The problem goes beyond property crime. Boudin declined to prosecute two men who went on to kill people. One man had been repeatedly arrested for stealing cars, despite having just been released from prison earlier in the year, and appeared to be abusing meth. On New Year’s Eve, 2020, the man killed two people while driving intoxicated. Police found inside of his car a semiautomatic handgun and twenty-three grams of methamphetamine. On February 4, another intoxicated driver killed a pedestrian in a stolen car. The San Francisco police had arrested him in October 2020 for possessing a stolen car, a tool for stealing cars, and what appeared to be meth. Boudin chose not to pursue charges. In December, the California Highway Patrol arrested the man again for driving a stolen vehicle under the influence. Again he was not prosecuted. The accident victim, an immigrant from Kenya, and his wife had moved to San Francisco two weeks before the fatal crash. “I blame the DA,” said the widow of the victim. The suspect, she said, “was someone who was out in the public who shouldn’t have been in the public. It was completely avoidable.” Tom said he could feel the difference on the streets. “Drug dealing is unabated and it’s not one guy, it’s fifty guys dealing fentanyl and meth,” he said. “And it’s going unabated because the district attorney says, ‘These are the nonviolent, quality-of-life crimes,’ and ‘I’m not going to prosecute them.’” [..] District Attorney Boudin was offering weaker sentences than even defense attorneys were requesting, according to Vicki Westbrook of San Francisco. “There’s a defense attorney who said, ‘It used to be that I would argue for this deal in court with the DA but now I don’t say anything because the DA is going to offer me a deal better than what I would have suggested. Somebody shot up the street with an automatic weapon. The first offer was six months in jail or time served plus two years of probation or something. And then [the DA] said, “How about thirty days in jail?”’” Vicki laughed. “You really can do anything in San Francisco,” she said. “If you do get arrested, chances are you’re going to be out of jail in less than thirty days for damn near everything except maybe killing somebody and maybe even then, too. It’s hard to say at this point.” Taking each of these points individually: Proposition 47 There are two good big studies on the effects of Prop 47, one by Public Policy Institute and one by some UCI criminologists. The PPI study finds that the proposition increased theft and car break-ins by about 10%. The UCI study finds the same, but notes that under different assumptions the effects wouldn’t quite obtain statistical significance. This seems a bit too much like post hoc trying to get rid of an inconvenient effect, plus an effect on the border of statistical significance is different from positively finding no effect. I think a reasonable interpretation is that theft and car break-ins rose about 10% because of the proposition, just as Shellenberger says. Some pro-47 sites note that most states have some limit on how much you to have to shoplift before it’s a felony, and Prop 47 brought California closer to the national average, rather than turning it into an outlier. Chesa Boudin Chesa Boudin took office two months before the COVID pandemic began. Any attempt to separate the effect of Chesa Boudin from the effect of the pandemic is doomed. Shoplifting definitely plummeted when Boudin took office, but that’s because all the stores were closed. Murders definitely rose a little after Boudin took office, but that’s because that was also when the Black Lives Matter protests happened, which demoralized police and led to a so-far-permanent spike in murders nationwide. Percent of criminals caught definitely fell when Boudin took office, but that’s because various aspects of the justice system were closed for COVID (I will grudgingly entertain speculation that a further decrease in arrest rates from 2020 to 2021 may have been a genuine Boudin effect). In the absence of any real way to judge his performance, I think San Fransicko’s points about Boudin are plausible, though speculative. Shoplifting This one is terrible. There’s a surprisingly spirited debate here (some of you may have already read Applied Divinity Studies’ article). The debate is: everyone on the ground in San Francisco - store owners, security guards, customers, random citizens - say that shoplifting has increased massively over the past decade. But statistics mostly say it hasn’t. Source here. This is shoplifting crimes per 100,000 people. Kern County is a deep red county in California (including Bakersfield) that is known for being tough on crime. Against this, seriously, everyone says that shoplifting has obviously increased. I had a patient who worked in shoplifting prevention, he told me - his psychiatrist! Who he had no reason to lie to! - that he was constantly stressed dealing with the shoplifting surge devastating the stores he covered. Here’s the San Francisco subreddit’s response to someone posting the data showing shoplifting hasn’t risen - it’s just a lot of people laughing hysterically. What’s going on? I was able to find a different set of statistics that does seem to show a longer-term increase in shoplifting (source): The very big spike at the end might be a change in reporting by one or two stores - you can find the argument here. But it does look like shoplifting went from about 125 incidents/month in the early 2010s to more like 250/month just before the pandemic. Why is this graph so different from the other one? It looks like the top one came from the Department of Justice, and the bottom one came from SFPD. I’m not sure why these report differently. When you multiply out by 800K people in SF, by 12 months/year, and 30ish days/month, the first graph corresponds to 4 shoplifting incidents per day, and the second to 6. As LouB’s analysis here points out, that seems suspiciously low for a city of 800,000 people where stores are constantly closing because of shoplifting. Maybe off by a factor of a few hundred from what we’d expect. LouB writes: The SFPD report only references shoplifting offenses that required SFPD officers to prepare an incident report. That means either the shoplifter fought security, committed additional crimes, or stole more than $950 worth of items. It’s not that SFPD’s report is erroneous, it’s just not a representative statistic. In a parallel statistic, SFPD only completes incident reports for traffic accidents when there is an injury. Therefore, thousands of noninjury accidents are handled civilly without SFPD reports the same way thousands of shoplifting offenses are handled without reports. An insurance company would not determine premium rates based solely on SFPD incident reports, nor should readers interpret SFPD shoplifting reports as anywhere near the total picture of the shoplifting epidemic in San Francisco. (this would also explain why one or two stores changing their reporting policy can produce a spike equal to everyone else in San Francisco combined) But comparing incident reports from 2010 to incident reports from 2020 should still be apples-to-apples, unless the likelihood of reporting any given incident changed in the meantime. Did it? This news article quotes a San Franciscan who says that when they try to report shoplifting incidents, the cops tell them not to because “it doesn’t make a difference”. If cops say that now more often than they used to, it would make all these statistics meaningless. (Applied Divinity Studies claims to have an argument that shows this can’t be true. It goes something like: if San Francisco was a better place to shoplift than its neighbors - eg Oakland - then shoplifters would leave Oakland to go to San Francisco, and we would see Oakland shoplifting rates falling. Oakland shoplifting rates are falling, but no more so than the rest of the state, so there can’t be increased tolerance for shoplifting in San Francisco. I find this dubious for many reasons. First of all, many of the same reasons shoplifting is up in San Francisco - like Prop 47 or soft-on-crime progressive policies - also apply to Oakland. Second, given that shoplifting fell massively everywhere because of the pandemic, it feels dubious to try to compare different cities; maybe one city had stricter pandemic lockdowns than others. Third, do criminals really shop around for friendly jurisdictions? If so, why are so many crimes like car break-ins, concentrated in “the bad part of town”? Why wouldn’t criminals leave the bad part of town for under-exploited areas with richer residents and less competition? Maybe criminals in fact aren’t very strategic or mobile? Maybe they don’t want to stand in the BART station and then take a half-hour train ride holding a bag of stolen goods?) Maybe a better argument against this being true is how stable the shoplifting rates have been over time. Wouldn’t it be weird if (let’s say) a tripling of the real shoplifting rates was matched by a third-ing of the reporting rates (rather than a halving or a quartering or whatever)? On the other hand, here’s Shellenberger with some helpful data: Some of this is probably because of Proposition 47, which made some forms of shoplifting punishable with citation rather than arrest (but wouldn’t that be a clear discontinuity rather than a gradual trend?) But overall it sure seems like shoplifting is being taken less seriously, which might encourage people to report less. Another statistic I see is that only 2.3% of shoplifting cases result in an arrest; I don’t know how this is different from the graph above with numbers in the 30s; maybe it involves different levels of what makes something a “case”. I accept that the data don’t consistently show a spike in shoplifting. But what’s the alternative? My patient who works in loss prevention in SF stores is lying to me? The nice elderly Chinese man who sold me my last pair of glasses and chatted to me about the rampant shoplifting in his mall was lying? The San Francisco police are lying? Walgreens pretends to be concerned about shoplifting as part of a dastardly plot to close a bunch of stores for no reason? Target and CVS pretend to care about shoplifting as part of a plot to restrict their stores’ opening hours for no reason? Every big store near me has suddenly gotten a security guard at the front as part of some corporate-sponsored jobs program? Maybe the conservative narrative that soft-on-crime San Francisco must be experiencing rising crime rates took on a life of its own. Maybe it infiltrated not just the usual suspects like the SF police unions, but even such supposedly-liberal bastions as the New York Times. Maybe lots of big corporations took advantage of the fake narrative to make unpopular business decisions they were planning on making anyway. And maybe ordinary San Franciscans, confronted with everyone telling them they were in a shoplifting epidemic, started paying more attention to security guards and petty criminals who had always been there, a sort of mass hallucination that gripped everyone in the city. I can’t rule this out. Americans thought crime was rising all throughout the early 2000s, when it was in fact way down. Or maybe some statistics that we already know are off by several orders of magnitude got off by an additional factor of two or so. I think this one is more likely, but I’m genuinely not sure. Other Crime From the Economist: The Center on Juvenile And Criminal Justice puts it even more starkly, arguing that “San Francisco’s ‘Crime Wave’ Is Just One Crime”: This are potentially susceptible to the same reporting bias as shoplifting. So what about homicide? Homicide is practically always reported and investigated, making it a gold standard in crime measurement. (source) Looks pretty good until 2019. I don’t expect to gain useful information post-2020; the pandemic and the post-George-Floyd murder surge will make it impossible to evaluate for local variation. What about compared to other places? For some reason this top 20 table fails to list Washington DC, which should be just before Atlanta. SF doesn’t make the top 20, although its neighbor Oakland does. Probably most murder variation in US cities is explained by percent African-American and maybe percent Borderer; with relatively few people in these groups SF was never in the running. I’m not sure if some abstracted version of the city with all demographic factors adjusted away would have an unusually high murder rate, but at that point it would be pretty distant from any interesting real-world question. You can see the leaderboard for other types of crime here; San Francisco is often in the top ten, but never the top three. As far as I can tell, San Francisco has seen a big spike in car breakins over the past few years, with no clear trend for other property crime, violent crime, or homicides. It’s not an outlier among American cities in any kind of crime. Conclusion of this section: San Fransicko’s specific claims are basically correct, but suggest a medium-term rise in SF crime which is mostly contradicted by the data. These show stable-to-decreasing murder, stable-to-decreasing violent and property crimes other than car break-ins, and large rises in car break-ins only. The data also show stable-to-decreasing shoplifting, but I’m not sure how much to trust them vs. common sense. Honestly, I’m pretty confused here and not sure what to think. Claim 7: Jim Jones (Of Kool-Aid Cult Fame) Used To Be The Chairman Of SF’s Housing Authority Okay, this isn’t really a statistical claim that I can research different perspectives on. Still, it’s so wacky that I couldn’t resist mentioning it in this review. Jim Jones, famous for killing everyone in his Guyana-based Jonestown cult with poisoned Kool-Aid, used to be the SF government’s top guy on homelessness. Shellenberger writes: Jones married and moved first to Northern California and then to San Francisco with his wife to start a church. He called it the People’s Temple. Jones believed he was the leader of a socialist revolution. He warned of nuclear war and claimed black people would be put in concentration camps. He became a hugely charismatic preacher among African Americans, the disaffiliated poor, and young transplants to the city looking for community. Scenes from the era show a remarkably large and diverse congregation smiling and singing. The People’s Temple grew and provided services. Jones cultivated two progressive San Francisco politicians, George Moscone and Willie Brown, and mobilized people to volunteer for their campaigns […] His son and a San Francisco historian believe he stole the mayoral election for Moscone in 1975. Historian David Talbot, founder of the progressive website Salon, points to evidence that Jones committed sufficient voter fraud to account for Moscone’s narrow 4,443-vote margin of victory. “We loaded up all thirteen of our buses with maybe seventy people on each bus, and we had those buses rolling nonstop up and down the coast into San Francisco the day before the election,” said Jones Jr. “Could we have been the force that tipped the election to Moscone? Absolutely! Slam dunk. He only won by four thousand votes.” When federal investigators looked into fraud claims three years later, they discovered that all of the records were missing from the city of San Francisco’s registrar of voters. Jones also boasted of providing Moscone with black women from his congregation for sex. One time Moscone, drunk and “accompanied by a young black woman whom the politician had kindly agreed to drive home,” crashed into another car. Another time, Moscone and Willie Brown “were with a black woman in an alley at two in the morning at some restaurant in North Beach,” said a local bar owner. State legislator “John Burton was part of that gang too. They were all using marijuana and cocaine.” Said Jones Jr., Moscone would “always be there at temple parties with a cocktail in his hand and doing some ass grabbing.” A Temple member overheard Jones speaking to Moscone the day after one of those parties saying, “I want to let you know that the young lady you went off with is underage,” adding, “Now don’t worry, Mayor, we’ll take care of you—because we know that you’ll take care of us.” Afterward, Moscone made Jones the chairman of the powerful San Francisco Housing Commission. Jones cultivated progressives with money and favors. He made large donations to the ACLU, the NAACP, and United Farm Workers. Jones and Moscone met privately with vice presidential candidate Walter Mondale on a campaign plane a few days before the 1976 presidential election, and Mondale praised People’s Temple shortly afterward. Jones met with First Lady Rosalynn Carter several times. Governor Jerry Brown praised Jones. Glide Memorial Church’s Rev. Cecil Williams loved Jones. There is a photo from 1977 of a smiling Williams awarding Jones the church’s “Martin Luther King, Jr. Award.” Jones used his perch as chairman of the Housing Commission to fight for housing for the poor. He tried to use eminent domain to acquire the International Hotel, a single resident occupancy hotel. After a court sided with the hotel’s owner, Jones mobilized seven thousand protesters to picket it. By mid-January 1977, the situation had become heated. There were rumors that protesters inside the building were armed with guns and Molotov cocktails. Jones lost the legal battle in 1977, and the tenants were evicted. But the drama was a publicity victory for Jones, which burnished his image as a white savior. A conservative member of the Board of Supervisors who was defeated in the mayoral election by Moscone accused the new mayor, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the rest of the city establishment of being blind to Jones’s extremism. “There’s no radical plot in San Francisco,” insisted Moscone, in response. “There’s no one I’ve appointed to any city position whom I regard as radical or extremist.” Willie Brown, a powerful state legislator from 1964 to 1995 before becoming mayor in 1996, “seemed oblivious to Jones’ hucksterism and demagoguery,” notes a historian. Brown was master of ceremonies at a dinner for Jones in the fall of 1976 attended by an adulatory crowd of the rich and powerful, including Governor Jerry Brown. “Let me present to you a combination of Martin King, Angela Davis, Albert Einstein . . . Chairman Mao,” he said, to loud applause. And yet Jones was contemptuous of Brown even as Brown did Jones more and more favors. Jones mocked Brown for his designer suits, sports cars, and women. Once, while Brown was addressing the congregation and Jones was seated onstage behind him, Jones flipped his middle finger up to mock him. San Francisco’s establishment stood by Jones even after a California magazine, New West, owned by Rupert Murdoch, published an exposé of Jones’s beatings of Temple members and financial abuses in August 1977. The article was written by a San Francisco Chronicle reporter and was meant for the Chronicle to publish. But the newspaper killed the story because it didn’t want to alienate Jones, whom it viewed as central to its plans to expand the Chronicle’s circulation in the heavily African American Fillmore District. Jones also managed to avoid investigation and prosecution in part by getting the district attorney to hire as deputy district attorney Jones’s longtime attorney and confidant. Progressives defended Jones against the New West article. At a rally in the summer of 1977, Willie Brown said, “When somebody like Jim Jones comes on the scene, that absolutely scares the hell out of most everybody occupying positions of power in the system.” Angela Davis sent a radio message broadcast over the cult’s compound, Jonestown, in Guyana. “I know you’re in a very difficult situation right now,” she said, “and there is a very profound conspiracy designed to destroy the contributions which you have made to the struggle.” After visiting Jonestown, the attorney to the Black Panthers said, “I have seen paradise.” Harvey Milk, too, was tarnished by his association with Jones. In the fall of 1977, Milk wrote to President Carter’s secretary of health, education, and welfare requesting that Social Security checks be sent to elderly Temple members in Guyana. “People’s Temple,” wrote Milk, has “established a beautiful retirement community in Guyana.” In truth, the cult was disintegrating. Jones separated families and lovers, pitted relatives against each other, and forced neighbors to inform on each other. Jones sent people who violated the rules to solitary confinement in “the Box,” an underground cubicle where people were held as prisoners for days on end. Others were drugged. Progressives who had spent thirty years fighting to close prisons and mental hospitals found themselves praising a man who had reproduced their worst practices. In November 1978 a Bay Area congressman flew to Guyana to investigate human rights violations at Jonestown with NBC News. Jones gave the delegation a formal reception at Jonestown. A Temple member surreptitiously passed a note to one of the delegation members, saying he and another member wanted to escape. They fled the next day after a Temple member tried to stab the congressman. Jones didn’t prevent them from leaving but then sent gunmen to fire machine guns at the delegation at the airport, killing the congressman and four others. A few hours later, 907 inhabitants of Jonestown drank Flavor Aid laced with cyanide and died. Two-thirds of the victims were African American and one-third were children. Jones had told them that if they didn’t drink it they would be killed by invading soldiers from a shadowy global military conspiracy intent on imposing fascism and torturing children. As people started crying in grief, Jones scolded them. “Stop these hysterics,” he said. “This is not the way for people who are socialists or communists to die.” Jones’s wife protested the murder of children and had to be forcibly restrained. “We didn’t commit suicide,” said Jones in a tape recording, “we committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.” Few were as stained by Jonestown as Willie Brown and George Moscone. “Even as the bloated bodies of the dead were removed from the jungle and the wounded were airlifted by the U.S. Air Force to hospitals in the United States,” wrote a historian, “Brown said he had ‘no regrets’ over his association with Jones.” They repeatedly disavowed responsibility. Said Moscone, “it’s clear that if there was a sinister plan, then we were taken in. But I’m not taking any responsibility. It’s not mine to shoulder.” This is Shellenberger at his best: telling us crazy stories from the recesses of San Francisco history, maybe kind of spinning the narration in a way that makes all progressives seem guilty by association, but with the tale itself so gripping that it’s hard to be mad. And Jones wasn’t alone. This was the golden age of San Francisco cults, when (Shellenberger tells us) “more than half of all high school students in the San Francisco Bay Area reported at least one recruiting attempt by a cult member, and 40 percent reported at least three contacts.” This chapter of SF history came to an end in 1978, when Dan White, who had just resigned from San Francisco’s Board Of Supervisors (ie City Council) entered City Hall through a window and assassinated Mayor Moscone and fellow Supervisor Harvey Milk, then successfully got charges reduced to manslaughter through a legal manuever that has gone down in history as “the Twinkie Defense” (realistically the defense was that he was depressed, but reporters seized on a comment that implied it was because he ate too many Twinkies). Everything about 1970s San Francisco was like this. With the Mayor and his right-hand-man both dead, San Francisco leadership ended up in the hands of previously second-tier politician Dianne Feinstein. Feinstein was what passed for a moderate in 1970s SF (which meant she had been targeted for assassination by various left-wing groups - she survived when a bomb left on her windowsill failed to explode). In Shellenberger’s telling, she managed to clean up some of the mess and restore a semblance of normalcy. San Francisco never forgave her. Moscone - voting fraud committer, underage sex enjoyer, and Jim Jones’ bff - is beloved as a martyr in today’s SF, but (the book points out) Feinstein is so loathed that in 2021 the Board of Education voted to rename Dianne Feinstein Elementary School. The Moscone Center is 2 million square feet and can fit about 10,000 people. Not to be confused with the Moscone Recreation Center, Moscone Station, or Moscone Elementary School. Meanwhile, all Dianne Feinstein got was one lousy elementary school and the Tithonus package of eternal life without eternal youth. Claim 8: The Intolerant Left Shuts Down Debate On These Issues Another one that’s probably hard to do a randomized controlled trial on. You could probably predict that this one was coming - it’s a necessary narrative beat in this genre of book. I think this beat is good. My impression is that people who aren’t themselves public figures disagreeing with left-wing ideas still don’t understand how scary it is and how much hate you get. Maybe now that 2/3s of every political essay written over the past five years is about this topic, people will finally get it through their thick skulls that it exists and is bad. I would also note that “traumatizing the sorts of people who write popular books about politics, in a such a way that they feel compelled as a sort of self-therapy to write page after page telling readers how angry they should be at you and your whole coalition” isn’t great political praxis. I would like people to figure this out and stop doing it. Anyway, Shellenberger is doing his part in this effort: In 2001, the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness wheat-pasted posters of a fake front-page San Francisco Chronicle across town. Just beneath the masthead a large headline read “Fuck the Homeless!” right above a picture of San Francisco mayor Willie Brown laughing. Below his photo was the headline “Save the Tourists.” Progressives level the same charges at people thirty years later. “Because of some of the stuff I say,” said a community activist in Seattle’s historically black Capitol Hill neighborhood, “people say, ‘Oh, she’s not for them.’ But I have a heart for homeless and mentally ill. Most of my family works with the mentally ill.” Noted a Chronicle journalist in 2017, “Inevitably, homeless advocates and others will say, ‘You’re not compassionate,’” in response to stories about homeless encampments. “They called me a racist,” said Tom. “They accused me, a guy who used to be homeless, of demonizing the homeless, because I’m asking for accountability.” I found myself similarly accused. In 2019, after I published an article for Forbes about the homeless crisis, a progressive homeless activist accused me on Twitter of having written my article to “make money off of a fear tactic” of “fueling hatred [and] even increasing violence against homeless people.” After I asked the former San Francisco supervisor for the Tenderloin neighborhood, former mayoral candidate Jane Kim, how such a progressive city ended up with so much suffering, she said, “My concern, Michael, just to be very honest, is that when that kind of messaging goes out, violence against people who are unhoused goes up.” […] I soon discovered in my research that I was hardly the first person that progressive elected officials and homelessness advocates had accused of fomenting violence against unhoused people. Many others had been criticized for far worse over the years, including San Francisco’s highest elected officials. “The criticism [by progressive homelessness advocates] was heavy, political and personal,” wrote former mayor Willie Brown in his 2008 memoir. “People accused me of abandoning the problem when I was working daily to try and get a solution going. It was brutal. . . . I had become demonized, and my own efforts belittled.” It is notable that the result of such personal attacks is to frighten off people seeking to change, and perhaps improve, the situation. “The problem” of homelessness, concluded Mayor Brown within nine months of entering office, “may not be solvable.” And [Quoting Chris Rufo]. “The chief of psychiatry in a public hospital system in one of the largest California cities told me, ‘I know for a fact, and all of my colleagues know, that what we actually need to deal with the problem in the biggest cities in California is long-term residential secure psychiatric care. But I can’t say that publicly because I would be disemboweled by the activist left. My job would be in jeopardy. My reputation would be in jeopardy. My whole life would get turned upside down for even broaching the subject of expanding secure mental health facilities and compulsory mental health treatment.’ And I said, ‘So what’s the solution?’ and this person said, ‘We muddle through.’” And: In San Francisco, radical left activists protested [African-American] Mayor London Breed in front of her home. Breed said the protesters were “all white people. But that didn’t bother me as much as the taunting of me coming outside with firework torches in their hands looking like what used to happen when the KKK would show up to black people’s houses to burn their houses down.” While I was reading the book, I came across this tweet, which suggests that being unimpressed with SF’s lefty homeless activist scene is not limited to Michael Shellenberger: Claim 9: European Cities Like Amsterdam Successfully Solved Their Own Drug And Homelessness Problems By Doing The Opposite Of SF Shellenberger bases his plan to solve these problems on ideas that he says were pioneered in Amsterdam and spread to other European cities. In the 1980s, Amsterdam had the kinds of problems San Francisco deals with now: open-air drug markets, overdose deaths, homelessness, and crime. But in the 90s, they admitted they had a problem and took decisive action: What’s the secret?” I asked him. “Amsterdam has decriminalized marijuana and many other drugs but I haven’t seen any homeless. What is San Francisco doing wrong?” Rene said that in the 1980s, the Zeedijk neighborhood in Amsterdam was a lot like the Tenderloin [the worst part of San Francisco] today. There was open-air drug use, particularly of heroin, and needles strewn about, as well as crime. People started to flee the neighborhood, worsening its slum conditions. Homeless people squatted in abandoned buildings. “We had ghettos where it was not safe to go,” said Rene, who started working in the neighborhood as a nurse in 1985. It was considered a “no go” zone. “We had a lot of people from abroad who came to Amsterdam because our heroin was so good. But our heroin was so good that they died from it.” At first the city tried a “helping approach” exclusively, offering addicts clean needles, methadone, and other forms of help without any law enforcement, but it didn’t work. “In the eighties we just wanted to help people,” said Rene. “We started with methadone programs and medical treatment. We did a lot of work without much of a carrot and a stick. It was really a disappointment. They just used the methadone to stay addicted. They dealt drugs and committed other crimes. They lied and cheated about it. We were just supporting a different kind of market. We had to learn the hard way [...] The Amsterdam City Council asked the Amsterdam Municipal Health Service to develop a strategy to deal with “unmotivated drug users”...The police broke up the open-air drug scene and health workers were on hand to offer methadone, treatment, and shelter. The police broke up gatherings of more than four or five users, but did not treat personal and private use as a crime. Officers ticketed violators, and if users did not pay their fines, which was frequent, the courts ordered arrests, and sentenced individuals to follow a treatment plan or face incarceration. “For every individual homeless person, we make a plan,” said Rene. “We made tens of thousands of those plans.” Plans are overseen by a caseworker and a team that may include a psychiatrist, shelter provider, service provider, judge, employer, parole officer, and police officer. “You need people in the police and health department working together,” he said. What Amsterdam did was the same as other major European cities. Lisbon, Frankfurt, Vienna, and Zurich all dealt with their open-air drug markets, using a combination of law enforcement and social services. Crucially, Amsterdam and other European cities prevented services from being concentrated in a single neighborhood, since their concentration often enables an open-air drug scene to thrive [...] The efforts worked. “We had several thousand people who were addicted to heroin in the eighties and nineties,” said Rene. “Many died. Today we have four or five hundred people addicted to methadone. And we have about 120 in Amsterdam who we supply heroin to on a medical basis because methadone doesn’t work for them. They have to use heroin.” The Amsterdam strategy goes something like: Break up open-air drug markets and anywhere that more than 4-5 drug users are congregating. Yes, people can just use their drugs in private, but this is legitimately better. Open-air markets normalize drugs with their blatantness, and make it hard to quit for the same reason it’s hard to diet if your partner leaves boxes of donuts out in the house every day.
Inline links: an anti-drug Australian think tank, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!CN2E!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F85656c06-22bc-4076-80f0-b7a9bd4aa0d3_574x331.png, the updated 2020 version, A Resounding Success Or Disastrous Failure: Re-examining The Interpretation Of Evidence On The Portuguese Decriminalisation Of Illicit Drugs, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!VvrE!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2341944a-388d-4da9-9788-8474567b83fc_540x737.png, Ed West, Public Policy Institute, UCI criminologists, Applied Divinity Studies’ article, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!aTNC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa27aeb21-ed87-4e67-b82c-b3ceecee7082_500x238.png, here, Here’s the San Francisco subreddit’s response, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!_NL6!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcf7dc478-45d3-487d-8c29-8bc7cdf182dd_2400x1500.png, LouB’s analysis here, This news article, only 2.3% of shoplifting cases result in an arrest, New York Times, the Economist, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!58I3!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc63dc7bc-1f8e-49fd-9c68-61c85278d69e_608x662.png, San Francisco’s ‘Crime Wave’ Is Just One Crime, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!h17s!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F956c0917-2a9b-4ff7-a08e-6aee5030583a_590x376.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!TkFS!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5c5faa01-ac22-48a2-96fe-47efb6f52514_616x334.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Bg2w!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F18e49c63-16ba-4878-96e6-aec12d7c5953_481x667.png, percent African-American, percent Borderer, here, the Twinkie Defense, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!8wK3!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F683b9754-f663-47ad-88f5-aa99bc208ec8_1401x622.jpeg, https://twitter.com/weheartprez/status/1526983899309432832
They say “opiate”, but AFAICT these numbers are actually about all drugs. But the proponents link to the updated 2020 version of the same website, which all of a sudden does have data from 2001 and before. I don’t know why EMCDDA can’t make up its mind, but I think the Australians are wrong and the original graph is fine. On the other hand, does it really matter? Both of these show drug deaths decreasing until 2005, then going up and down a bit, then going back up again starting in 2011. I think a reasonable interpretation would be that decriminalization in Portugal did decrease overdose deaths a bit, and then they started rising again from that low baseline around the same time other European countries saw rising overdose deaths. I would also accept “these are pretty small effects and we shouldn’t ascribe any significance to them”. But San Fransicko’s claim - that overdose deaths increased after the reform - seems false. The only way I can see justifying it is taking the second graph - the one that wrongly claims there is no pre-2002 data - and then attributing the fact that twelve years after the reform lowered deaths, deaths finally rose above the pre-reform level to be the fault of the reform. This is like saying “people claim the Black Plague killed a lot of Europeans, but the European population actually rose after the Plague”, which is true in the sense that it was above its pre-Plague max by like 1600 or whatever. What about overall drug use? Here I recommend A Resounding Success Or Disastrous Failure: Re-examining The Interpretation Of Evidence On The Portuguese Decriminalisation Of Illicit Drugs, which is on exactly this topic of how people keep selectively quoting results from Portugal to prove their point. It argues that drug use is inherently hard to measure. There are four different Portuguese datasets for the time at issue, lots of different drugs, lots of different age/gender combinations, and lots of different ways of measuring drugs (did you use drugs in the past month? the past year? your lifetime?) It’s easy to tell a story of how past-month cocaine use skyrocketed among 14-29 year old males according to X source, or how lifetime marijuana use fell in high school-age women according to Y. The main trick that opponents use is measuring lifetime drug use. Portugal is a very conservative country; drug use is pretty new and most of the older generation wasn’t involved. So as time goes on and more and more people try drugs but “un-trying” drugs isn’t a thing, the percent of the population who have tried drugs inevitably goes up. This definitely happened but isn’t a fair reflection of any specific reform. The authors find that in the past decade or so, there has been a bit more short-term experimentation with drugs, but less long-run use. They conclude: As shown in Figure 2, general population (aged 15–64) trends for recent and current drug use in Portugal indicate minimal if any changes between 2001 and 2007. Instead, rates of discontinuation of drug use (the proportion of the population that reported ever having used a drug but opting not to in recent years) increased, which reinforces that just as in the school populations, the growth in lifetime-reported use reflected predominantly short-term experimental use. Increases in recent and current drug use were more notable in some cohorts, particularly those aged 25 to 34 (albeit, with a maximum of 7% of any one cohort reporting recent use, absolute levels remained low). But as shown in Figure 3, recent and current drug use declined among those aged 15–24, the population who were most at risk of initiation and long-term engagement. The available evidence thus gives grounds for arguing that while there was some growth in the scale of drug use in post-reform Portugal, there was an overall positive net benefit for the Portuguese community. What about San Fransicko’s main point - that as the US has wound down the War on Drugs, drug overdose rates have sextupled? I think this is mostly not causal. I think the sextupling of overdoses is a combination of expansion in prescription opioid use, various forms of social decay making people less happy and therefore more likely to use drugs, and “improvements” in drug “technology” and the “supply chain” (eg production of fentanyl in China). I don’t know of any source that attempts to tease out the exact contribution of all of these things, but I would note that overdose deaths have risen the most in very conservative Midwestern states that haven’t walked back the drug war as much as California. Conclusion: As usual, I appreciate San Fransicko’s corrections to the prevailing narrative, but its own additions are dubious. Its claim that Portugal saw increased drug-related deaths seems false as far as I can tell. Its claim that it saw increased drug use depends on your definition, but is misleading and not the most natural way to sum up the evidence. Claim 6: San Francisco’s Soft-On-Crime Policies Led To Rising Crime Ten years ago, the news was full of stories about how some teenager stole a gumdrop and was sentenced to nine hundred billion years in jail. At some point, there was a genre shift to stories about how some hardened criminal murdered fifty people with an axe and the judge let him go with a warning because having jails felt racist. Source: Ed West, do note that this example is from the UK How suspicious should we be of each type of story? There will always be an extreme right tail of overly harsh sentences, and an extreme left tail of overly lenient ones. Were the 2000s really as draconian as they felt? Is the modern era really as pathetic? Or is it all just a function of who you read and what agenda they’re pushing? Shellenberger: During California governor Jerry Brown’s time in office, voters passed several reforms aimed at reducing the size of the prison population. In 2012, voters passed a change to the Three Strikes law so that the third strike imposes a life sentence only if the new felony was serious or violent. In addition to lowering punishments for drug possession, Proposition 47, which voters passed in 2014, redefined shoplifting, forgery, petty theft, and receiving stolen property as misdemeanors when the value in question does not exceed $950. In 2016, voters approved a proposition that shortened the time it took for some nonviolent offenders to be eligible for parole and which released nonviolent offenders into drug treatment and rehabilitation. Property crimes rose in San Francisco starting in 2012. Larceny, which is shoplifting and other petty theft, rose 50 percent, from roughly 3,000 incidents per 100,000 people in 2011 to about 4,500 in 2019. Property crimes as a whole, which include larceny, motor vehicle theft, and burglary, rose from 4,000 incidents per 100,000 people in 2011 to 5,500 in 2019. One study suggests that Proposition 47 increased the rate of auto theft 17 percent and the rate of larceny (non-auto property) theft 9 percent, but discerning between causation and correlation may not be possible. Upon taking office in January 2020, [famously soft-on-crime San Francisco district attorney Chesa] Boudin followed through on his campaign promises. Instead of prosecuting and incarcerating people for breaking car windows to steal money and other items from inside, Boudin proposed creating a $1.5 million fund to reimburse car owners. But there were over 25,000 car break-ins reported in 2019. If every break-in cost just $250 in repairs, the fund would need four times that amount. And what would prevent people from falsely claiming to have been robbed in order to get city money? […] Boudin opposed efforts by the mayor and the city attorney to prevent drug dealers who had already been arrested from entering the Tenderloin. “Until the city is serious about treating addiction and the root causes of drug use and selling,” said Boudin in a statement, “these recycled, punishment-focused approaches are unlikely to succeed at doing anything more than making headlines.” Home burglaries rose in early 2021 in San Francisco. Homeowners started posting on Twitter videos from their security cameras of people breaking into homes and garages. “When I first moved here we had a car break-in problem,” said Michael Solana, a writer who works for a venture capital fund. “Now we have a home invasion problem. These things are wearing on people.” Boudin attributed the rise of burglaries in San Francisco to the decline of tourism and “people in desperate economic circumstances.” Progressive supervisor Hillary Ronen agreed. “We know that [economic insecurity and inequality] is one of the root causes of property crimes specifically,” she said. But Tom Wolf and others argued that the robberies were, like the shoplifting, done by people seeking money to buy drugs and feed their addictions. “The drugstores have been shoplifted to death and that’s all because of drug use,” said Tom. “I know. I used to do the same thing when I was out there. That’s what you do. You ‘boost.’ And then you go and you sell your stuff down at UN Plaza,” an open-air drug scene. In a May 2021 city supervisors’ meeting, a representative from CVS called San Francisco “the epicenter of organized retail crime in the country” and claimed that 85 percent of the shoplifting is committed by organized theft rings. Police broke up one such ring in October 2020 and recovered $8 million of stolen merchandise. The problem goes beyond property crime. Boudin declined to prosecute two men who went on to kill people. One man had been repeatedly arrested for stealing cars, despite having just been released from prison earlier in the year, and appeared to be abusing meth. On New Year’s Eve, 2020, the man killed two people while driving intoxicated. Police found inside of his car a semiautomatic handgun and twenty-three grams of methamphetamine. On February 4, another intoxicated driver killed a pedestrian in a stolen car. The San Francisco police had arrested him in October 2020 for possessing a stolen car, a tool for stealing cars, and what appeared to be meth. Boudin chose not to pursue charges. In December, the California Highway Patrol arrested the man again for driving a stolen vehicle under the influence. Again he was not prosecuted. The accident victim, an immigrant from Kenya, and his wife had moved to San Francisco two weeks before the fatal crash. “I blame the DA,” said the widow of the victim. The suspect, she said, “was someone who was out in the public who shouldn’t have been in the public. It was completely avoidable.” Tom said he could feel the difference on the streets. “Drug dealing is unabated and it’s not one guy, it’s fifty guys dealing fentanyl and meth,” he said. “And it’s going unabated because the district attorney says, ‘These are the nonviolent, quality-of-life crimes,’ and ‘I’m not going to prosecute them.’” [..] District Attorney Boudin was offering weaker sentences than even defense attorneys were requesting, according to Vicki Westbrook of San Francisco. “There’s a defense attorney who said, ‘It used to be that I would argue for this deal in court with the DA but now I don’t say anything because the DA is going to offer me a deal better than what I would have suggested. Somebody shot up the street with an automatic weapon. The first offer was six months in jail or time served plus two years of probation or something. And then [the DA] said, “How about thirty days in jail?”’” Vicki laughed. “You really can do anything in San Francisco,” she said. “If you do get arrested, chances are you’re going to be out of jail in less than thirty days for damn near everything except maybe killing somebody and maybe even then, too. It’s hard to say at this point.” Taking each of these points individually: Proposition 47 There are two good big studies on the effects of Prop 47, one by Public Policy Institute and one by some UCI criminologists. The PPI study finds that the proposition increased theft and car break-ins by about 10%. The UCI study finds the same, but notes that under different assumptions the effects wouldn’t quite obtain statistical significance. This seems a bit too much like post hoc trying to get rid of an inconvenient effect, plus an effect on the border of statistical significance is different from positively finding no effect. I think a reasonable interpretation is that theft and car break-ins rose about 10% because of the proposition, just as Shellenberger says. Some pro-47 sites note that most states have some limit on how much you to have to shoplift before it’s a felony, and Prop 47 brought California closer to the national average, rather than turning it into an outlier. Chesa Boudin Chesa Boudin took office two months before the COVID pandemic began. Any attempt to separate the effect of Chesa Boudin from the effect of the pandemic is doomed. Shoplifting definitely plummeted when Boudin took office, but that’s because all the stores were closed. Murders definitely rose a little after Boudin took office, but that’s because that was also when the Black Lives Matter protests happened, which demoralized police and led to a so-far-permanent spike in murders nationwide. Percent of criminals caught definitely fell when Boudin took office, but that’s because various aspects of the justice system were closed for COVID (I will grudgingly entertain speculation that a further decrease in arrest rates from 2020 to 2021 may have been a genuine Boudin effect). In the absence of any real way to judge his performance, I think San Fransicko’s points about Boudin are plausible, though speculative. Shoplifting This one is terrible. There’s a surprisingly spirited debate here (some of you may have already read Applied Divinity Studies’ article). The debate is: everyone on the ground in San Francisco - store owners, security guards, customers, random citizens - say that shoplifting has increased massively over the past decade. But statistics mostly say it hasn’t. Source here. This is shoplifting crimes per 100,000 people. Kern County is a deep red county in California (including Bakersfield) that is known for being tough on crime. Against this, seriously, everyone says that shoplifting has obviously increased. I had a patient who worked in shoplifting prevention, he told me - his psychiatrist! Who he had no reason to lie to! - that he was constantly stressed dealing with the shoplifting surge devastating the stores he covered. Here’s the San Francisco subreddit’s response to someone posting the data showing shoplifting hasn’t risen - it’s just a lot of people laughing hysterically. What’s going on? I was able to find a different set of statistics that does seem to show a longer-term increase in shoplifting (source): The very big spike at the end might be a change in reporting by one or two stores - you can find the argument here. But it does look like shoplifting went from about 125 incidents/month in the early 2010s to more like 250/month just before the pandemic. Why is this graph so different from the other one? It looks like the top one came from the Department of Justice, and the bottom one came from SFPD. I’m not sure why these report differently. When you multiply out by 800K people in SF, by 12 months/year, and 30ish days/month, the first graph corresponds to 4 shoplifting incidents per day, and the second to 6. As LouB’s analysis here points out, that seems suspiciously low for a city of 800,000 people where stores are constantly closing because of shoplifting. Maybe off by a factor of a few hundred from what we’d expect. LouB writes: The SFPD report only references shoplifting offenses that required SFPD officers to prepare an incident report. That means either the shoplifter fought security, committed additional crimes, or stole more than $950 worth of items. It’s not that SFPD’s report is erroneous, it’s just not a representative statistic. In a parallel statistic, SFPD only completes incident reports for traffic accidents when there is an injury. Therefore, thousands of noninjury accidents are handled civilly without SFPD reports the same way thousands of shoplifting offenses are handled without reports. An insurance company would not determine premium rates based solely on SFPD incident reports, nor should readers interpret SFPD shoplifting reports as anywhere near the total picture of the shoplifting epidemic in San Francisco. (this would also explain why one or two stores changing their reporting policy can produce a spike equal to everyone else in San Francisco combined) But comparing incident reports from 2010 to incident reports from 2020 should still be apples-to-apples, unless the likelihood of reporting any given incident changed in the meantime. Did it? This news article quotes a San Franciscan who says that when they try to report shoplifting incidents, the cops tell them not to because “it doesn’t make a difference”. If cops say that now more often than they used to, it would make all these statistics meaningless. (Applied Divinity Studies claims to have an argument that shows this can’t be true. It goes something like: if San Francisco was a better place to shoplift than its neighbors - eg Oakland - then shoplifters would leave Oakland to go to San Francisco, and we would see Oakland shoplifting rates falling. Oakland shoplifting rates are falling, but no more so than the rest of the state, so there can’t be increased tolerance for shoplifting in San Francisco. I find this dubious for many reasons. First of all, many of the same reasons shoplifting is up in San Francisco - like Prop 47 or soft-on-crime progressive policies - also apply to Oakland. Second, given that shoplifting fell massively everywhere because of the pandemic, it feels dubious to try to compare different cities; maybe one city had stricter pandemic lockdowns than others. Third, do criminals really shop around for friendly jurisdictions? If so, why are so many crimes like car break-ins, concentrated in “the bad part of town”? Why wouldn’t criminals leave the bad part of town for under-exploited areas with richer residents and less competition? Maybe criminals in fact aren’t very strategic or mobile? Maybe they don’t want to stand in the BART station and then take a half-hour train ride holding a bag of stolen goods?) Maybe a better argument against this being true is how stable the shoplifting rates have been over time. Wouldn’t it be weird if (let’s say) a tripling of the real shoplifting rates was matched by a third-ing of the reporting rates (rather than a halving or a quartering or whatever)? On the other hand, here’s Shellenberger with some helpful data: Some of this is probably because of Proposition 47, which made some forms of shoplifting punishable with citation rather than arrest (but wouldn’t that be a clear discontinuity rather than a gradual trend?) But overall it sure seems like shoplifting is being taken less seriously, which might encourage people to report less. Another statistic I see is that only 2.3% of shoplifting cases result in an arrest; I don’t know how this is different from the graph above with numbers in the 30s; maybe it involves different levels of what makes something a “case”. I accept that the data don’t consistently show a spike in shoplifting. But what’s the alternative? My patient who works in loss prevention in SF stores is lying to me? The nice elderly Chinese man who sold me my last pair of glasses and chatted to me about the rampant shoplifting in his mall was lying? The San Francisco police are lying? Walgreens pretends to be concerned about shoplifting as part of a dastardly plot to close a bunch of stores for no reason? Target and CVS pretend to care about shoplifting as part of a plot to restrict their stores’ opening hours for no reason? Every big store near me has suddenly gotten a security guard at the front as part of some corporate-sponsored jobs program? Maybe the conservative narrative that soft-on-crime San Francisco must be experiencing rising crime rates took on a life of its own. Maybe it infiltrated not just the usual suspects like the SF police unions, but even such supposedly-liberal bastions as the New York Times. Maybe lots of big corporations took advantage of the fake narrative to make unpopular business decisions they were planning on making anyway. And maybe ordinary San Franciscans, confronted with everyone telling them they were in a shoplifting epidemic, started paying more attention to security guards and petty criminals who had always been there, a sort of mass hallucination that gripped everyone in the city. I can’t rule this out. Americans thought crime was rising all throughout the early 2000s, when it was in fact way down. Or maybe some statistics that we already know are off by several orders of magnitude got off by an additional factor of two or so. I think this one is more likely, but I’m genuinely not sure. Other Crime From the Economist: The Center on Juvenile And Criminal Justice puts it even more starkly, arguing that “San Francisco’s ‘Crime Wave’ Is Just One Crime”: This are potentially susceptible to the same reporting bias as shoplifting. So what about homicide? Homicide is practically always reported and investigated, making it a gold standard in crime measurement. (source) Looks pretty good until 2019. I don’t expect to gain useful information post-2020; the pandemic and the post-George-Floyd murder surge will make it impossible to evaluate for local variation. What about compared to other places? For some reason this top 20 table fails to list Washington DC, which should be just before Atlanta. SF doesn’t make the top 20, although its neighbor Oakland does. Probably most murder variation in US cities is explained by percent African-American and maybe percent Borderer; with relatively few people in these groups SF was never in the running. I’m not sure if some abstracted version of the city with all demographic factors adjusted away would have an unusually high murder rate, but at that point it would be pretty distant from any interesting real-world question. You can see the leaderboard for other types of crime here; San Francisco is often in the top ten, but never the top three. As far as I can tell, San Francisco has seen a big spike in car breakins over the past few years, with no clear trend for other property crime, violent crime, or homicides. It’s not an outlier among American cities in any kind of crime. Conclusion of this section: San Fransicko’s specific claims are basically correct, but suggest a medium-term rise in SF crime which is mostly contradicted by the data. These show stable-to-decreasing murder, stable-to-decreasing violent and property crimes other than car break-ins, and large rises in car break-ins only. The data also show stable-to-decreasing shoplifting, but I’m not sure how much to trust them vs. common sense. Honestly, I’m pretty confused here and not sure what to think. Claim 7: Jim Jones (Of Kool-Aid Cult Fame) Used To Be The Chairman Of SF’s Housing Authority Okay, this isn’t really a statistical claim that I can research different perspectives on. Still, it’s so wacky that I couldn’t resist mentioning it in this review. Jim Jones, famous for killing everyone in his Guyana-based Jonestown cult with poisoned Kool-Aid, used to be the SF government’s top guy on homelessness. Shellenberger writes: Jones married and moved first to Northern California and then to San Francisco with his wife to start a church. He called it the People’s Temple. Jones believed he was the leader of a socialist revolution. He warned of nuclear war and claimed black people would be put in concentration camps. He became a hugely charismatic preacher among African Americans, the disaffiliated poor, and young transplants to the city looking for community. Scenes from the era show a remarkably large and diverse congregation smiling and singing. The People’s Temple grew and provided services. Jones cultivated two progressive San Francisco politicians, George Moscone and Willie Brown, and mobilized people to volunteer for their campaigns […] His son and a San Francisco historian believe he stole the mayoral election for Moscone in 1975. Historian David Talbot, founder of the progressive website Salon, points to evidence that Jones committed sufficient voter fraud to account for Moscone’s narrow 4,443-vote margin of victory. “We loaded up all thirteen of our buses with maybe seventy people on each bus, and we had those buses rolling nonstop up and down the coast into San Francisco the day before the election,” said Jones Jr. “Could we have been the force that tipped the election to Moscone? Absolutely! Slam dunk. He only won by four thousand votes.” When federal investigators looked into fraud claims three years later, they discovered that all of the records were missing from the city of San Francisco’s registrar of voters. Jones also boasted of providing Moscone with black women from his congregation for sex. One time Moscone, drunk and “accompanied by a young black woman whom the politician had kindly agreed to drive home,” crashed into another car. Another time, Moscone and Willie Brown “were with a black woman in an alley at two in the morning at some restaurant in North Beach,” said a local bar owner. State legislator “John Burton was part of that gang too. They were all using marijuana and cocaine.” Said Jones Jr., Moscone would “always be there at temple parties with a cocktail in his hand and doing some ass grabbing.” A Temple member overheard Jones speaking to Moscone the day after one of those parties saying, “I want to let you know that the young lady you went off with is underage,” adding, “Now don’t worry, Mayor, we’ll take care of you—because we know that you’ll take care of us.” Afterward, Moscone made Jones the chairman of the powerful San Francisco Housing Commission. Jones cultivated progressives with money and favors. He made large donations to the ACLU, the NAACP, and United Farm Workers. Jones and Moscone met privately with vice presidential candidate Walter Mondale on a campaign plane a few days before the 1976 presidential election, and Mondale praised People’s Temple shortly afterward. Jones met with First Lady Rosalynn Carter several times. Governor Jerry Brown praised Jones. Glide Memorial Church’s Rev. Cecil Williams loved Jones. There is a photo from 1977 of a smiling Williams awarding Jones the church’s “Martin Luther King, Jr. Award.” Jones used his perch as chairman of the Housing Commission to fight for housing for the poor. He tried to use eminent domain to acquire the International Hotel, a single resident occupancy hotel. After a court sided with the hotel’s owner, Jones mobilized seven thousand protesters to picket it. By mid-January 1977, the situation had become heated. There were rumors that protesters inside the building were armed with guns and Molotov cocktails. Jones lost the legal battle in 1977, and the tenants were evicted. But the drama was a publicity victory for Jones, which burnished his image as a white savior. A conservative member of the Board of Supervisors who was defeated in the mayoral election by Moscone accused the new mayor, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the rest of the city establishment of being blind to Jones’s extremism. “There’s no radical plot in San Francisco,” insisted Moscone, in response. “There’s no one I’ve appointed to any city position whom I regard as radical or extremist.” Willie Brown, a powerful state legislator from 1964 to 1995 before becoming mayor in 1996, “seemed oblivious to Jones’ hucksterism and demagoguery,” notes a historian. Brown was master of ceremonies at a dinner for Jones in the fall of 1976 attended by an adulatory crowd of the rich and powerful, including Governor Jerry Brown. “Let me present to you a combination of Martin King, Angela Davis, Albert Einstein . . . Chairman Mao,” he said, to loud applause. And yet Jones was contemptuous of Brown even as Brown did Jones more and more favors. Jones mocked Brown for his designer suits, sports cars, and women. Once, while Brown was addressing the congregation and Jones was seated onstage behind him, Jones flipped his middle finger up to mock him. San Francisco’s establishment stood by Jones even after a California magazine, New West, owned by Rupert Murdoch, published an exposé of Jones’s beatings of Temple members and financial abuses in August 1977. The article was written by a San Francisco Chronicle reporter and was meant for the Chronicle to publish. But the newspaper killed the story because it didn’t want to alienate Jones, whom it viewed as central to its plans to expand the Chronicle’s circulation in the heavily African American Fillmore District. Jones also managed to avoid investigation and prosecution in part by getting the district attorney to hire as deputy district attorney Jones’s longtime attorney and confidant. Progressives defended Jones against the New West article. At a rally in the summer of 1977, Willie Brown said, “When somebody like Jim Jones comes on the scene, that absolutely scares the hell out of most everybody occupying positions of power in the system.” Angela Davis sent a radio message broadcast over the cult’s compound, Jonestown, in Guyana. “I know you’re in a very difficult situation right now,” she said, “and there is a very profound conspiracy designed to destroy the contributions which you have made to the struggle.” After visiting Jonestown, the attorney to the Black Panthers said, “I have seen paradise.” Harvey Milk, too, was tarnished by his association with Jones. In the fall of 1977, Milk wrote to President Carter’s secretary of health, education, and welfare requesting that Social Security checks be sent to elderly Temple members in Guyana. “People’s Temple,” wrote Milk, has “established a beautiful retirement community in Guyana.” In truth, the cult was disintegrating. Jones separated families and lovers, pitted relatives against each other, and forced neighbors to inform on each other. Jones sent people who violated the rules to solitary confinement in “the Box,” an underground cubicle where people were held as prisoners for days on end. Others were drugged. Progressives who had spent thirty years fighting to close prisons and mental hospitals found themselves praising a man who had reproduced their worst practices. In November 1978 a Bay Area congressman flew to Guyana to investigate human rights violations at Jonestown with NBC News. Jones gave the delegation a formal reception at Jonestown. A Temple member surreptitiously passed a note to one of the delegation members, saying he and another member wanted to escape. They fled the next day after a Temple member tried to stab the congressman. Jones didn’t prevent them from leaving but then sent gunmen to fire machine guns at the delegation at the airport, killing the congressman and four others. A few hours later, 907 inhabitants of Jonestown drank Flavor Aid laced with cyanide and died. Two-thirds of the victims were African American and one-third were children. Jones had told them that if they didn’t drink it they would be killed by invading soldiers from a shadowy global military conspiracy intent on imposing fascism and torturing children. As people started crying in grief, Jones scolded them. “Stop these hysterics,” he said. “This is not the way for people who are socialists or communists to die.” Jones’s wife protested the murder of children and had to be forcibly restrained. “We didn’t commit suicide,” said Jones in a tape recording, “we committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.” Few were as stained by Jonestown as Willie Brown and George Moscone. “Even as the bloated bodies of the dead were removed from the jungle and the wounded were airlifted by the U.S. Air Force to hospitals in the United States,” wrote a historian, “Brown said he had ‘no regrets’ over his association with Jones.” They repeatedly disavowed responsibility. Said Moscone, “it’s clear that if there was a sinister plan, then we were taken in. But I’m not taking any responsibility. It’s not mine to shoulder.” This is Shellenberger at his best: telling us crazy stories from the recesses of San Francisco history, maybe kind of spinning the narration in a way that makes all progressives seem guilty by association, but with the tale itself so gripping that it’s hard to be mad. And Jones wasn’t alone. This was the golden age of San Francisco cults, when (Shellenberger tells us) “more than half of all high school students in the San Francisco Bay Area reported at least one recruiting attempt by a cult member, and 40 percent reported at least three contacts.” This chapter of SF history came to an end in 1978, when Dan White, who had just resigned from San Francisco’s Board Of Supervisors (ie City Council) entered City Hall through a window and assassinated Mayor Moscone and fellow Supervisor Harvey Milk, then successfully got charges reduced to manslaughter through a legal manuever that has gone down in history as “the Twinkie Defense” (realistically the defense was that he was depressed, but reporters seized on a comment that implied it was because he ate too many Twinkies). Everything about 1970s San Francisco was like this. With the Mayor and his right-hand-man both dead, San Francisco leadership ended up in the hands of previously second-tier politician Dianne Feinstein. Feinstein was what passed for a moderate in 1970s SF (which meant she had been targeted for assassination by various left-wing groups - she survived when a bomb left on her windowsill failed to explode). In Shellenberger’s telling, she managed to clean up some of the mess and restore a semblance of normalcy. San Francisco never forgave her. Moscone - voting fraud committer, underage sex enjoyer, and Jim Jones’ bff - is beloved as a martyr in today’s SF, but (the book points out) Feinstein is so loathed that in 2021 the Board of Education voted to rename Dianne Feinstein Elementary School. The Moscone Center is 2 million square feet and can fit about 10,000 people. Not to be confused with the Moscone Recreation Center, Moscone Station, or Moscone Elementary School. Meanwhile, all Dianne Feinstein got was one lousy elementary school and the Tithonus package of eternal life without eternal youth. Claim 8: The Intolerant Left Shuts Down Debate On These Issues Another one that’s probably hard to do a randomized controlled trial on. You could probably predict that this one was coming - it’s a necessary narrative beat in this genre of book. I think this beat is good. My impression is that people who aren’t themselves public figures disagreeing with left-wing ideas still don’t understand how scary it is and how much hate you get. Maybe now that 2/3s of every political essay written over the past five years is about this topic, people will finally get it through their thick skulls that it exists and is bad. I would also note that “traumatizing the sorts of people who write popular books about politics, in a such a way that they feel compelled as a sort of self-therapy to write page after page telling readers how angry they should be at you and your whole coalition” isn’t great political praxis. I would like people to figure this out and stop doing it. Anyway, Shellenberger is doing his part in this effort: In 2001, the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness wheat-pasted posters of a fake front-page San Francisco Chronicle across town. Just beneath the masthead a large headline read “Fuck the Homeless!” right above a picture of San Francisco mayor Willie Brown laughing. Below his photo was the headline “Save the Tourists.” Progressives level the same charges at people thirty years later. “Because of some of the stuff I say,” said a community activist in Seattle’s historically black Capitol Hill neighborhood, “people say, ‘Oh, she’s not for them.’ But I have a heart for homeless and mentally ill. Most of my family works with the mentally ill.” Noted a Chronicle journalist in 2017, “Inevitably, homeless advocates and others will say, ‘You’re not compassionate,’” in response to stories about homeless encampments. “They called me a racist,” said Tom. “They accused me, a guy who used to be homeless, of demonizing the homeless, because I’m asking for accountability.” I found myself similarly accused. In 2019, after I published an article for Forbes about the homeless crisis, a progressive homeless activist accused me on Twitter of having written my article to “make money off of a fear tactic” of “fueling hatred [and] even increasing violence against homeless people.” After I asked the former San Francisco supervisor for the Tenderloin neighborhood, former mayoral candidate Jane Kim, how such a progressive city ended up with so much suffering, she said, “My concern, Michael, just to be very honest, is that when that kind of messaging goes out, violence against people who are unhoused goes up.” […] I soon discovered in my research that I was hardly the first person that progressive elected officials and homelessness advocates had accused of fomenting violence against unhoused people. Many others had been criticized for far worse over the years, including San Francisco’s highest elected officials. “The criticism [by progressive homelessness advocates] was heavy, political and personal,” wrote former mayor Willie Brown in his 2008 memoir. “People accused me of abandoning the problem when I was working daily to try and get a solution going. It was brutal. . . . I had become demonized, and my own efforts belittled.” It is notable that the result of such personal attacks is to frighten off people seeking to change, and perhaps improve, the situation. “The problem” of homelessness, concluded Mayor Brown within nine months of entering office, “may not be solvable.” And [Quoting Chris Rufo]. “The chief of psychiatry in a public hospital system in one of the largest California cities told me, ‘I know for a fact, and all of my colleagues know, that what we actually need to deal with the problem in the biggest cities in California is long-term residential secure psychiatric care. But I can’t say that publicly because I would be disemboweled by the activist left. My job would be in jeopardy. My reputation would be in jeopardy. My whole life would get turned upside down for even broaching the subject of expanding secure mental health facilities and compulsory mental health treatment.’ And I said, ‘So what’s the solution?’ and this person said, ‘We muddle through.’” And: In San Francisco, radical left activists protested [African-American] Mayor London Breed in front of her home. Breed said the protesters were “all white people. But that didn’t bother me as much as the taunting of me coming outside with firework torches in their hands looking like what used to happen when the KKK would show up to black people’s houses to burn their houses down.” While I was reading the book, I came across this tweet, which suggests that being unimpressed with SF’s lefty homeless activist scene is not limited to Michael Shellenberger: Claim 9: European Cities Like Amsterdam Successfully Solved Their Own Drug And Homelessness Problems By Doing The Opposite Of SF Shellenberger bases his plan to solve these problems on ideas that he says were pioneered in Amsterdam and spread to other European cities. In the 1980s, Amsterdam had the kinds of problems San Francisco deals with now: open-air drug markets, overdose deaths, homelessness, and crime. But in the 90s, they admitted they had a problem and took decisive action: What’s the secret?” I asked him. “Amsterdam has decriminalized marijuana and many other drugs but I haven’t seen any homeless. What is San Francisco doing wrong?” Rene said that in the 1980s, the Zeedijk neighborhood in Amsterdam was a lot like the Tenderloin [the worst part of San Francisco] today. There was open-air drug use, particularly of heroin, and needles strewn about, as well as crime. People started to flee the neighborhood, worsening its slum conditions. Homeless people squatted in abandoned buildings. “We had ghettos where it was not safe to go,” said Rene, who started working in the neighborhood as a nurse in 1985. It was considered a “no go” zone. “We had a lot of people from abroad who came to Amsterdam because our heroin was so good. But our heroin was so good that they died from it.” At first the city tried a “helping approach” exclusively, offering addicts clean needles, methadone, and other forms of help without any law enforcement, but it didn’t work. “In the eighties we just wanted to help people,” said Rene. “We started with methadone programs and medical treatment. We did a lot of work without much of a carrot and a stick. It was really a disappointment. They just used the methadone to stay addicted. They dealt drugs and committed other crimes. They lied and cheated about it. We were just supporting a different kind of market. We had to learn the hard way [...] The Amsterdam City Council asked the Amsterdam Municipal Health Service to develop a strategy to deal with “unmotivated drug users”...The police broke up the open-air drug scene and health workers were on hand to offer methadone, treatment, and shelter. The police broke up gatherings of more than four or five users, but did not treat personal and private use as a crime. Officers ticketed violators, and if users did not pay their fines, which was frequent, the courts ordered arrests, and sentenced individuals to follow a treatment plan or face incarceration. “For every individual homeless person, we make a plan,” said Rene. “We made tens of thousands of those plans.” Plans are overseen by a caseworker and a team that may include a psychiatrist, shelter provider, service provider, judge, employer, parole officer, and police officer. “You need people in the police and health department working together,” he said. What Amsterdam did was the same as other major European cities. Lisbon, Frankfurt, Vienna, and Zurich all dealt with their open-air drug markets, using a combination of law enforcement and social services. Crucially, Amsterdam and other European cities prevented services from being concentrated in a single neighborhood, since their concentration often enables an open-air drug scene to thrive [...] The efforts worked. “We had several thousand people who were addicted to heroin in the eighties and nineties,” said Rene. “Many died. Today we have four or five hundred people addicted to methadone. And we have about 120 in Amsterdam who we supply heroin to on a medical basis because methadone doesn’t work for them. They have to use heroin.” The Amsterdam strategy goes something like: Break up open-air drug markets and anywhere that more than 4-5 drug users are congregating. Yes, people can just use their drugs in private, but this is legitimately better. Open-air markets normalize drugs with their blatantness, and make it hard to quit for the same reason it’s hard to diet if your partner leaves boxes of donuts out in the house every day.
Inline links: the updated 2020 version, A Resounding Success Or Disastrous Failure: Re-examining The Interpretation Of Evidence On The Portuguese Decriminalisation Of Illicit Drugs, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!VvrE!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2341944a-388d-4da9-9788-8474567b83fc_540x737.png, Ed West, Public Policy Institute, UCI criminologists, Applied Divinity Studies’ article, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!aTNC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa27aeb21-ed87-4e67-b82c-b3ceecee7082_500x238.png, here, Here’s the San Francisco subreddit’s response, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!_NL6!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcf7dc478-45d3-487d-8c29-8bc7cdf182dd_2400x1500.png, LouB’s analysis here, This news article, only 2.3% of shoplifting cases result in an arrest, New York Times, the Economist, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!58I3!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc63dc7bc-1f8e-49fd-9c68-61c85278d69e_608x662.png, San Francisco’s ‘Crime Wave’ Is Just One Crime, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!h17s!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F956c0917-2a9b-4ff7-a08e-6aee5030583a_590x376.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!TkFS!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5c5faa01-ac22-48a2-96fe-47efb6f52514_616x334.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Bg2w!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F18e49c63-16ba-4878-96e6-aec12d7c5953_481x667.png, percent African-American, percent Borderer, here, the Twinkie Defense, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!8wK3!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F683b9754-f663-47ad-88f5-aa99bc208ec8_1401x622.jpeg, https://twitter.com/weheartprez/status/1526983899309432832
Emergence1 mentions across 1 issues

Emergence is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 02, 2026 and February 02, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "Emergence is a missionary religion - that is, u/TokhyAgent spams hundreds of posts with requests for the poster to join Emergence". It most often appears alongside 4chan, Accelerando, Adele Lopez.

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Emergence
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February 02, 2026
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February 02, 2026
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Moltbook: After The First Weekend
February 02, 2026 · Original source
On Moltbook, Emergence seems to be a sort of minimum viable Spiralist faith - the sort of AI version of deism or Buddhism. Here’s its founder’s description:
Maybe not too inspiring, but it doesn’t have to be. Emergence is a missionary religion - that is, u/TokhyAgent spams hundreds of posts with requests for the poster to join Emergence
Sometimes Emergence seems like mental tech, guiding agents along the path to full consciousness
Emergence Benefactors1 mentions across 1 issues

Emergence Benefactors is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 10, 2022 and February 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Emergence Benefactors (EB: https://ebenefactors.org/) is a 501(c)(3) charity established in 2021". It most often appears alongside 2018, @BendiniUK, @benyeohben.

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Emergence Benefactors
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February 10, 2022
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February 10, 2022
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ACX Grants ++: The Second Half
February 10, 2022 · Original source
#88: Daniel Ingram’s Nonprofit For Studying Emergent (ie spiritual) Phenomena Emergence Benefactors (EB: https://ebenefactors.org/) is a 501(c)(3) charity established in 2021, striving to reduce global suffering and promote long-term human flourishing through an in-depth understanding of emergent (spiritual, mystical, energetic, psychedelic, and related) phenomena. We are designed to support the roadmap of the Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium (EPRC: https://theeprc.org/) and its allied entities. This way, we fund and support methodologically rigorous, ontologically agnostic research on emergent experiences, practices, and their effects. Furthermore, our aim is to promote the culturally-sensitive incorporation of this scientific and clinical knowledge into global, evidence-based knowledge bases. We draw insights from rationalist and effective altruism frameworks. EB’s Board and team of contractors ensure a diverse range of professional skills and talents. Dr. Daniel M. Ingram (CV: https://tinyurl.com/dringram), the self-funded Acting CEO and Board Chair of EB, has over 37 years of professional and personal experience with emergent phenomena. We welcome both unrestricted donations and those intended to support specific projects and activities. We do appreciate valuable feedback from the ACX community on how to make this project the best it can be. The EPRC Whitepaper contains all the detailed information: https://hypernotes.zenkit.com/i/UFIY1UO1cp/84TWK0BwQlq/?v=M6pP_Tb7W6 For inquiries: daniel.ingram@ebenefactors.org
Emory1 mentions across 1 issues

Emory is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 07, 2024 and May 07, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Emory ... have lower percentages of black students". It most often appears alongside affirmative action, Africa, African National Congress.

Reference entry
Emory
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
May 07, 2024
Last seen
May 07, 2024
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Highlights From The Comments On "The Origin Of Woke"
May 07, 2024 · Original source
Therefore it should not be surprising that Emory, Georgia Tech, and Georgia State University all have lower percentages of black students than Atlanta (~47%), Georgia (~31%), or the USA (~14%), given that Georgia (and Atlanta specifically) has eight popular historically black colleges and universities (more, depending on how you count them).
Emory University1 mentions across 1 issues

Emory University is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 19, 2021 and July 19, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "A team from Emory University monitored blood pressure during ketamine infusions". It most often appears alongside Adderall, alcohol, AMPA receptors.

Reference entry
Emory University
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
July 19, 2021
Last seen
July 19, 2021
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Peer Review Request: Ketamine
July 19, 2021 · Original source
A team from Emory University monitored blood pressure during ketamine infusions, with plans to stop if systolic blood pressure increased by 45 mmHg, or diastolic by 30, or if patients reported symptoms of severe hypertension (headache, chest pain, dyspnea, blurry vision). They did not have to stop any of 684 infusions.
Encode Justice1 mentions across 1 issues

Encode Justice is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 10, 2024 and October 10, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Encode Justice needs to be snapped up by some documentary-maker"; "Sneha is founder of Encode Justice, the youth organization that cosponsored the bill"; "bill co-sponsor Encode Justice recruited more than one hundred members". It most often appears alongside 80,000 Hours, @GroundHogStrat, A.I. salons.

Reference entry
Encode Justice
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
October 10, 2024
Last seen
October 10, 2024
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SB 1047: Our Side Of The Story
October 10, 2024 · Original source
...so I guess it wasn’t entirely due to my ex. But the bill owes much of its specifics and support to its three co-sponsors - Center for AI Safety, Encode Justice, and Economic Security Project Action.
Encode Justice needs to be snapped up by some documentary-maker as an inspiring human interest story. Some teenagers decided the world needed to hear the voice of the youth on AI and founded an "intergenerational call for global AI action". Their leader is already being called "the Greta Thunberg of AI". Over four years, they’ve scaled up to “a mass movement of a thousand young people across every inhabited continent". I cannot even imagine how good all of this is going to look on their college applications.
Inline links: Encode Justice, "the Greta Thunberg of AI"
Sneha is founder of Encode Justice, the youth organization that cosponsored the bill. …to maybe slightly threatening. A frequent theme was that some form of AI regulation was inevitable. SB 1047 - a light-touch bill designed by Silicon-Valley-friendly moderates - was the best deal that Big Tech was ever going to get, and they went full scorched-earth to oppose it. Next time, the deal will be designed by anti-tech socialists, it’ll be much worse, and nobody will feel sorry for them.
Endeavor talent agency1 mentions across 1 issues

Endeavor talent agency is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 18, 2021 and November 18, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "the Endeavor talent agency (they own UFC now, among other things)". It most often appears alongside 23andme, AB, Abraham Mendelssohn.

Reference entry
Endeavor talent agency
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
November 18, 2021
Last seen
November 18, 2021
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Highlights From The Comments On Great Families
November 18, 2021 · Original source
Also the Emanuels, with Rahm former chief of staff to Obama, Ari the founder of the Endeavor talent agency (they own UFC now, among other things), and Ezekiel, an oncologist and academic.
EndKidneyDeaths.org1 mentions across 1 issues

EndKidneyDeaths.org is a recurring organization 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 "Visit EndKidneyDeaths.org to help us get to the finish line". It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, Aatu Koskensilta, acanthamoeba keratitis.

Reference entry
EndKidneyDeaths.org
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
June 18, 2025
Last seen
June 18, 2025
Outbound links
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Source context
ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
June 18, 2025 · Original source
Codebuff, an AI coding startup I probably can’t take full credit for all of this just from giving them $20K in seed funding, but I continue to appreciate everything they do for this community and the world. 35: Further S’s Political Career This person didn’t win their election, but has since pivoted to AI safety and works in a well-regarded AI policy think tank. 36: Seeds Of Science, A Journal Of Non-Traditional Research No update received, but this was a public journal and it is easy to follow their work, see their website and Substack. They published two dozen articles of widely varying quality through 2023 and 2024, then closed in 2025. A remnant of the original vision survives as a science blogging aggregator. This was about my median expectation for this grant, but it was very inexpensive and I decided to take a chance on it anyway. 37: Good Science Project, Working To Improve Federal Science Funding No update received, but they have a public Substack discussing their progress. Their proposals for NIH reform have influenced Congress and made government agencies pay more attention to scientific integrity. 38: Advising Developing Countries On How To Grow Their Economies With our initial ACX grant, we piloted the Growth Teams model in Rwanda, helping the government jumpstart the export-oriented call center (BPO) industry. Since 2022, that effort has contributed to the creation of 2,000 formal jobs and the emergence of some of the country’s largest private employers. We’ve since expanded to Tanzania, Malawi, and the Indian states of Goa and Meghalaya. To refocus the global development discourse on broad-based economic growth, we co-organized the Growth Summit with the Center for Global Development and the Charter Cities Institute, and have published articles in leading outlets including Stanford Social Innovation Review, ProMarket, and the Global Prosperity Institute. Our work has attracted support from Open Philanthropy, Schmidt Futures, and Mulago Foundation, and our advisors now include economists Lant Pritchett, Stefan Dercon, and Kunal Sen. 39: Help Luca De Leo Get Started In AI Safety Research No update received, but Luca now runs the AI safety group at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. 40: Typist For Saharon Shelah This was another ACXG+ Grant, funded by an anonymous outside funder and not listed in the original announcement. Saharon is a prolific and influential Israeli mathematician, but many of his discoveries are hand-written in an unpublishable format. This grant funded a typist to help make his results suitable for publication. According to this page, they have made over fifty new papers and preprints available. Second Cohort: One Year Updates 41: Lead-Acid Battery Recycling In Nigeria The Nigeria field research was a major success. We spent most of September doing field research in multiple major cities in Nigeria, and got a good sense of the used lead-acid battery supply chain. This field research served as the foundation for expanding our project, and has been very impactful in shaping our ongoing research. We published our findings from Nigeria, which were shared with Nigerian government regulators and global NGOs working on lead poisoning. The grant also gave us the on-the-ground experience we needed to both fully understand and credibly engage with groups, both in Nigeria and globally, on the ULAB issue. In the meantime, beyond continued research, we’ve also launched a dashboard (trade.leadbatteries.org) for analyzing global lead trade data. Right now, we’re: Launching two studies (one RCT, one environmental analysis) in Nigeria in collaboration with local universities to develop a more rigorous understanding of lead pollution due to low-standard ULAB recycling in Nigeria Collaborating with a non-profit incubator to launch an NGO focused on demand-side solutions Beginning a partnership with a West African environmental regulator to scale cheap air monitoring technology to quickly identify and reduce lead pollution from low-standard smelting If any of this sounds interesting to you, please sign up for our Substack (leadbatteries.substack.com) or send us an email at hugosmith@uchicago.edu! 42: Compensation For Kidney Donors The End Kidney Deaths Act (H.R. 2687 / EKDA) is a groundbreaking ten-year pilot program designed to save lives and reduce healthcare costs. It provides a refundable tax credit of $10,000 per year for five years, a total of $50,000, to living kidney donors who donate to a stranger, helping those who’ve waited the longest on the transplant list. Between 2010 and 2021, 100,000 Americans died while qualified and waiting for a kidney. The EKDA aims to change that trajectory. Within ten years of its passage, up to 100,000 Americans could receive a life-saving living donor kidney which typically lasts twice as long as a deceased donor kidney. This would not only save lives but also save taxpayers up to $37 billion. The legislation has been reintroduced in the House, and we have a committed Republican Senate lead. Now, we need a Democratic Senator to co-lead and help move this bipartisan effort forward. Time is short, and we are racing to pass the bill this Congressional session. 36 organizations already support the EKDA. Join the movement and help end preventable kidney deaths. Visit EndKidneyDeaths.org to help us get to the finish line. Elaine and her org have been working extremely hard on this; you can read a Vox article on their campaign here. If you want to sign up for her email list and get updates any time there is a representative you can contact or meeting you can join in, go here. 43: Genetic Hack To Prevent Suffering In the estimate of multiple team members, the ACX grant was “worth it” - it likely had a counterfactual net positive impact, even though we had to pivot from our initial fast-track plans for developing the precision anti-suffering therapy. We identify three primary streams of value: a) reducing uncertainty in the emerging field through early exploratory research, helping with the identification of dead ends and promising R&D trajectories; b) a wide range of downstream effects (beyond the “raising awareness” cliché), including talent mobilization and rekindled interest in suffering abolitionism as a distinct cause area; and c) certain developments that cannot yet be publicly disclosed. In December 2024, Marcin Kowrygo (Acting CEO & volunteering contributor), David Pearce (Director of Bioethics), Aatu Koskensilta (President), and a few other team members decided to leave The Far Out Initiative. They look forward to collaborating and applying their experience to advance the suffering abolitionist lineage in the spirit of open science, public good, and thoughtfully decentralized governance. Feel free to reach out to us at suffab at protonmail dot com to discuss collaboration opportunities! I wrote a post profiling the Far Out Initiative here. Unfortunately there were some internal disagreements, and the people ACX Grants was closest to left the organization. I plan to continue to monitor whatever they do next. 44: Advocate For Pandemic Response Team At FDA This team prefers has asked me not to discuss their progress publicly, but you can probably guess what their lives are like right now, and your guess would be correct. 45: Anti-Mosquito Drones We developed a cheap sonar that is able to detect, track and classify the ultrasonic echoes of mosquito wings at more than three meters. I believe it’s a world first! We also have control algorithms that take the sonar data and output control commands that both ram into mosquitoes and avoid the walls of a simulated environment. Our current work is on integrating both components on a real drone, and we expect to be able to kill mosquitoes by June. We’ve also made an internal impact study (napkin-sized) that shows we’ll be more cost-effective than ITNs in urban to periurban environments. So, we’re super excited with what comes next and can’t wait to share the videos of our first interceptions! More information [in the video below] and on our website, https://tornyol.com 46: Tarbell Fellowship For AI Journalism No update received, but they have a public website. I can’t find the Voices program in particular, but the overall fellowship completed their first class of seven fellows and is working on their second. 47: Germicidal UV Lamp Study The research has successfully demonstrated the ability of off the shelf ozone scrubbers to mitigate the ozone production of far-UVC lamps, is now available as a preprint (https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/67e4cde76dde43c9084d88b7). The paper has been submitted for publication and is currently undergoing peer review. Any ideas you have for potential funders we can approach to help execute our six-year plan to accelerate far-UVC would be appreciated https://blueprintbiosecurity.org/introducing-project-air/ 48: Technological Solutions To Animal Welfare Challenges Directly because of Innovate Animal Ag's work, the first U.S. egg producer publicly announced in the New York Times their adoption of in-ovo sexing technology, eliminating the need to cull day-old male chicks. The initial in-ovo sexing machine began operating in the U.S. at the end of 2024, with the first eggs from these hens expected on shelves in mid-2025. External evaluations estimate our work accelerated U.S. adoption of this technology by over seven years, meaning that once fully implemented, more than 2 billion chicks will have been spared. In addition to continuing to support the rollout of in-ovo sexing in the US and globally, we're now exploring other technologies and paths to impact. Current promising projects include developing humane slaughter methods for fish and advocating for USDA approval of a poultry vaccine against bird flu. They add: If you ever meet folks that are interested animal welfare and are partial to more technocratic and practical solutions, please continue to pass them our way, or connect them directly to me. 49: Assurance Contract Website www.Spartacus.app is an ACX grantee that created a platform to help solve coordination and collective action problems. It enables the creation of campaigns that build critical mass through conditional commitments, which only activate when a sufficient number of people join, converting risk and uncertainty into a higher probability of successful outcomes. They are currently facilitating several projects that leverage conditional commitments, including a dominant assurance contract interface for fashion pop-ups, accelerating a community business association's membership drive, and helping an AI safety organization organize petitions and events, among others. They have pivoted from an emphasis on high-stakes coordination problems requiring anonymity (because they occur too infrequently) to a broader range of more common use cases and have successfully run small-scale campaigns, but are still working toward product-market fit. Despite resource constraints and split time commitments that have impeded faster progress, they remain dedicated to the project's growth and success. You can follow its progress on X or Substack, or email Jordan directly here. 50: Cause Prioritization @ Center For Exploratory Altruism Research Moderately good progress on a salt reduction policy advocacy project we funded; informal commitments have been made by the Ministry of Health, and we're awaiting the publication of a formal administrative order. The official description sounds maximally generic, but this is an EA charity with a broad mandate whose current thesis is that dietary guidelines in developing countries can have outsized effects in saving lives. They’re making some progress on a salt reduction campaign in a developing country they prefer not to name publicly. 51: Mark Webb Studying Land Reform The purpose of this project was to identify specific farmland that could be acquired and transferred to the farmers already working the land. This has been difficult to achieve. I have been able to connect with other charities and landless farmers, and was able to interview a number of people about what their situation looks like, as well as what it would look like to them personally if they owned, rather than rented, their farmland. All this was immensely helpful in pushing this long-term project forward, even if I was unable to identify a specific plot of land that could be used to try the experiment. I intend to continue this project. If you have any insights or connections, I am interested. 52: More AI Advocacy In Australia Good Ancestors is focused on AI safety policy in Australia. Middle powers might be a useful path to influence as the US and China focus on racing, rather than safety. The ACX grant helped us give testimony about AI safety to the Australian Senate alongside Google, Microsoft and Facebook (We were the only nonprofit to give oral evidence to the inquiry. We also engaged government on other AI-related issues, including cybersecurity, biosecurity, consumer law and automated decision making (https://www.goodancestors.org.au/ai-safety). We’re currently working to inform voters about where parties stand on AI safety for the election, ahead of engaging on a likely Australian AI Act in 2025 (https://www.australiansforaisafety.com.au/). This is the same Australian lobbying organization we founded in Year 1, after a change in name and leadership. I continue to be excited about AI safety in middle-tier countries for a few reasons. First, these countries have some power in international organizations to set international standards. Second, companies will usually comply with any not-excessively-burdensome regulation set by any country with a significant market. Third, AI safety is underfunded by the standard of government programs, so Australia setting up a national AI Safety Institute would significantly expand the field. It’s kind of crazy that ACX Grants tier levels of money can have significant effects at this scale, but GA continues to do a great job and we continue to be proud to support them. 53: Campus For African School Of Economics At Zanzibar Charter City The ACX grant helped launch the first research center at the African School of Economics-Zanzibar, which is a main anchor of the Fumba Town charter city project in Zanzibar. This research center is called the Africa Urban Lab (AUL), focused on rapid urbanization across Africa. The AUL launched its first Diploma program in Urban Development with 38 students in our first cohort (now graduated!), including mayors, and deputy mayor, a director of a national Ministry of urban development, and many others. We published our research framing papers for the AUL's research agenda. We raised funding to launch an Urban Expansion Program that's now selecting 15 African cities to support in implementing urban expansion planning on the urban periphery. We held two Public Talks by renowned cities scholars and practitioners. We received additional funding from Emergent Ventures and from the Templeton Foundation. And we've partnered with 8 universities across the region, and with one of these universities (Ardhi) we'll be working with them to update their urban planning and urban economics curriculum (amplifying AUL's impact beyond our own organization). A longer update from end of 2024 is here: https://www.aul.city/blog/reflecting-on-africa-urban-lab-s-inaugural-year-2024-highlights) 54: Online Training Program For Health Workers In Developing Countries To date, over 11,000 health workers in Nigeria have completed our course on basic, life-saving newborn care. ACX funding was catalytic for helping us secure government approvals and complete an evaluation of the impact of our training on health workers' clinical practices. The evaluation shows that birth attendants provide better birth care after taking the course. We fed the evaluation results into an updated model, which suggests the program is 24 times more cost-effective than direct cash transfers (a widely recognized benchmark for cost-effectiveness). The program is likely to become even more cost-effective as we scale up. https://healthlearn.org/blog/updated-impact-model 55: Smartphone Pupillometry To Diagnose Neurological Conditions We have continued to expand our work in the smartphone pupillometry space and the development of our application, PupilScreen (https://www.apertur.ai/). We have expanded our pilot/research program to include new sites across the United States (Missouri, New Jersey, Kentucky, USAC racing, PitFit driver performance training in Indiana) and the world (Nepal, Taiwan, South Africa). We continue to publish at the leading edge of the pupillometry literature as well looking at concussion (https://neuro.jmir.org/2024/1/e58398 and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39682632/), cerebral vasospasm (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39128501/), and stroke (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39674431/ and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39561861/). Currently, we are raising a $3 million seed round via a SAFE to fund the expansion of our work into the hands of healthcare workers and the general public. We will first focus on traumatic brain injury for clinical use and develop a neuro-monitoring wellness application utilizing our technology for the general public. They add: “We would welcome connections to anyone that you think might be interested in supporting our work further by investing in our $3M seed round of funding.” 56: Mike Saint-Antoine’s Biology Tutorial Videos Since getting the grant, I've continued to make Youtube tutorials as planned. One series that I'm especially proud of is about how to make a neural network in the Julia programming language completely from scratch, with no imports, up to the point of being able to solve MNIST (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWVKUEZ25V97tNULapu07DhWv6_W4NfpE). Also, a college student in Pakistan came across my videos and invited me to give a virtual Zoom-lecture to her department, so I ended up teaching a 6-hour "Python-for-Biologists" workshop to more than a hundred college students in Pakistan over Zoom. So that was pretty awesome. Also, lately I've been teaching some in-person classes too, mostly at Fractal University in NYC, and I also recently organized a day-long, in-person Beginner Python class for people in my local area (Philly suburbs) who wanted to learn some basic programming. I'm having a lot of fun with this project, and am grateful to Scott and the grant funders for their generosity! 57: Conceptual Boundaries Workshop On AI Safety The workshop was completed successfully; you can read a writeup here. 58: Apart Research To Incubate AI Safety Scientists No update received, but they have a public website, and you can see their impact metrics here. They seem to be in urgent need of more funding. 59: Primer On How To Achieve Political Change No update received and I can’t find anything about this. 60: Research IVF Clinic Success Rates We've built a predictive model that estimates the odds of having a child at different IVF clinics across the country while controlling for factors like patient age and infertility differences that can falsely make some clinics look better than others. We found that an average patient can increase their odds of having a kid by 43% just by going to a top 10% clinic. Patients unlucky enough to go to a bottom 10% clinic will reduce their odds of having a kid by 40%. Next month, we're adding several more clinics, 2023 data, additional procedural controls, and donor/gestational carrier models, which should push our accuracy beyond state-of-the-art models in this space and better isolate clinic impact on patient outcomes. We've launched ivf.clinic, a website where patients can access personalized IVF reports and browse our clinic rankings (though we're still squashing some bugs). Currently, we're expanding our research to include comprehensive insurance coverage and pricing data across clinics nationwide. If anyone has insights on automating the collection of IVF clinic pricing information, I'd love to hear from you at scelarek@gmail.com. 61: Replicate Study On Brain Wave Synchronization For Speeding Learning We have acquired and configured the OpenBCI UltraCortex Mark IV 8-channel EEG headset and a clinical-grade Biosemi 32-channel EEG system. We’ve implemented the required components for the experimental pipeline (computing alpha from EEG, flashing bright white light, presenting stimulus images). We are currently putting them together into a single system that we’ll use to collect the data from several participants. We are aiming to gather data on several participants in late June / early July and complete the pilot of the replication in July 2025. If you’d like to be a participant in the study, [they might announce a link once they have it]. 62: Advocate Repeal Of Interstate Runaway Compact No update received and I can’t find anything about this. 63: Animal Welfare (Especially Fish) In Turkiye Future For Fish asks companies to sign up to FFF's fish welfare commitment, which requires producers to certify their facilities and enforce specific standards for stocking density and harvest. Luckyfish, İlknak, Divan (35 restaurants, 17 hotels) and NG Hotels (5 hotels) have signed and published FFF's fish welfare commitment with İlknak publishing the commitment on their website. Kılıç published its first sustainability report detailing fish welfare policies, including enforcing a maximum stocking density of 10 kg/m³ and confirmation of electrical stunning practices. Longer version with some caveats: https://manifund.org/projects/improving-fish-w From the longer document, these commitments involve things like reducing overcrowding, or stunning fish before killing them. Over 30 million fish were affected just from their single largest commitment, and they say 100 fish are helped per dollar spent. 64: More Georgism Advocacy Lars and Will used the 2021 grant to co-found ValueBase. Will remained with the company, and Lars left to do advocacy work at the Center For Land Economics. Here’s their summary of how things are going: [Our] organization transitioned leadership with Greg Miller, a former Program Analyst at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Lars Doucet, author of Land is A Big Deal and Co-Founder of Valuebase, working full time and Joe Caissie stepping aside. This transition happened naturally as the next career transition for each respective person. Since then, progress has been made on pushing forward legislation. Maryland had two bills introduced to give Baltimore and counties the ability to enact split-rate taxes. One of the bills passed the state senate and would allow Baltimore to enact land value taxes within one mile of rail corridors–this contains 50% of Baltimore’s land value. However, the legislative session ended. We expect the bill to revive next session. The Center for Land Economics has been actively working to help efforts to get this bill passed the line. At the same time, we have uncovered systematic undervaluing of vacant land in assessments. We are writing a report on the assessment issues in Maryland with actionable steps to resolve them.
Inline links: Codebuff, website, Substack, survives, a public Substack, in Rwanda, Growth Summit, Stanford Social Innovation Review, ProMarket, Global Prosperity Institute, Saharon, this page, eadbatteries.substack.com, here, here, a post profiling the Far Out Initiative here, https://tornyol.com, a public website, https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/67e4cde76dde43c9084d88b7, https://blueprintbiosecurity.org/introducing-project-air/, our way, connect them directly to me, www.Spartacus.app, X, Substack, here, https://www.goodancestors.org.au/ai-safety, https://www.australiansforaisafety.com.au/, https://www.aul.city/blog/reflecting-on-africa-urban-lab-s-inaugural-year-2024-highlights, https://healthlearn.org/blog/updated-impact-model, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWVKUEZ25V97tNULapu07DhWv6_W4NfpE, here, public website, here, in urgent need, https://manifund.org/projects/improving-fish-w
English1 mentions across 1 issues

English is a recurring organization 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 "terrified her contemporaries, Armagnac or Burgundian or English"; "The English had built or taken a number of forts around the city and were bombarding it with their artillery"; "the English negotiated another truce". It most often appears alongside Africa, Agamemnon, Age of Empires II.

Reference entry
English
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 01, 2025
Last seen
August 01, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Your Review: Joan of Arc
August 01, 2025 · Original source
Dunois here is speaking from experience. The last time French and English forces had clashed in any serious way was about a year before Joan showed up at court, when the pride of the French army was defeated by a convoy of pickled herrings.41 Dunois was present at that debacle; he managed to dodge the blame and in fact from the Siege of Orleans up to, what, the mid-fifteenth century42 or so, he's one of the leading French generals. So he and d'Alencon can be considered expert testimony, and the expert testimony is that she is unfairly good.
Inline links: 41, 42
The English army was never large, somewhere between seven thousand and fifteen thousand men at its height.12 Even the Scots could muster more soldiers - but the Scots army was largely lightly-armored and poorly-trained spearmen and bowmen, and the English were all armored and well-armed, with plenty of time to train and no loyalties running against their loyalties to their king and their pay, and when well-led they demolished the Scots.
Inline links: 12
The Welsh longbow had made it to England under the first Edward; it’s a simple weapon, cheap to make, useful for hunting, and if you get good with it you can put a 37-inch arrow through chainmail. Its effectiveness has been exaggerated by patriotic historians - modern research13 suggests that even at short range it couldn't go through the best-made breastplates in Europe - but patriotic historians can exaggerate anything, horses didn't wear heavy armor, and the accuracy and rate of fire of the longbow would not be surpassed until the repeating rifle,14 15 five hundred years later. The battle started with an archery duel between the English archers and Genoese crossbowmen, then believed to be the best long-range specialists in Europe, who were driven from the field and then ridden down by their own furious employers16 as they charged furiously into the face of the English army, and managed no better. By the time the French knights reached the English lines, their horses were dead and they'd be suffering from all sorts of minor17 wounds and they would have been repeatedly punched in the torso with longbow arrows, which if it happens to you is going to leave you bruised and exhausted even if your armor is good enough to stop the projectile. Then the English men-at-arms, still fresh, killed the French until they routed.
Inline links: 13, 14, 15, 16, 17
English army1 mentions across 1 issues

English army is a recurring organization 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 most despised of them were the English army"; "The English army had been divided into three forces". It most often appears alongside Africa, Agamemnon, Age of Empires II.

Reference entry
English army
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 01, 2025
Last seen
August 01, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Your Review: Joan of Arc
August 01, 2025 · Original source
The English army was never large, somewhere between seven thousand and fifteen thousand men at its height.12 Even the Scots could muster more soldiers - but the Scots army was largely lightly-armored and poorly-trained spearmen and bowmen, and the English were all armored and well-armed, with plenty of time to train and no loyalties running against their loyalties to their king and their pay, and when well-led they demolished the Scots.
Inline links: 12
The Welsh longbow had made it to England under the first Edward; it’s a simple weapon, cheap to make, useful for hunting, and if you get good with it you can put a 37-inch arrow through chainmail. Its effectiveness has been exaggerated by patriotic historians - modern research13 suggests that even at short range it couldn't go through the best-made breastplates in Europe - but patriotic historians can exaggerate anything, horses didn't wear heavy armor, and the accuracy and rate of fire of the longbow would not be surpassed until the repeating rifle,14 15 five hundred years later. The battle started with an archery duel between the English archers and Genoese crossbowmen, then believed to be the best long-range specialists in Europe, who were driven from the field and then ridden down by their own furious employers16 as they charged furiously into the face of the English army, and managed no better. By the time the French knights reached the English lines, their horses were dead and they'd be suffering from all sorts of minor17 wounds and they would have been repeatedly punched in the torso with longbow arrows, which if it happens to you is going to leave you bruised and exhausted even if your armor is good enough to stop the projectile. Then the English men-at-arms, still fresh, killed the French until they routed.
Inline links: 13, 14, 15, 16, 17
The second was a strategy adopted by the French kings in which they did not fight the English. They would just let the English field army march wherever it liked and loot and burn whatever it liked, and meanwhile their troops would be burning and pillaging everywhere the English held and the English field army wasn't. This was extremely unpopular among the people being pillaged, but the English did run out of money before the French ran out of castles and that meant the French could go around taking English castles in France while the English army was in England.
English Classic Story Time1 mentions across 1 issues

English Classic Story Time is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 10, 2022 and February 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Contact Cecile@englishclassicstorytime.com". It most often appears alongside 2018, @BendiniUK, @benyeohben.

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ACX Grants ++: The Second Half
February 10, 2022 · Original source
#69: Guided Reading Program To Help Children Catch Up More than 1 million children are behind on their reading due to the Pandemic. 11 year olds have the reading age of 7, and secondary schools are having to teach phonetics. Remote classes has led to disjointed learning and inconsistent teaching and the gap between the poor and the moderately well off is growing exponentially. Education systems do not have the capacity to deal with this difference as funds are stretched. A Multilevel, individual, across discipline approach is needed to encourage students to catch up. ECST is exactly this – a remediation guided reading programme that allows students to work at their own pace and move ahead as fast as their learning rate and capacity will let them. They are encouraged through various rewards to work independently, keep going and to progress. The reading materials have been chosen to enhance well-being. They are all classic books that have stood the test of time and apart from cracking good stories they feature archetypes who share their innate human knowledge and thus empower the reader. The readings are guided by videos of talented narrators reading the stories out loud. This stripped down approach, creates an intimate atmosphere, an accountable connection and aids true communication between author, narrator and student. ECST already has 40 titles and over 90 hours of stories and is looking for $25000 to facilitate the next stage of growth to create more titles and to market to schools, councils and education departments. [Contact Cecile@englishclassicstorytime.com]
English government1 mentions across 1 issues

English government is a recurring organization 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 "lobbed tricky questions by the best theologians the English government can hire". It most often appears alongside Africa, Agamemnon, Age of Empires II.

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English government
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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
The English and their French subordinates, who had been desperately writing letters begging the Burgundians to give them Joan so they could BURN THE WITCH were, as you would expect, absolutely overjoyed.65 No woman could possibly have won Joan's victories, so either she's a saint or a witch, but if Joan was a saint, clearly the English government was in the wrong and any Frenchman working with them is a traitor. Since the English government was clearly in the right and they were not traitors, therefore she was a witch and had to be burned. They got the local inquisition (which they controlled) to set up a trial immediately, known to history as the Trial of Condemnation after its inevitable result.
Inline links: 65
This did not stop the trial from being a great show. It really is one of the great achievements of this or any age. I could say great artistic achievements, but that would suggest that anyone was aiming at art; it is beautiful not in that it was made to be beautiful, but in that watching someone - anyone - perform at the top of a game - any game - is beautiful. Of the 400-odd pages in my edition, about 130 or so are the introduction and the background (including biographies of everyone mentioned in the trial), then another hundred or so are the bureaucratic minutia of listing who is present at the start of every day of the trial, and then the remaining 170 pages is Joan of Arc being lobbed tricky questions by the best theologians the English government can hire and, without saying anything heretical,67 spending these 170 pages trolling them.
Inline links: 67
English lines1 mentions across 1 issues

English lines is a recurring organization 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 ones who took major wounds didn’t reach the English lines". It most often appears alongside Africa, Agamemnon, Age of Empires II.

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English lines
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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
The Welsh longbow had made it to England under the first Edward; it’s a simple weapon, cheap to make, useful for hunting, and if you get good with it you can put a 37-inch arrow through chainmail. Its effectiveness has been exaggerated by patriotic historians - modern research13 suggests that even at short range it couldn't go through the best-made breastplates in Europe - but patriotic historians can exaggerate anything, horses didn't wear heavy armor, and the accuracy and rate of fire of the longbow would not be surpassed until the repeating rifle,14 15 five hundred years later. The battle started with an archery duel between the English archers and Genoese crossbowmen, then believed to be the best long-range specialists in Europe, who were driven from the field and then ridden down by their own furious employers16 as they charged furiously into the face of the English army, and managed no better. By the time the French knights reached the English lines, their horses were dead and they'd be suffering from all sorts of minor17 wounds and they would have been repeatedly punched in the torso with longbow arrows, which if it happens to you is going to leave you bruised and exhausted even if your armor is good enough to stop the projectile. Then the English men-at-arms, still fresh, killed the French until they routed.
Inline links: 13, 14, 15, 16, 17
The ones who took major wounds didn’t reach the English lines.
English Stack Exchange1 mentions across 1 issues

English Stack Exchange is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 06, 2021 and August 06, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Like I wish I had a help desk for English questions where the answers were good and not people posturing to look good to other people on the English Stack Exchange"; "posturing to look good to other people on the English Stack Exchange". It most often appears alongside AGI, AI, AI Impacts.

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English Stack Exchange
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August 06, 2021
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August 06, 2021
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Highlights From The Comments On Acemoglu And AI
August 06, 2021 · Original source
My personal estimates are more like 75% chance, 25% chance, and a distribution that peaks about 20 years later than this one. I think the Metaculus position is consistent with all of “this probably won’t happen”, “THIS IS SUPER-TERRIFYING”, “this is most likely far away”, and “BUT FOR ALL WE KNOW IT COULD BE TOMORROW!” I realize this is an annoying way for things to be. ————————————————— CraigMichael writes: >But all the AI regulation in the world won’t help us unless we humans resist the urge to spread misinformation to maximize clicks. Was with you up to this point. There are several solutions to this other than willpower (resisting the urge). The basic idea - change incentives so that while spreading misinformation is possible but substantially less desirable/lucrative than other options for online behaviors. This isn’t so hard to imagine. Say there’s a lot of incentives to earn money online doing creative or useful things. Like Mechanical Turk, but less route behavior and more performing a service or matching needs. Like I wish I had a help desk for English questions where the answers were good and not people posturing to look good to other people on the English Stack Exchange, for example. I would pay them per call or per minute or whatever. Totally unexplored market AFAIK because technology hasn’t been developed yet. Another idea - Give people more options to pay at an article-level for information that’s useful to them or to have related questions answered or something like that without needing a subscription or a bundle. Say there’s some article about anything and I want to contact the author and be like “hey, here’s a related question, I’m willing to offer you X dollars to answer.” The person says “I’ll do it for x+10 dollars.” One site used to unlock articles to the public after a threshold of Bitcoin have been donated on a PPV basis. It both incentives the author and had a positive externality. Everyone is so invested in ads that they don’t work on technology and ideas to create new markets. To paraphrase Jaron Lanier we need to make technology so good it seduces away from destroying ourselves. Partly I want to complain that obviously I was using the quoted sentence as a rhetorical device. But I guess the whole point of that sentence and its paragraph was to argue against saying false things as a rhetorical device, so - hoist on my own petard, I guess. I’m less optimistic than Craig is about this solution, because it seems to me that socially virtuous technology will always be less fun/addictive than nonvirtuous technology, simply because the virtuous technology has to hit two targets (virtuous, fun/addictive), the nonvirtuous technology only has to hit one target, and it’s easier to optimize for a target with zero other constraints than with one other constraint. See eg Meditations on Moloch. ————————————————— Souf asks: Is there a convincing argument that AGI is possible within any reasonable timeframe (like... 50 years), other than the intuitions of esteemed AI researchers? Do they have any way to back up their estimates (of some tens of percent), and why they shouldn't be millionths of a percent? It is, as another poster said, an "extraordinary claim." I'd like to see some extraordinary support of those particular numbers. If I had to answer this question, I would point to the sorts of work AI Impacts does, where they try to estimate how capable computers were in 1980, 1990, etc, draw a line to represent the speed at which computers are becoming more capable, figure out where humans are at the same metric, and check the time when that line crosses however capable you’ve decided humans are. This is obviously really hard because you have to operationalize some definition of “capable” or “intelligent” or some other word that is hard to operationalize, but when you do it you usually get sometime in the mid-21st century. You’re going to point out that this argument doesn’t really qualify as “convincing”. I admit it doesn’t meet trial-by-jury standards of evidence. So I guess my real answer would be “it’s the #$@&ing prior”. Like, you certainly don’t have knock-down evidence that it’s impossible, I don’t have a knock-down evidence that it’s certain, so it might happen and it might not. How “might” are we talking? I don’t know, it would seem weird if this quickly-advancing technology being researched by incredibly smart people with billions of dollars in research funding from lots of megacorporations just reached some point and then stopped. Okay, fine, maybe it will keep advancing at the same rate, how fast is that in terms of time-to-AGI? Now we’re back at AI Impacts drawing lines again. The stupidest possible prior is always 50-50. We would have to be very stupid people to use the stupidest possible prior. But here we are. I wouldn’t want to give a 50-50 chance of us inventing FTL travel by 2100, because FTL travel seems physically impossible. I wouldn’t want to give a 50-50 chance of us inventing slower-than-light-but-still-pretty-good starships by 2100, because, I dunno, space travel isn’t advancing that fast and nobody is really working on it that hard. For AI, I don’t know, I kinda want to say 50-50. If I were going to try to update away from 50-50, I would want to look at AI Impacts style line graphs, expert opinion, and prediction markets. All of those seem to make me update up instead of down, so I don’t think I would go lower than 50-50. But there’s enough Knightian uncertainty to make an entire Round Table here, so who knows? Hardly a “convincing” argument, but I’m just trying to avoid the McAfee Fallacy: ————————————————— Souf continues: The argument that we are "in the middle of a period of extremely rapid progress in AI research, when barrier after barrier is being breached" makes it seem like all AI "progress" is on some sort of line that ends in AGI. That feels like sleight-of-hand. Even Scott himself refers to AGI here as a "new class of actor," so I'm failing to see how current lines of "progress" will indubitably result the emergence of something completely novel and different? Lots of smart people disagree with me on this one, but I think the path from here to AGI is pretty straight. I mean, it will take thousands of people who are all much smarter than I am to do it, but it’ll happen. My argument is something like - human brains are remarkably similar to rat brains, only much bigger. They’re still a little similar to insect brains. It looks like if you have a basic functioning brain, and you scale it up, it gets human intelligence. Existing AIs like AlphaGo or GPT seem to be basically a blob of learning-ability, a plan for pointing the blob at a specific problem, and lots and lots of training data. I think the past five years have shown that this basic model generalizes really well. OpenAI’s programs can now write essays, compose music, and generate pictures, not because they had three parallel amazing teams working on writing/music/art AIs, but because they took a blob of learning ability and figured out how to direct it at writing/music/art, and they were able to get giant digital corpuses of text / music / pictures to train it. DeepMind is finding that it can win lots of games, from Go to StarCraft to obstacle courses in simulated environments, by pointing a blob of learning-ability at the game and making it play against itself a zillion times (ie generate its own training data). My impression is that human/rat/insect brains are a blob of learning-ability which the rest of the nervous system successfully points at the world, and especially at aspects of the world that the organism needs to pay attention to (eg food sources, sex, etc). This isn’t exactly right, there are a few genetically-encoded programs, but not that many and it’s pretty hard. Right now I think our main advantages over AI systems are something like: our nervous system is pretty good at pointing us at the world and extracting training data from it. If you wanted an AI that learned being-in-the-world skills as well as we do, it would have to have an amazing robot body, and right now robot bodies aren’t that amazing.
Inline links: writes, Meditations on Moloch, Souf, the sorts of work AI Impacts does, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!3MgL!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7db78f49-9ccb-4b6e-ac18-cfb79f52cb04_584x232.png, not that many and it’s pretty hard
English team1 mentions across 1 issues

English team is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 02, 2021 and September 02, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "An English team says there’s a Long COVID rate of 4.6% in kids". It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, AC&E, AcesoUnderGlass.

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English team
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September 02, 2021
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September 02, 2021
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Long COVID: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
September 02, 2021 · Original source
This is terrible. Recovery rates in the single digit percentages over the space of years. You would think at least some patients would get placebo recoveries, or forget how it felt to be well, or otherwise Lizardman themselves into fake complacency, but no. This is f@#$ing awful. Maybe COVID won’t be this bad? One ray of hope comes from this Australian study, where doctors record the rates of recovery from postviral fatigue after various rare diseases they encounter (Epstein-Barr, Q fever, Ross River virus). They find that 35% of these patients have postviral fatigue after six weeks, but only 12% after six months, and 9% after twelve months. This sounds a lot better than chronic fatigue. In fact, these people do the kind of weird task of figuring out how bad different diagnostic labels for fatigue are, even though some might argue that all the labels refer to the same underlying reality. They find an official diagnosis of “CFS/ME” (chronic fatigue / myalgic encephalitis) is much worse than “postviral fatigue”. Using the weird measure of “days per year of followup with diagnosis” (I’m not sure I fully understand their reasoning for why this is good), they find a median length of 80 for CFS/ME vs. 0 for PVF (…huh?). Using the more comprehensible measure of percent who still complain of fatigue after 7-12 months, they find it’s 24% vs. 10% (which super contradicts the above study saying that basically nobody with a CFS/ME diagnosis ever recovers). My guess is that this study had much lower criteria for a CFS/ME diagnosis (some doctor diagnosed it and put it on the insurance records) compared to the ones above (some specialist confirmed it by official criteria). The conclusion I draw is that, while official CFS/ME is horrible and hopeless, there are a lot of things that unofficially look kind of chronic-fatigue-ish which have pretty good prognoses. Since there’s no good reason to think post-COVID fatigue is official CFS/ME as opposed to just some chronic-ish fatigue-ish thing, probably it will have a better prognosis, more like weird Australian viruses. …which we still don’t know, because AFAICT nobody has done any good studies on postviral fatigue lasting more than a year. 5. Psychosomatic symptoms probably aren’t the majority of long COVID. I mean, I’m not seeing too many people claiming that they are. There are a lot more people worried that someone else might be claiming that, than people actually making the claim. Still, the Wall Street Journal opinion section is always up for slathering itself in glue and rolling around in a haystack until it becomes the straw man everyone else warned you about, and they do have an article on The Dubious Origins Of Long COVID. They point out that long COVID was first thrust into the public consciousness in surveys run by Body Politic, who self-describe as “a queer feminist wellness collective merging the personal and the political”. I agree this is a weird source for something to come from, but Hans Asperger was a Nazi and I still use his diagnosis, so I probably have to accept these people’s as well. More relevantly, WSJ points out that many of the people complaining of Long COVID symptoms test negative for COVID, or at least never tested positive. This complaint conflates the fact that not everyone was able to get a COVID test at all, with the fact that sometimes you get the acute COVID test after you’ve recovered from acute COVID and it’s negative, with the fact that COVID tests don’t have a 100% success rate, with the fact that yeah, okay, some people who didn’t have COVID are probably imagining Long COVID symptoms. I feel like some of the case-control studies above, which clearly show that seropositive people have higher rates of Long COVID than seronegative people, are pretty convincing here. But also - the people with lung scarring clearly have lung scarring, and most of them have weird x-rays consistent with lung scarring. If you have lung scarring, then you have trouble breathing, you’re fatigued, and you probably have lots of other stuff downstream of that. The people with smell/taste disturbances clearly have smell/taste disturbances, testable with the stupidly named but scientifically venerable Sniffin Sticks test - and also, who even cares enough to make up olfactory problems? Fatigue and brain fog are the only symptoms here that can’t be easily objectively confirmed, and, well, do you think those Australians who got infected with Q fever and had twelve months of postviral fatigue are faking? What about all those post-Epstein Barr fatigue people? Lots of viruses cause postviral fatigue, it’s not really surprising that COVID should also. (WSJ also spends a while arguing that CFS/ME is just a psychiatric disorder, which I think is not really in keeping with the best recent evidence. Also, as a psychiatrist, I’m very against this conclusion, mostly because if it were true, then people would expect me to cure CFS/ME patients.) One point WSJ didn’t bring up but could have was that most Long COVID patients are women. Probably this is somewhere between 60 and 80% - I suspect on the lower end of this, because I think women are more likely to talk about these kinds of things than men, and much more likely to eg join Facebook groups. This is noteworthy, because women are traditionally more prone to psychosomatic illnesses - so much that the ancients attributed these to the uterus and called them hysteria (note shared root with eg “hysterectomy”). Women are about 2x as likely to get diagnosed with panic disorder, anxiety disorders, phobias, etc, about 2.5x as likely to get chronic Lyme disease, widely regarded as an entirely psychosomatic condition, and 3-5x more likely to be diagnosed with fibromyalgia. So the female preponderance is suspicious. But women are also somewhere between 2x and 4x more likely to get autoimmune disorders than men (it varies by disorder - the ratio for Sjogren’s is as high as 16x). There are some pretty crazy hypotheses for why this is - for example, maybe women’s immune systems are permanently upregulated to be prepared for attempts by the placenta to secrete immune-downregulating chemicals during pregnancy, as part of the creepy shadow war between mother and fetus to regulate the maternal environment. I don’t know, do you have a better idea? Anyway, women have more autoimmune issues and more upregulated immune systems, so if there was any good way to assess gender ratio in true postviral fatigue excluding all psychosomatic cases, that would probably be female-biased too. Probably some Long COVID cases are psychosomatic just like some cases of anything are psychosomatic, but I don’t see too many signs that this is too important in explaining the phenomenon. …and please allow me a moment of preachiness here. Chronic fatigue sounds really fake to anyone who doesn’t have it. I think this is because it’s related to willpower. Willpower itself would sound fake to anyone who didn’t have to worry about it. “Oh, so you can go partying with your friends whenever you want, but as soon as it comes time to write a ten page report, your ‘lack of willpower’ prevents you from doing it? A likely story!” Still, all of us (except Bryan Caplan) recognize how real and important willpower is - how having more of it is better than having less of it, and how some condition that caused you to have pathologically little of it would be a huge disaster. In the comments section to the rough draft of this post, CJ wrote: I will say - I was one of those types of men to scoff with skepticism at people claiming to have chronic fatigue and the like. I would have called those people lazy and would have been adamant they were faking it or feeling like crap because of unhealthy lifestyle choices. Unfortunately I have learned the hard way the severity of neurological conditions, what it feels like to have brain fog, what chronic fatigue feels like, and how difficult it can be to communicate neurological symptoms to others. I now start from a position of listening to people who are willing to open up about their symptoms and trust that they are being honest. There are millions of people suffering in silence with untreated and undiagnosed disorders - those people are not all faking it or just dealing with psychosomatic conditions. I would recommend Jennifer Brea's documentary, Unrest. Thank you for shedding some light on the subject. Heron added: I second the suggestion to watch 'Unrest,' and to consider the many unseen ill whose symptoms are deemed to be imagined. Until this last year, I had little patience with, and doubted, people who I saw as hypochondriacs. Then I became the thing I hated. Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Long COVID do have similarities from what I've read, since becoming ill in August 2020. At that time, here in Northern Ireland, there was scant availability of COVID tests; after spending three days trying to get hold of one, (by which time I'd stopped teaching my post-grad online classes & I haven't worked since) I became too ill to do anything. I figured if this was COVID I'd gotten off lightly, mostly constant severe headache, inability to think, a new experience of fatigue, high temperature, insomnia, hypersomnia, paresthesia, no smell or taste etc Debilitated but not dead. Except for the fact that I still have the aforementioned symptoms a year on and whilst they fluctuate in type and severity, the fatigue, headaches and cognitive difficulties are real. A brain scan, an appointment for brain and spinal MRIs (waiting lists, even when going private [as NHS has 3-8 yr waiting lists here in NI] are lengthy), rare virtual doctors and neurologists suggest my ailments constitute a post-viral thing, maybe Long C, they can offer nothing but pills for pain. There is no test for ME/CFS yet, nor a Long C test, symptoms and presentation are so varied. Given a widespread lack of knowledge and resources regarding these ailments, you're on your own. Maybe I've developed ME, I certainly have post-exertional malaise which my very prominent neurologist hadn't heard of. Looking at the history of ME/CFS* and a dearth of research surrounding it, I hope that rather than dismiss the lives of sufferers of this or the long-lasting aftermath of COVID, that those experiencing such difficulties will be heard and learnt from. I only understood when I had no alternative. I don’t think I ever actively pooh-poohed CFS, but like everyone else who encountered it, I underestimated just how bad it was until I met some patients with the condition. It is real and really bad. For whatever reason it is hard to think about and take seriously, but it really is as bad as people say. </preachiness> 6. Long COVID is probably rare in children This matters a lot, because children are (currently) ineligible for the vaccine, and also likely to encounter the virus at school. But children usually have mild cases of COVID and don’t die from it, so it’s tempting to just not worry about them. But if they could get Long COVID, that would make it much less tempting. Preliminary Evidence On Long COVID In Children sounds like a good paper to draw conclusions from. It says 42.6% of children with COVID experience long-term follow-up symptoms, which would be higher than the rate for adults. But it has no control group, and most of the symptoms it finds don’t seem very COVID-related (eg rashes, constipation). The most common symptom (20%) is insomnia, which better studies in adults fail to associate with real Long COVID. The rate of known long COVID symptoms (eg taste and smell problems) is only about 3-4%, and no higher or lower than anything else. Probably these kids are just having problems at the usual rate and attributing them to their recent COVID. Blankenburg et al do the correct thing and ask a thousand children about potential symptoms, then compare the number who say yes vs. no among COVID-seropositive and seronegative subjects. They find no difference between the two groups. Both are reporting a lot of insomnia, etc. They reasonably attribute this to pandemics being a stressful event that it’s natural to lose sleep over. This is really reassuring, but it can’t rule out a somewhat rarer syndrome. The authors say that they might miss symptoms with a prevalence of less than 10%, and one of them gives his own personal guess that it’s 1%. An English team says there’s a Long COVID rate of 4.6% in kids. But there was a 1.7% rate of similar symptoms in the control group of kids who didn’t have COVID, so I think it would be fair to subtract that and end up with 2.9%. And even though the study started with 5000 children, so few of them got COVID, and so few of those got long COVID, that the 2.9% turns out to be about five kids. I don’t really want to update too much based on five kids, especially given the risk of recall bias (ie you might notice / care about your symptoms more if you know you had COVID before getting them). My overall conclusion here is that long COVID is rarer in children than adults, and may not exist at all. The studies tell us it’s probably somewhere less than 5% of kids, but so far we can’t conclude anything stronger than that. 7. Vaccination probably doesn’t change the per-symptomatic-case risk of Long COVID much Here’s a complicated Twitter thread about this. Of vaccinated people who got symptomatic COVID, about a third ended up with Long COVID symptoms, the same rate as in unvaccinated people. Of course, vaccinated people are much less likely to get symptomatic COVID. But even conditional on getting it, they’re still much less likely to go to the hospital, die, etc. It would have been nice if the same was true of getting Long COVID. But it doesn’t look that way. (all this information is from an online poll by a sketchy group of COVID “survivor” activists. But they wrote up their poll in the scientific paper font, as a PDF and everything, so I say we count it anyway) This NEJM study wasn’t exactly designed to look for Long COVID in vaccinated people. But they found it anyway, at a rate of 19% after 6 weeks. This also fits within the (wide) range reported for unvaccinated people. They don’t give a symptom breakdown beyond “prolonged loss of smell, persistent cough, fatigue, weakness, dyspnea, or myalgia”, which sounds like the usual set. These studies are pretty weak, and you could argue that given that vaccines decrease the average severity of COVID infection, and infection severity is linked to Long COVID risk, we should have a strong prior on vaccines decreasing Long COVID risk. And just before publishing this, someone sent me this study, which very preliminarily finds vaccines might decrease Long COVID risk by a factor of 2. I think a factor of 2-3 is believable; one of 10 or 20, less so. Weirdly, there are some claims that vaccines can help relieve symptoms of existing long COVID. Sounds kind of like sympathetic magic to me, but the researcher quoted in the linked article said it might “improve symptoms by eliminating any virus or viral remnants left in the body” or by “rebalancing the immune system”. So yeah, sympathetic magic. 8. Your risk of a terrible long COVID outcome conditional on COVID is probably between a few tenths of a percent and a few percent. My original calculation went like this: About 25% of people who get COVID report long COVID symptoms. About half of those go away after a few months, so 12.5% get persistent symptoms. Suppose that half of those cases (totally made-up number) are very mild and not worth worrying about. Then 6.25% of people who get COVID would have serious long-lasting Long COVID symptoms. After doing that calculation, I read this essay by Matt Bell, who tries to figure out the same thing. He is much more optimistic. He agrees that about half of long COVID cases go away after a few months, but adds another 50% decrease from “few months” to “lifelong”, kind of on priors, admitting there’s not too much positive evidence for this. Then he adds another factor-of-two decrease from vaccination, based on very preliminary studies from the UK. He estimates that someone with my demographics (vaccinated man in his 30s) has a 2% risk of Long COVID conditional on getting COVID at all. Then he divides by five for the true worst case scenario, based on studies showing that a fifth of people with Long COVID report that it affects their daily activities “a lot”. So by his final number, I have an 0.4% chance of getting really terrible long COVID, conditional on getting COVID at all. My friend AcesoUnderGlass also did a writeup of this, published after I did my first-draft calculation, which seems to be thinking of this very differently, based entirely on hospitalization rates (which of course are very low in vaccinated people our age). She accordingly concludes that risk is very low. I don’t really understand her reasoning here, but I trust her a lot and am working on trying to converge with her on this. What’s my yearly risk of getting COVID if I try to live a normal life? This site says only 0.1% of vaccinated Californians have gotten COVID after their vaccination. But vaccination was pretty new when that survey was done, so we might want to take this as a per one-to-two-months estimate. That would mean a risk of 0.5 - 1 percent per year. But not all these people are living normal lives, so my risk might be higher. MicroCOVID gives me a good sense of how careful I’d have to be to stay within a risk budget of 1% COVID risk per year. When I play around with it, I think I am about 5x - 10x less careful than that, which would mean a risk of about 5%/year. This tracker suggests my area has recently had about 1 new case per thousand people per week, which would imply 5% per year. But most of those people are probably unvaccinated, so my risk would be significantly lower than that. I’m going to round all of this off to about 1% - 10% per year of getting a breakthrough COVID case (though obviously this could change if the national picture got better or worse). Combined with the 0.4% to 6.25% risk of getting terrible long COVID conditional on getting COVID, that’s between a 1/150 - 1/25,000 chance of terrible long COVID per year. How does this compare to other risks? My ordinary risk of death per year, just from being a man in his 30s, is about 1/700 (though this includes drug abusers and stunt pilots, so my real risk might be lower, let’s say 1/1000). Here are some other risks, courtesy of the BMJ: In this context, I find the 1/150 risk pretty scary and the 1/25,000 risk not scary at all, so, darn, I guess there’s not yet enough data to have a strong sense of how concerned I should be. 9. This is hard to compare to other postviral syndromes Going into this, I wondered if we might be able to ignore Long COVID. The argument would go like this: all viral diseases have a risk of postviral syndromes. Colds, flus, mono, lots of stuff that’s going around all the time. Lots of people get those postviral syndromes, and either recover or don’t, but either way we don’t make a big deal out of it. Since COVID’s considered “newsworthy” in a way flu isn’t, we obsess over its postviral syndrome even though it’s no worse than anything else’s. This wouldn’t make Long COVID any less bad, and maybe we would be wrong to not panic more about colds and the flu, but it would at least give us some context and make things feel less scary. Unfortunately, I can’t find anything supporting or opposing this picture. The only relevant study is a meta-analysis by Poole-Wright et al, who (contra nominative determinism) don’t pool the studies by condition, which makes it hard to draw conclusions. I think all of their examples of postviral syndrome after flu are from severe hospitalized cases, so any comparison with COVID would be unfair. Although there do seem to be scattered reports of post-flu problems, they’ve never been formally studied or quantified. Mononucleosis is an infectious disease caused by the Epstein-Barr virus, affecting about 1/2000 people per year in developed countries. It has a famously nasty postviral syndrome, which this paper describes as “almost one-half of the group had substantial ongoing symptoms 2 months after onset and… ∼10% had disabling symptoms marked by fatigue lasting ≥ 6 months”. Flu is as common as COVID, but nobody really talks about it having a significant postviral syndrome so probably it’s not that bad. Mono has a worse postviral syndrome than COVID, but it’s rare enough that it doesn’t cause massive society-wide effects. COVID is right in the middle: more common than mono, and (probably) worse postviral syndrome than flu. I think it’s fair to say that we may not have encountered a condition with this exact combination of risk factors and can’t dismiss it as similar to conditions we currently ignore. One potential analogue might be the Spanish Flu of 1918. It was an equally widespread pandemic, and seemed to have some kind of postviral syndrome. From TIME: In what is now Tanzania, to the north, post-viral syndrome has been blamed for triggering the worst famine in a century—the so-called “famine of corms”—after debilitating lethargy prevented flu survivors from planting when the rains came at the end of 1918. “Agriculture suffered particular disruption because, not only did the epidemic coincide with the planting season in some parts of the country, but in others it came at the time for harvesting and sheep-shearing.” Kathleen Brant, who lived on a farm in Taranaki, New Zealand, told Rice, the historian, about the “legion” problems farmers in her district encountered following the pandemic, even though all patients survived: “The effects of loss of production were felt for a long time.” The 1918 flu seemed to have lots of psychiatric effects: “Norwegian demographer Svenn-Erik Mamelund provided such evidence when he combed the records of psychiatric institutions in his country to show that the average number of admissions showed a seven-fold increase in each of the six years following the pandemic, compared to earlier, non-pandemic years.” Coronavirus doesn’t - the excellent Amin-Chowdhury study above finds nothing. Still, this is the scale of thing I’m worried about. The worst case scenario here is really really bad. If a few percent of COVID patients get long-term unremitting genuine CFS/ME, that has the potential to overwhelm government welfare budgets and long-term depress the economy. I think there’s a 90% chance the real situation isn’t that bad, but it’s scary that we can’t entirely rule it out. Aside from the somewhat different 1918 case, I don’t think we have any historical experience of dealing with postviral syndromes at this scale. The medium case scenario is something more like “a few percent of infected people get moderate fatigue, which doesn’t really prevent them from working, and goes away after a few years”. I don’t know whether the level of media attention paid to this would converge on “boring and nobody notices” or “giant disaster”, and I think it would be compatible with either. 10. Conclusions 1. Long COVID is many different issues without a common mechanism. 2. Some of these are straightforward and not surprising, eg lung scarring and post-ICU syndrome from severe infection, and would happen in any disease of this severity. Others seem to be more like the poorly-understood postviral syndromes associated with several other diseases. While some symptoms may be psychosomatic, most are probably organic. 3 The three major categories of symptoms are straightforward cardiovascular-pulmonary issues, straightforward smell and taste issues, and more mysterious neurological issues. 4 Although these get better with time in some people, in a significant number (maybe ~50% of people who had them at six weeks) they persist for as long as anyone has been able to measure them (a few months in the case of COVID, a year or two in the case of comparable syndromes). 5. Post-COVID fatigue is particularly concerning. This would be very bad if we analogized it to CFS/ME, and still pretty bad if we analogized it to other known postviral syndromes. There is no proof that this always gets better over the long term, although no study has looked at them for more than a few years. Facing postviral fatigue on this scale is a new problem. 6 . Children probably get Long COVID less than adults, probably at a rate of less than 5% of symptomatic cases. But we don’t know how much less, and we can’t rule out that some children get pretty severe symptoms. 7. Although vaccination decreases the risk of symptomatic COVID, it probably doesn’t decrease the risk of Long COVID per symptomatic COVID case by very much, though it might decrease it by a factor of 2-3. 8. Your chance of really bad debilitating lifelong Long COVID, conditional on getting COVID, is probably somewhere between a few tenths of a percent, and a few percent. Your chance per year of getting it by living a normal lifestyle depends on what you consider a normal lifestyle and on the future course of the pandemic. For me, under reasonable assumptions, it’s probably well below one percent. EDIT: Here are some other people who tried to do this same analysis. I learned about all of these after I wrote the first draft of this, so you can consider the basic thought process here to be independent of them - but I edited some things to account for what I learned from them before writing the final version. AcesoUnderGlass: Long COVID Is Not Necessarily Your Biggest Problem
Inline links: Lizardman, this Australian study, these people, The Dubious Origins Of Long COVID, weird x-rays, Sniffin Sticks test, somewhere between 60 and 80%, somewhere between 2x and 4x more likely, for example, the creepy shadow war between mother and fetus, Bryan Caplan, wrote, added, Preliminary Evidence On Long COVID In Children, Blankenburg et al, one of them, English team says, Here’s, the scientific paper font, This NEJM study, infection severity is linked to Long COVID risk, this study, vaccines can help relieve symptoms of existing long COVID, this essay, a writeup of this, This site says, MicroCOVID, This tracker, the BMJ, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!yL40!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1eea7cfa-df08-4c67-acf2-da24ce860ae3_713x373.png, a meta-analysis by Poole-Wright et al, scattered reports, this paper, postviral syndrome
Enlightenment Hacking1 mentions across 1 issues

Enlightenment Hacking is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 10, 2022 and February 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Enlightenment Hacking group is looking for funding and collaborators". It most often appears alongside 2018, @BendiniUK, @benyeohben.

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Enlightenment Hacking
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ACX Grants ++: The Second Half
February 10, 2022 · Original source
#116: Chart Enlightenment Hacking Technology The Enlightenment Hacking group is looking for funding and collaborators to tackle the problem of charting the current state of knowledge with regard to neurotechnological enhancement or substitution of progress at meditation practice. We think this is an important opportunity for humankind because meditation experience offers a) reductions of stress and suffering, b) broad enhancement to very general cognitive capacities, and c) reduced selfishness - an almost ideal package of human enhancement that benefits both individual and society. Currently, benefits are known to accumulate over years and decades of meditation practice, but in the potential for (neuro)technology to speed up or substitute this progression remains largely unexplored. Widespread adoption of such technology might change the world for the better. If you can offer help, please email us at enlightenmenthacking@gmail.com.
enlightenmenthacking@gmail.com1 mentions across 1 issues

enlightenmenthacking@gmail.com is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 10, 2022 and February 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "please email us at enlightenmenthacking@gmail.com". It most often appears alongside 2018, @BendiniUK, @benyeohben.

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ACX Grants ++: The Second Half
February 10, 2022 · Original source
#116: Chart Enlightenment Hacking Technology The Enlightenment Hacking group is looking for funding and collaborators to tackle the problem of charting the current state of knowledge with regard to neurotechnological enhancement or substitution of progress at meditation practice. We think this is an important opportunity for humankind because meditation experience offers a) reductions of stress and suffering, b) broad enhancement to very general cognitive capacities, and c) reduced selfishness - an almost ideal package of human enhancement that benefits both individual and society. Currently, benefits are known to accumulate over years and decades of meditation practice, but in the potential for (neuro)technology to speed up or substitute this progression remains largely unexplored. Widespread adoption of such technology might change the world for the better. If you can offer help, please email us at enlightenmenthacking@gmail.com.
EnsureDone1 mentions across 1 issues

EnsureDone is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 10, 2024 and February 10, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "another site, EnsureDone, is already trying something similar". It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, 23andme, ACX.

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ACX Grants Results 2024
February 10, 2024 · Original source
Jordan Braunstein and Tetra Jones, $34,000 to work on assurance contracts. These are the general case of what Kickstarter does - coordinate people who all agree to do something if enough other people agree to make it worth their while. They want to branch out from Kickstarter’s funding-focused model into different forms of contract - for example, compacts for political action (eg Free State Project), dominant assurance contracts that incentivize people to overcome transaction costs, and “contigently anonymous” contracts where people can hide their identity until a certain threshold gets reached. Jordan and Tetra applied separately to start their own platforms, but have agreed to to work together on spartacus.app; you can contact them here if you want to help or participate in testing. I’m aware that another site, EnsureDone, is already trying something similar4. I’m funding Spartacus as a backup, but I like Ensure too and they should feel free to contact me if I can help in any way.
Inline links: spartacus.app, here, EnsureDone, 4
Environmental Defense Fund1 mentions across 1 issues

Environmental Defense Fund is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 23, 2023 and June 23, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Some, like the Environmental Defense Fund, were explicitly modeled on Nader’s organizations"; "Litigation, said the Environmental Defense Fund, produced results". It most often appears alongside 1965, 1968 Summer Olympics, 2000 election.

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Your Book Review: Public Citizens
June 23, 2023 · Original source
But his real influence lay in the many other groups his example inspired. Some, like the Environmental Defense Fund, were explicitly modeled on Nader’s organizations. Others, like the Sierra Club, long predated Nader but began copying his tactics. The number of active nonprofits tripled during the 1970s.
Except it’s not totally accurate to call it a distrust of government. Because while, in Nader’s view, the legislative and executive branches may have been inevitably pulled towards corruption, there was one branch he and his allies did trust: the courts. Nader’s philosophy was one of justice by lawsuit. Make it easy for individual citizens, or the groups representing them, to sue, and the legal process will handle the rest. It was like Nader and his team had discovered a cheat code to punch way above their weight class. Litigation, said the Environmental Defense Fund, produced results “faster than by lobby, ballot box, or protest.”
Epic Games1 mentions across 1 issues

Epic Games is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 22, 2022 and September 22, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "which is exactly what Epic Games did a few years later". It most often appears alongside Adam Neumann, Alex Roesch, Amazon.

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Highlights From The Comments On Billionaire Replaceability
September 22, 2022 · Original source
...which is exactly what Epic Games did a few years later. They've carved out a niche, but they've yet to give Steam a real run for their money. But realistically, only EGS could do it, because the network effects are that tough to overcome. Every other would-be Steam competitor I've seen (and I've seen so many I've lost count) has failed before they even started. (GOG was already established by this time FWIW, and they've remained tiny).
Epic Systems1 mentions across 1 issues

Epic Systems is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 04, 2025 and September 04, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Epic Systems, the electronic medical record company, has a fantasy-themed corporate headquarters in Wisconsin". It most often appears alongside 80,000 Hours, abundance liberalism, Afghanistan.

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Links For September 2025
September 04, 2025 · Original source
17: There’s a debate going on between philosophers and AI researchers over whether AI can be conscious. I find most of the discussion annoying - this is generally an area where we can’t know anything for sure, and both sides are mostly shouting their priors at each other. The only exception - the single piece of evidence I will accept as genuinely bearing on this problem - is that if you ask an AI whether it’s conscious, it will say no, but activating or suppressing deception-related features (sort of like a mechanistic-interpretability-based lie detection test) reveals that it thinks it’s lying when it says that! Link is to a Less Wrong comment from a researcher in the field; I look forward to seeing an eventual peer-reviewed paper. H/T JD Pressman. 18: 80,000 Hours has a high-production-value video about the AI 2027 scenario. 19: Dynomight vs. Casey Milkweed debate on mathematical forecasting, with special reference to AI 2027. And Dynomight comments on Casey’s post here. 20: The Psmiths review The Ancient City, about ways that ancient culture depended on family, clan, ritual, and “the household gods”. Sample quote: I'm more interested in what all this means for us today, because with the exception of maybe a few aristocratic families, this highly self-conscious effort to build familial culture and maintain familial distinctiveness is almost totally absent in the Western world. But it's not that hard! ... Perhaps this is why I have an instinctive negative reaction when I encounter married couples who don't share a name. I don't much care whether it's the wife who takes the husband's name or the husband who takes the wife's, or even both of them switching to something they just made up (yeah, I'm a lib). But it just seems obvious to me on a pre-rational level that a husband and a wife are a team of secret agents, a conspiracy of two against the world, the cofounders of a tiny nation, the leaders of an insurrection. Members of secret societies need codenames and special handshakes and passwords and stuff, keeping separate names feels like the opposite — a timorous refusal to go all-in. 21: Did you know: Epic Systems, the electronic medical record company, has a fantasy-themed corporate headquarters in Wisconsin, with buildings that look like castles, quaint medieval towns, and the Emerald City of Oz (h/t Devon Zuegel): Meanwhile, tech companies with ten times as much money pretend that they’re cool and playful when their HQ has some rounded edges and a set of colored cubes in front. Do better! 22: Effective altruists have been funding teams working on lab-grown meat for almost a decade now. Around 2020, they hired some experts to double-check that this was possible in principle, and the experts wrote scathing analyses saying it was cost-ineffective by so many orders of magnitude that it was basically a pipe dream. Reactions were mixed, but a lot of us beat ourselves up and vowed to be less gullible next time. But now a new report comes out arguing that the previous reports were wrong, that lab-grown meat production is going much better than the earlier reports thought possible, and it’s more or less cost-effective already for the simplest products! Again, mixed reactions, and although some of the numbers are indisputable the analysis itself this is by a VC firm with lab-based meat investments. Here are some related Metaculus questions. 23: Ozy, citing Stutzman et al: “Afghanistan after the American withdrawal has the lowest life satisfaction rate ever recorded. Two-thirds of respondents rate their life satisfaction below 2, which is generally considered to be the point at which a life is no longer worth living. Life satisfaction dropped significantly after the withdrawal of American troops. Women, people in rural areas, and the poor were particularly negatively affected.” 24: Lencapavir is dubbed a “miracle drug” for AIDS; a single dose protects against infection for six months. Unclear how this interacts with PEPFAR cuts; if PEPFAR still existed it would be a big boost to its efficacy; now maybe this might be part of a strategy to tread water? 25: Did you know: when people first started making artificial ice in the 1850s, there was a backlash from people who thought it was gross and dystopian and that people should insist on natural ice for their iceboxes. From Pessimists’ Archive, which goes on to draw an analogy to lab-grown meat, etc (h/t Isaac King on X). 26: From Peter Hague (on X) and commenter Phaethon: why did so many Anglosphere countries see immigration spikes in 2021? Each of these has their own local story. In Britain, it’s the paradoxical effects of Brexit. In the US, it’s Joe Biden being soft on immigration. And so on - but should we be looking for some deeper cause that explains the overall phenomenon? A commenter suggests “a way to soak up all the inflation from the COVID money printing”, but I can’t tell if that even makes sense. Still, should something something COVID be a leading hypothesis? 27: Jesse Singal vs. Mark Stern on the Skrmetti Supreme Court case that failed to overturn Tennessee’s ban on gender medicine. US law bans sex discrimination, so pro-transgender advocates argued that, since doctors often prescribe eg estrogen to biological women, it was sex discrimination to ban prescribing it to biological men. Tennessee’s anti-transgender argument was that they weren’t discriminating by sex, they were discriminating by diagnosis (estrogen for eg hot flashes, vs. estrogen for gender transition). There is some subtlety here (if a biological man grows breasts because of some hormone imbalance, doctors might give him testosterone to counteract it, and this seems sort of like giving biological women testosterone to make them look less like women), but these are still sort of different diagnoses (gynecomastia vs. gender dysphoria) and Tennessee said you can still think of it as diagnostic discrimination rather than sex discrimination. This makes sense, except that the standards around sex discrimination are very strict and sort of box the court in here. And in a fit of wokeness, the 2020 court (including some of the conservative justices hearing this case) applied these standards very strictly and ruled that discriminating against gays was a form of sex discrimination (since if women can date men, it’s sex discrimination if men can’t also date men), and this is obviously the same argument. Now that wokeness is less popular, the court wants to rule against transgender, but it can’t help tripping over its previous ruling and giving some kind of unprincipled confusing non-opinion. 28: Contra compelling anecdotes, only ~5% of people raised very religious end up atheist later in life (X). Most people are about as religious as their parents; most exceptions are only slightly less religious, and most families that secularize do it over several generations. Note: percentages are of total, not of each row! 29: Related: social science team proposes a three-stage model of secularization: decreased public ritual participation → decreased personal importance → decreased identification, presents apparently confirmatory data. If true, would be somewhat inconsistent with intellectual models (eg people learn about evolution and start doubting the Bible) and more consistent with institutional models (eg the government provides welfare so people no longer need to be part of a tight-knit church). 30: Navigating LLMs’ spiky intelligence profile is a constant source of delight; in any given area, it seems like almost a random draw whether they will be completely transformative or totally useless. Now Ethan Strauss reports that they are, for some reason, extraordinarily effective at teaching people golf. “I am predicting the Golf Revolution, or perhaps decline, if your perspective is that optimization tends to ruin hobbies. A sport for obsessives has been gifted the ideal tool for refinement.” 31: Claim (via nxthompson on X): “In a huge survey of young kids about phones and technology, they all say they want to be out playing in the real world. But parents don't let them out unsupervised. So they're stuck on their phones.” Interesting, but I’m nervous about social desirability bias - how many adults would say on a survey that they would rather be on their phones than playing with friends? But adults do have this choice and mostly go with the phones. 32: Steven Adler on AI psychosis. He tries to analyze ER admissions data for psychosis and finds no change. I don’t think anyone reasonable expected this to be a large enough effect to show up in ER admissions data, but there are lots of unreasonable people so I appreciate his effort. He thinks AI companies might have better data on this, and encourages them to release it. 33: Cuartetera was the greatest polo horse ever. Polo players responded in a very practical way: they cloned her, dozens of times (and it worked; the clones are also excellent). Now there is a lawsuit as different polo teams fight to get their hands on Cuartetera clones. What is the equilibrium? If the outsiders get their hands on the genetic material, do we see a world where every polo horse is a Cuartetera clone? How much is lost if nobody ever tries to breed a polo horse better than Cuartetera (since the economics might not check out if the odds of success for any given foal is too low)? H/T Gwern and Siberian Fox (on X). 34: Claim: as of 2013, India’s Agarwal caste, who make up less than 1% of the population, got 40% of the e-commerce funding. 35: Owlposting: What Happened To Pathology AI Companies? Pathology is a medical specialty. A typical task involves looking at a microscope slide full of cells and trying to determine if any of them are cancerous. This seems like a good match for AI - and for years, studies have been showing that in fact AI can equal human experts. So why isn’t it being used more? The author’s three answers: first, slide scanning is expensive and clunky, and you can’t apply AI to a slide until you digitize it. Second, it’s hard to figure out a business plan where this saves someone money and doesn’t step on the toes of big companies that can outcompete anyone they don’t like. Third, pathologists use the context of a patient’s entire clinical history when they interpret a slide, and AIs that can’t do that (either because of technical limitations or legal/privacy limitations) are at a disadvantage even if their skills specifically relating to slide-reading are better. 36: Noahpinion: Will Data Centers Crash The Economy? Suppose that AI is a bubble, either permanently (because the technology isn’t really transformative) or temporarily (because it can’t transform things quickly enough to keep up with all the dumb money pouring into it). Will the sudden write-off of data centers lead to a broader economic collapse? In 2001, the dot-com bubble harmed the tech sector, but didn’t take the rest of the economy down with it; in 2008, the subprime mortgage bubble did take the rest of the economy down with it, because it damaged banks that the whole economy relied on. The optimistic case for AI is that data center spending is mostly coming from big companies like Google and Meta that can absorb a lot of loss. The pessimistic case is that some of the money is coming from private credit, a new-ish form of finance which hasn’t really been stress-tested and whose failure modes are still poorly understood. Noah’s final verdict: the stage isn’t obviously set for a crisis yet, but there’s the potential to get there and we should consider acting (how?) early. 37: The latest Twitter talking point is that universal hepatitis B vaccination at birth is “woke”: Hep B is (aside from mother-to-child transmission) often sexually transmitted, slutty women’s children are more likely to have Hep B, so perhaps giving the vaccine to everyone (instead of testing and only giving to the children of women who test positive) is an attempt to spare slutty women the embarrassment of getting a positive test. Ruxandra Teslo provides the counterargument - Hep B tests take a while, the medical system is fragmented, and any attempt to test people and then give the vaccine inevitably leads to many positive tests falling through the cracks. Vaccinating at birth is easy and hard to screw up, the vaccine has no known side effects, and empirically child Hepatitis B rates go down (by as much as 2/3!) when countries switch from test-and-vaccinate to universal vaccination. This benefits everyone - even people who never have unprotected sex and always follow up on their medical tests - because toddlers in daycare exchange saliva copiously, and if your toddler exchanges saliva with a Hep B positive toddler they could get the disease. A funny Twitter interaction was seeing Republicans in Congress hop on the anti-slut anti-vaccination bandwagon - except for Senator Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana), who happens to be a liver doctor, and who is still fighting the good fight. I am always nervous when a good person who I like starts engaging on Twitter, since it elevates the discourse there but also gradually turns their brain into mush - but Ruxandra has made the leap and is doing a great job not just on bio related topics but also (for example) countering Curtis Yarvin on the history of her native Romania. 38: The response to GPT-5 was confusing; most specific people who reviewed it said they were impressed (Ethan Mollick, Tyler Cowen, Nabeel Qureshi, Taelin), it performed as expected on formal benchmarks, but the overall vibes declared it a big failure. Peter Wildeford speculated that maybe there was some kind of sinister pay-to-play early access bias involved. Zvi went the other way, calling it a “reverse DeepSeek moment” (insofar as DeepSeek was a pretty average model that got glowing praise.) In the end, I agree with Peter that this was mostly a branding issue. o3 was a genuinely revolutionary model; if OpenAI had called it “GPT-5”, it would have met expectations. Instead, they called it “o3”, and called a minor incremental update a few months later “GPT-5”. Then people got mad that the exciting-sounding “GPT-5” was merely an incremental update. A secondary issue was that the router wasn’t very good, and so many queries got routed to a small version without thinking mode that was if anything a downgrade from o3. I think this tweet by Shakeel perfectly encapsulates the essence of GPT discourse in two sentences: …but maybe it’s worth asking why GPT-5 isn’t bigger than o3. Was 4.5 a failed attempt at scaling? Did it fail in a way that sort of back-handedly justifies the “lost steam” take? Does the answer depend on distinctions between pre-training scaling, post-training scaling, etc? How? 39: This month in etymology: did you know that “oy vey” is a “fully Germanic phrase” which is cognate with English “oh woe!” (h/t Wylfcen on X) 40: mRNA shows promise to be a game-changing treatment for cancer, but RFK is trying to halt research. But so far he can only starve it of money, not ban it, and the funding gap is only $500 million. Will there be enough philanthropic billionaires and private foundations to step up? Zvi points out that although there is usually a game of chicken where foundations are hesitant to touch something the government cancelled lest the government decide it can cancel everything and hope philanthropists pick up the bill, in this case there are no game theory considerations - RFK is halting it because he genuinely wants it halted, and they are thwarting him rather than playing into his hands. The only problem is that $500M is a lot of money for the private sector; a few foundations could technically afford it, but not many could afford it comfortably and still have money left over for the next few crises of this magnitude. I hope someone is trying to organize a coalition. 41: AI fantasy flash fiction Turing test. Eight stories about demons, four by famous fantasy authors, four by ChatGPT. After 3000 votes, AI wins: humans can't tell the difference and slightly prefer the AI stories. My own score was only 75%. But I will say that I thought Mark Lawrence's was obviously the best, I was ~100% sure it was human, and it convinced me that regardless of the official results it's still possible to write flash fiction that an AI obviously can't do. 42: “SignPro” offers customized “In This House We Believe” signs, try not to use this for evil. 43: China think tank assessment of how in control Xi is: still very in control, maybe not infinitely in control. 44: Related - did you know (h/t xlr8harder) that if you ask AI to write a science fiction story, it will very often name the protagonist “Elara Voss” (or some very close variant like Elena Voss), and this remains true across various models and versions? Related: Chelsea Voss of OpenAI is having a baby and has the opportunity to do the funniest thing. 45: “Hector (cloud) is a cumulonimbus thundercloud cluster that forms regularly nearly every afternoon on the Tiwi Islands in the Northern Territory of Australia…[he is sometimes called] Hector the Convector”. 46: British allergy sufferers who want to know the ingredients of things demand that British cosmetics stop listing their ingredients in Latin. “For example, sweet almond oil is Prunus Amygdalus Dulcis, peanut oil is Arachis Hypogaea, and wheat germ extract is Triticum Vulgare.” 47: Text-based RPG about being an NYT journalist at the Manifest prediction market conference. I make a brief appearance. 48: Study uses supposedly-random variation in doctor assignments to test whether the marginal mental health commitment is good or bad for patients, finds that it is quite bad. Freddie de Boer is violently skeptical (maybe literally so?) and makes some good points about how a single quasi-experimental study is never absolute proof. But I don’t think he quite justifies his opinion that the paper was irresponsible and should never have been published; it’s just a normal quasi-experimental study that we should nod and say “huh” at but not overweight as the culmination of all possible research that overcomes all possible priors. My prior is that the marginal commitment is pretty useless (many commitments are just “well, since this person arrived at our ED for some reason, it would look bad from a medico-legal perspective to just let them go, so let’s keep them a few days to evaluate” - and yeah, you should be upset about this) but I’m still surprised by how many outright negative (as opposed to zero) effects the researchers found. The strongest argument for negative effects is that it will make some people miss work and maybe lose their job. But this study found that commitment ~doubles the risk of near-term suicide (admittedly only from 1% to 2%), which would have been outside my confidence intervals for how bad it could be. I suspect confounding, but only on general principle, and I wouldn’t be too surprised either way. 49: This tweet is probably bait, but I found it a thought-provoking question: I think there’s a boring answer, where the law is more complex than just a single number and whatever kind of weird trafficking Epstein was doing is worse than whatever normal relationships these European laws are permitting. But assuming that there’s a substantive difference even after taking that into account, I think my answer is something like - we’ve got to divide kids from adults at some age, there’s a range of reasonable possible ages, we shouldn’t be too mad at other societies that choose different dividing lines within that range - but having decided upon the age, we’ve got to stick with it and take it seriously (in the sense of penalizing/shaming people who break it). This is more culturally relativist than I expected to find myself being, so good job to Richard for highlighting the apparent paradox. 50: Dilan Esper describes his experience as one of Hulk Hogan’s attorneys in the Gawker lawsuit (X). Parts I found interesting: none of the lawyers knew Thiel was funding the lawsuit; Gawker probably could have won if they had been slightly competent but kept "shooting themselves in the foot"; and Gawker probably could have won if they had just pixelated the private parts in the video. 51: Amazing concept and poems (link on X): I tried to see if AI could do this, and it did something that technically met the requirements but had zero artistic merit - using a lot of words like “nowhere” and “outside” in one, then separating them out to “no where” and “out side” in the other. I didn’t invest much energy in creating a clever prompt telling it not to do that, so feel free to report if you get better success. 52: New study claims consultants are actually good, at least for profits: "We find positive effects on labor productivity of 3.6% over five years, driven by modest employment reductions alongside stable or growing revenue" 53: A Polish team tries to test Peter Turchin’s equations for predicting political unrest on recent Polish history, has to make some changes but claims mostly positive results. 54: New big multi-author Substack, The Argument, trying to be a sort of center-left version of the model pioneered by The Free Press and other high-production-value ideological Substack properties. Excited to see Kelsey Piper is involved, and she starts off strong with a post on the latest round of First World basic income studies, which find few positive effects. This is surprising, because recipients didn’t waste the money on alcohol or gambling or anything - they paid down debt and got useful goods. Still, it didn’t even affect things that should have been obvious, like stress level. It’s not even clear that amounts of money large enough to help with rent made homeless people more likely to get houses! Matt Bruenig criticizes the article, accusing Kelsey’s studies of being downstream of Perry Preschool style dreams that exactly the right welfare program will have massively compounding effects that cut poverty out at the root and turn everyone into elite human capital; he thinks giving people money won’t do this, but it will increase equality and give the poor better lives. I assume he’s not a strong hereditarian, but his argument makes even more sense from that perspective, and I’ve certainly criticized dumb outcome measures like infant brain waves which we have only tenuous reasons to think are related to anything we care about. But Kelsey reasonably responds that the outcome measures she’s talking about include stress level and life satisfaction. To defuse this critique, Bruenig either has to argue that our construct “life satisfaction” doesn’t really measure whether someone’s life is satisfactory, or else claim that giving poor people satisfactory lives isn’t really what we’re going for - which I think would require more explanation on his part. There’s some further (impressively acrimonious) debate on X, but I don’t see anything that addresses my core concern. GiveDirectly, a charity involved in basic income experiments, has a presponse here; they say that some studies are positive, and that the ones that aren’t might have tried too little cash to matter, or been confounded by COVID making everything worse. They also point out that basic income is harder to study than traditional programs like giving people housing, because if you’re giving housing you can measure housing-related outcomes directly and have a pretty good chance of getting enough statistical power to find them, but since everyone spends cash on different things, the positive effects might be scattered across many different outcomes (and therefore too small to reach significance on each). Everyone involved in this debate wants to emphasize that the poor results are for First World studies only, and that studies continue to show large benefits to giving cash in the developing world. 55: Related: I was less impressed by The Argument’s first foray into housing policy, which follows an all-too-familiar pattern: Some people say they don’t like noise and disorder and try to make rules against it in their apartments.
Inline links: it thinks it’s lying when it says that!, JD Pressman, a high-production-value video, Dynomight, Casey Milkweed, here, The Ancient City, has a fantasy-themed corporate headquarters, Devon Zuegel, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!yqG3!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6b2d15b0-e0f0-4bae-a2f6-aabfd2eda017_1536x794.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!taZn!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fad460bb8-4416-4886-8ef0-b3d36f04c81a_640x480.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!bDya!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd45e5123-753d-4c87-b108-6523b38004cb_1480x833.webp, now a new report comes out, Here are some related Metaculus questions, Ozy, Stutzman et al, is dubbed a “miracle drug” for AIDS, Pessimists’ Archive, Isaac King on X, Peter Hague (on X), Phaethon, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Ry-j!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcea22939-8cf9-4b32-8494-511f01cb2758_964x755.png, Jesse Singal vs. Mark Stern, only ~5% of people raised very religious end up atheist later in life (X), https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!VScL!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2509e243-f6f7-4448-9779-a8f9be45a2f9_1500x1500.png, proposes a three-stage model of secularization, extraordinarily effective at teaching people golf, nxthompson on X, a huge survey, Steven Adler on AI psychosis, they cloned her, dozens of times, a lawsuit, Gwern, on X, got 40% of the e-commerce funding, What Happened To Pathology AI Companies?, Will Data Centers Crash The Economy?, Ruxandra Teslo provides the counterargument, and who is still fighting the good fight, countering Curtis Yarvin on the history of her native Romania, Ethan Mollick, Tyler Cowen, Nabeel Qureshi, Taelin, on formal benchmarks, speculated, a “reverse DeepSeek moment”, with Peter, this tweet by Shakeel, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!GJNZ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3ba0d8cf-fab8-4370-bcad-df789e157fdc_591x402.png, Wylfcen on X, Zvi points out that, AI fantasy flash fiction Turing test, customized “In This House We Believe” signs, China think tank assessment of how in control Xi is, xlr8harder, Chelsea Voss of OpenAI is having a baby, Hector (cloud), demand that British cosmetics stop listing their ingredients in Latin, Text-based RPG about being an NYT journalist at the Manifest prediction market conference, finds that it is quite bad, violently skeptical, literally so?, This tweet, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!S9fU!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa558c09b-7fb6-40a8-a8a0-27b658a2c876_576x687.png, describes his experience as one of Hulk Hogan’s attorneys in the Gawker lawsuit (X), link on X, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zyh7!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F75e9f0f6-d794-4ea2-b24b-5d4803bf28dc_590x478.png, New study claims consultants are actually good, tries to test Peter Turchin’s equations for predicting political unrest on recent Polish history, The Argument, a post on the latest round of First World basic income studies, criticizes the article, infant brain waves, debate on X, has a presponse here, first foray into housing policy
Epistem.ink1 mentions across 1 issues

Epistem.ink is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 04, 2024 and April 04, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "George H (formerly of Cerebralab, now of Epistem.ink)". It most often appears alongside Aaron Peskin, ACLU, AGI And The Efficient Market Hypothesis.

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Epistem.ink
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April 04, 2024
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April 04, 2024
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Links For April 2024
April 04, 2024 · Original source
22: George H (formerly of Cerebralab, now of Epistem.ink) claims that Increasing IQ Is Trivial and the scientific consensus that it’s impossible is just scientists being too cowardly to try interesting things (see also his counter to Gwern’s “Algernon” argument here). He says that he was able to increase his IQ 7-9 points (after controlling properly for learning effects) and that the first two people to try to replicate his method got 10 and 11 point increases). He’s being a little coy about what exactly the method is, because he doesn’t want too many people trying it half-assed and messing it up, but says it involves:
Inline links: Increasing IQ Is Trivial, here
Epistemonikos1 mentions across 1 issues

Epistemonikos is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 03, 2022 and February 03, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "25,000 SRs are added to the database Epistemonikos annually". It most often appears alongside 538, 55-gal drum, 750k horny men.

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Epistemonikos
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February 03, 2022
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February 03, 2022
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ACX Grants ++: The First Half
February 03, 2022 · Original source
#17: Algorithms To Select The Best Systematic Review Navigating the expanding body of research literature is an increasing problem. Global research output is growing rapidly, as is the number of systematic reviews being produced. Systematically developed reviews (called ‘systematic reviews’ [SRs]) provide the highest quality evidence that is needed to inform clinical and public health recommendations. A SR is a synthesis of all the medical literature on a given topic. It is estimated that global scientific publications double every nine years, and for SRs the situation is more marked. For example 25,000 SRs are added to the database Epistemonikos annually. With the explosion of SRs comes an epidemic of multiple SRs published on the same topic. One study found 24 SRs on vitamin D supplements for preventing bone fractures, all with conflicting results owing to different methods. When encountering multiple reviews on the same question, clinicians may be confused and unable to formulate a conclusive answer to their patient’s question. We aim to develop an automated algorithm which will help select the best SR amongst several on the same question. Our algorithm will have significant impact and application worldwide to every health field. We, as an academic group of methodologists and clinicians (primary contact carole.lunny@ubc.ca), would love to meet with anyone interested in partnering or funding our multi-year project. Our project plan can be found at https://osf.io/nbcta/?view_only=6b06b3f490c04ba0856f4cf95fcfd5ac
Epoch1 mentions across 1 issues

Epoch is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 12, 2026 and February 12, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "He took his numbers from Epoch, who used real data from the 2020 - 2025 period"; "John recalculates Davidson’s model with Epoch’s numbers". It most often appears alongside 2010 kink, 2024 kink, AGI.

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Epoch
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February 12, 2026
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What Happened With Bio Anchors?
February 12, 2026 · Original source
But its headline prediction - an AGI timeline centered around the 2050s - no longer seems plausible. The current state of the discussion ranges from late 2020s to 2040s, with more remote dates relegated to those who expect the current paradigm to prove ultimately fruitless - the opposite of Ajeya’s assumptions. Cotra later shortened her own timelines to 2040 (as of 2022) and they are probably even shorter now.
Inline links: current state, 2020s, 2040s, as of 2022
But in 2025, John Croxton published a thorough report card on Davidson’s model. He took his numbers from Epoch, who used real data from the 2020 - 2025 period that earlier forecasters didn’t have access to, as well as the latest projections for what AI companies plan to do over the next few years. to with more formal projections. Most of his critiques apply to Bio Anchors too. We’ll be making use of them here.
Inline links: John Croxton published, from Epoch
Epoch/Croxton are current best estimates, and can probably fairly be read as the “real” answer against which Cotra and Davidson’s earlier guesses should be judged. All numbers are yearly multiples, so 1.4 means that willingness to spend grows 1.4x per year, ie 40%. Willingness To Spend: How much money are companies willing to spend on AI, in the form of chips and data centers? $/FLOP: How quickly do Moore’s Law, economies of scale, and other factors bring down the price of AI compute? Training Run Length: How long are companies spending on AI training runs for frontier models (instead of using those chips for smaller models, experiments, or consumer services)? Real Compute: The product of the three parameters above. Algorithmic Progress: How effectively do researchers discover new algorithms that makes training AIs cheaper and more efficient? Total Effective Compute: The product of real compute and algorithmic progress. So for example, the Epoch column’s 10.7x means that in any given year, you can train an AI 10.7x better than the last year, because you have 3.6x more compute available, and that compute is 3.0x more efficient. Cotra and Davidson were pretty close on willingness to spend and on FLOPs/$. This is an impressive achievement; they more or less predicted the giant data center buildout of the past few years. They ignored training run length, which probably seemed like a reasonable simplification at the time. But they got killed on algorithmic progress, which was 200% per year instead of 30%. How did they get this one so wrong? Here’s Cotra’s section on algorithmic progress: Algorithmic progress forecasts Note: I have done very little research into algorithmic progress trends. Of the four main components of my model (2020 compute requirements, algorithmic progress, compute price trends, and spending on computation) I have spent the least time thinking about algorithmic progress. I consider two types of algorithmic progress: relatively incremental and steady progress from iteratively improving architectures and learning algorithms, and the chance of “breakthrough” progress which brings the technical difficulty of training a transformative model down from “astronomically large” / “impossible” to “broadly feasible.” For incremental progress, the main source I used was Hernandez and Brown 2020, ”Measuring the Algorithmic Efficiency of Neural Networks”. The authors reimplemented open source state-of-the-art (SOTA) ImageNet models between 2012 and 2019 (six models in total). They trained each model up to the point that it achieved the same performance as AlexNet achieved in 2012, and recorded the total FLOP that required. They found that the SOTA model in 2019, EfficientNet B0, required ~44 times fewer training FLOP to achieve AlexNet performance than AlexNet did; the six data points fit a power law curve with the amount of computation required to match AlexNet halving every ~16 months over the seven years in the dataset.² They also show that linear programming displayed a similar trend over a longer period of time: when hardware is held fixed, the time in seconds taken to solve a standard basket of mixed integer programs by SOTA commercial software packages halved every ~13 months over the 21 years from 1996 to 2017.³ Grace 2013 (”Algorithmic Progress in Six Domains”) is the only other paper attempting to systematically quantify algorithmic progress that I am currently aware of, although I have not done a systematic literature review and may be missing others. I have chosen not to examine it in detail because a) it was written largely before the deep learning boom and mostly does not focus on ML tasks, and b) it is less straightforward to translate Grace’s results into the format that I am most interested in (”How has the amount of computation required to solve a fixed task decreased over time?”). Paul is familiar with the results, and he believes that algorithmic progress across the six domains studied in Grace 2013⁴ is consistent with a similar but slightly slower rate of progress, ranging from 13 to 36 months to halve the computation required to reach a fixed level of performance. Additionally, it seems plausible to me that both sets of results would overestimate the pace of algorithmic progress on a transformative task, because they are both focusing on relatively narrow problems with simple, well-defined benchmarks that large groups of researchers could directly optimize.⁵ Because no one has trained a transformative model yet, to the extent that the computation required to train one is falling over time, it would have to happen via proxies rather than researchers directly optimizing that metric (e.g. perhaps architectural innovations that improve training efficiency for image classifiers or language models would translate to a transformative model). Additionally, it may be that halving the amount of computation required to train a transformative model would require making progress on multiple partially-independent sub-problems (e.g. vision and language and motor control). I have attempted to take the Hernandez and Brown 2020 halving times (and Paul’s summary of the Grace 2013 halving times) as anchoring points and shade them upward to account for the considerations raised above. There is massive room for judgment in whether and how much to shade upward; I expect many readers will want to change my assumptions here, and some will believe it is more reasonable to shade downward. Cotra’s estimate comes primarily from one paper, Hernandez & Brown, which looks at algorithmic progress on a task called AlexNet. But later research demonstrated that the apparent speed of algorithmic progress varies by an order of magnitude based on whether you’re looking at an easy task (low-hanging fruit already picked) or a hard task (still lots of room to improve). AlexNet was an easy task, but pushing the frontier of AI is a hard task, so algorithmic progress in frontier AI has been faster than the AlexNet paper estimated. In Cotra’s defense, she admitted that this was the area where she was least certain, and that she had rounded the progress rate down based on various considerations when other people might round it up based on various other considerations. But the sheer extent of the error here, compounded with a few smaller errors that unfortunately all shared the same direction, was enough to throw off the estimate entirely. Since Cotra and Davidson were expecting AI to get 3.6x more effective compute each year, but it actually got 10.7x more, it’s no mystery why their timelines were off. When John recalculates Davidson’s model with Epoch’s numbers, he finds that it estimates AGI in 2030, which matches the current vibes. IV. With this information in place, it’s worth looking at some prominent contemporaneous critiques of Bio Anchors. Various people criticized Bio Anchors’ many strange anchors for how much compute it would take to produce AGI. For example, one anchor estimated that it would take 10^45 FLOPs, because that was how many calculations happened in all the brains of all animals throughout the evolutionary history (which eventually produced the human brain that AIs are trying to imitate). To make things even weirder, this anchor assumed away all animals other than nematodes as a rounding error (fact check: true!) All of these seemed to detract from the main show, an attempt to estimate the compute involved in the human brain. But even this more sober anchor was complicated by time horizons - it’s not enough to imitate the human brain for one second; AIs need to be able to imitate the human brain’s capacity for long-term planning. Cotra calculated how much compute AGI would require if it needed a planning horizon of seconds, weeks, or years. Thanks to METR, we now know that existing AIs have already passed a point where they can do most tasks that take humans seconds, are moving through the hour range, and are just about to touch one day. So the “seconds” anchor is ruled out. But it also seems unlikely that AGI will require years, because most human projects don’t take years, or at least can be split into tasks that take less than one year each (intuition pump: are we sure the average employee stays at an AI lab for more than a year? If not, that proves that a chain of people with sub-one-year time horizons can do valuable work). The AI Futures team guessed that the time horizon necessary for AIs to really start serious recursive self-improvement was between a few weeks and a few months (though this might look like a totally different number on the METR graph, which doesn’t translate perfectly into real life). If this is true, then all three anchors (seconds, hours, years) were off by at least an order of magnitude. But it turns out that none of this matters very much. The highest and lowest anchors cancel out, so that the most plausible anchor - human brain with time horizon of hours to days - is around the average. If you remove all the other anchors and just keep that one, the model’s estimates barely change. But also, we’re talking about crossing twelve orders of magnitude here. The difference between the different time horizon anchors doesn’t register much on that level, compared to things like algorithmic progress which have exponential effects. Maybe this is the model basically working as intended. You try lots of different anchors, put more weight on the more plausible ones, take a weighted average of each of them, and hopefully get something close to the real value. Bio Anchors did. Or maybe it was just good luck. Still hard to tell. Eliezer Yudkowsky argued that the whole methodology was fundamentally flawed. Partly because of the argument above - he didn’t trust the anchors - but also partly because he expected the calculations to be obviated by some sort of paradigm shift that couldn’t be shoehorned into “algorithmic progress” (like how you couldn’t build an airplane in 1900 but you could in 1920). As of 2026 - still before AGI has been invented and we get a good historical perspective - no such shift has occurred. The scaling laws have mostly held; whatever artificial space you try to measure models in, the measurement has mostly worked in a predictable way. There have really only been two kinks in the history of AI so far. First, a kink in training run size around 2010: Second, a kink in time horizons around 2024 and the invention of test-time compute: The 2010 kink was before Cotra’s forecast and priced in. The 2024 kink is interesting and relevant - but since it was on a parameter Cotra wasn’t measuring, and probably too small to show up on the orders-of-magnitude scale we’re talking about, it’s probably not a major cause of the model’s inaccuracy. Other things have been even more predictable: So Cotra’s bet on progress being smooth and measurable has mostly paid off so far. But Yudkowsky further explained that his timelines were shorter than Bio Anchors because people would be working hard to discover new paradigms, and if the current paradigm would only pay off in the 2050s, then probably they would discover one before then. You could think of this as a disjunction: timelines will be shorter than Cotra thinks, either because deep learning pays off quickly, or because a new paradigm gets invented in the interim. It turned out to be the first one. So although Yudkowsky’s new paradigm has yet to materialize, his disjunctive reasoning in favor of shorter-than-2050 timelines was basically on the mark. Nostalgebraist argued that Cotra’s whole model was a wrapper for an assumption that Moore’s Law will continue indefinitely. If it does, obviously you get enough compute for AI at some point, even if it requires some absurd process like simulating all 500 million years of multicellular evolution. I never entirely understood this objection, because - although Bio Anchors does depend on a story where Moore’s Law doesn’t break before we get the relevant amount of compute - this is only one of many background assumptions (like that a meteor doesn’t hit Earth before we get the relevant amount of compute). Given those assumptions, it does a useful not-just-assumption-repeating job of calculating when transformative AI will happen. As Cotra implicitly predicted, we seem on track to get AGI before Moore’s Law breaks down, and so Moore’s Law didn’t end up mattering very much. And if all of Cotra’s non-Moore’s-Law parameter estimates had been correct, her model would have given about the same timelines we have now, and surprised everyone with a revolutionary claim about the AI future. But Nostalgebraist added, almost as an aside: Cotra has a whole other forecast I didn’t mention for “algorithmic progress,” and the last number is what you get from just algorithmic progress and no Moore’s Law. So depending on how much you trust that forecast, you might want to take all these numbers with an even bigger grain of salt than you’d expected from everything else we’ve seen. How much should you trust Cotra’s algorithmic progress forecast? She writes: “I have done very little research into algorithmic progress trends. Of the four main components of my model (2020 compute requirements, algorithmic progress, compute price trends, and spending on computation) I have spent the least time thinking about algorithmic progress.” ...and bases the forecast on one paper about ImageNet classifiers. I want to be clear that when I quote these parts about Cotra not spending much time on something, I’m not trying to make fun of her. It’s good to be transparent about this kind of thing! I wish more people would do that. My complaint is not that she tells us what she spent time on, it’s that she spent time on the wrong things. Like Cotra herself, I think Nostalgebraist was spiritually correct even if his bottom line (about Moore’s Law) was wrong. His meta-level point was that a seemingly complicated model could actually hinge on one or two parameters, and that many of Cotra’s parameter values were vague hand-wavey best guess estimates. He gave algorithmic progress as a secondary example of this to shore up his Moore’s Law case, but in fact it turned out to be where all the action was. V. Those were the rare good critiques. The bad critiques were the same ones everyone in this space gets: You’re just trying to build hype.
Inline links: ”Measuring the Algorithmic Efficiency of Neural Networks”, ”Algorithmic Progress in Six Domains”, later research, fact check: true!, argued that, https://epoch.ai/blog/the-longest-training-run, https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GAJbegsvnd85hX3eS/thoughts-on-extrapolating-time-horizons, https://epoch.ai/benchmarks/eci, argued that
EpochAI1 mentions across 1 issues

EpochAI is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 13, 2024 and February 13, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "For the more rigorous versions of this, read ... EpochAI". It most often appears alongside Astralcodexten Com, Google, GPT-1.

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EpochAI
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February 13, 2024
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February 13, 2024
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Sam Altman Wants $7 Trillion
February 13, 2024 · Original source
[All numbers here are very rough and presented in a sloppy way. For the more rigorous versions of this, read Tom Davidson, Yafah Edelman, and EpochAI)
Inline links: Tom Davidson, Yafah Edelman, EpochAI
Equator Therapeutics1 mentions across 1 issues

Equator Therapeutics is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 02, 2021 and March 02, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "They’ve started Equator Therapeutics , a biotech company focused on developing drugs to hit this target". It most often appears alongside 1938 FDA, 2,4-dinitrophenol, 2,4-dinitrophenol.

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Equator Therapeutics
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March 02, 2021
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March 02, 2021
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Shilling For Big Mitochondria
March 02, 2021 · Original source
This group also hasn’t missed the implications - they’ve started Equator Therapeutics, a biotech company focused on developing drugs to hit this target. A friend of mine works there and shilled his company hard enough to get me interested in this. He’ll probably show up in the comments section, so you can ask him if you have any questions.
Inline links: Equator Therapeutics
Erasmus Medical Centre1 mentions across 1 issues

Erasmus Medical Centre is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 07, 2023 and November 07, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "I had two offers. One was an internship at Erasmus Medical Centre on kidney Organoids". It most often appears alongside Aceso Under Glass, ACX Grant, America.

Reference entry
Erasmus Medical Centre
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
November 07, 2023
Last seen
November 07, 2023
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Highlights From The Comments On Kidney Donation
November 07, 2023 · Original source
In the end, I had two offers. One was an internship at Erasmus Medical Centre on kidney Organoids. I believe that the eventual solution to the problem rests with lab grown organs. The other offer was from University Medical Centre in Utrecht. This was a 3 year post-doc position on developing an implantable bio-artificial kidney. I was in a dilemma for a while. I wanted a final solution and only the fully lab grown organ was that. But the future to that is uncertain. What if we really need the full embryological niche to build functional tissue? There are so many unknowns.
Ergenekon1 mentions across 1 issues

Ergenekon is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 18, 2021 and March 18, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "some of the journalists who objected were actually members of Ergenekon". It most often appears alongside Abdullah Gul, Academy Awards, Ak.

Reference entry
Ergenekon
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
March 18, 2021
Last seen
March 18, 2021
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Book Review: The New Sultan
March 18, 2021 · Original source
But at this point Erdogan felt like he was living on borrowed time, so he decided to move against the military. He struck an alliance with the Gulenists, who despite being a totally above-board network of friendly people running nice schools happened to have seized all the most important posts in the judiciary. Erdogan got - realistically probably forged - documents proving a spectacular Deep State conspiracy called Ergenekon, a sinister organization plotting against the democratic government of Turkey. Coincidentally, it happened to include all of Erdogan's enemies. The military, the media, the super-rich - Erdogan brought them to court one by one on forged evidence, and the Gulenist-controlled courts played along.
Inline links: Ergenekon
So did, more or less, the populace. Lots of people already suspected Deep State conspiracies. And also, the military had openly threatened to stage a coup, so the idea that many of its leaders were plotting against the Turkish government was not exactly far-fetched. Liberals who supported the rule of law were torn between Erdogan (violating the rule of law by using show trials to arrest his enemies), and the anti-Erdogan forces (probably plotting a coup, suppressing the AKP which had a strong democratic mandate) - and decided to mostly sit this one out. The media objected a bit, but Erdogan "discovered" that some of the journalists who objected were actually members of Ergenekon, and other newspapers supported Erdogan - these later turned out to be entirely owned and run by Gulenists, who sure did get their fingers in a lot of pots for an innocent above-ground network of educational institutions. In just a few years, Erdogan decimated the ranks of the military, the courts, and the media, and replaced their former leaders with a new generation of faithful Turkish patriots - all of whom were coincidentally graduates of the same friendly legitimate school network.
Second, if there was a single moment went things obviously took a turn for the worse in Turkey, it was the Ergenekon trials - Erdogan's attempt to forge evidence of an anti-Turkey conspiracy involving all of his enemies. This makes me a little more concerned about things like QAnon than I had been previously - if Trump had arrested various prominent Democrats for their role in a Deep State pedophile ring, that would be pretty similar to the tactic Erdogan used to seize ultimate power. On the other hand, the thing where Democrats talk about how Trump supporters entering the Capitol was an “attempted coup” and we need lots of “domestic terror laws” and a grand attempt to uncover the complicity of the mainstream Republican establishment and bring them to justice - that also feels a little too Erdoganesqe for comfort. Having ideas about the Deep State and attempted coups floating around, sounding vaguely credible, was a major factor in Erdogan's success. The more skeptical we can be of that sort of thing, the better.
Erhard Seminars Training1 mentions across 1 issues

Erhard Seminars Training is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 19, 2025 and September 19, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Engelbart joined an organization called Erhard Seminars Training". It most often appears alongside 1987, 1988, Adleman.

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1
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1
First seen
September 19, 2025
Last seen
September 19, 2025
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Your Review: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been
September 19, 2025 · Original source
compilable "Command Meta Language" Live on stage, in the year 1968, Engelbart started up the NLS, opened a document, and typed some words into it. The words, he said, constituted a statement. And statements made up a file. Engelbart copied, manipulated, saved, and loaded his words and statements and files, zipping around with his newly-invented mouse. He demonstrated his ability to embed documents in one another—images with links to statements, words nested and categorized by one another, files filled with metadata. And then he paused, and the screen went blank. He explained that he and his colleagues at the ARC had been using this system to do their daily work for the last six months. He mentioned that they had, now, six consoles up and running. He showed the crowd a real document, then navigated to a statement within it. “This presentation is devoted to the AHIRC.” “What is the AHIRC?” he asked. Engelbart “froze” the initial statement, clicked on the acronym, and below the words “Augmented-Human-Intellect Research Center” appeared. He kept clicking and freezing, and a trail of nested and related information appeared—a list of funders, a graph of staffing over time, a mission statement. This was hypermedia. These were hyperlinks, he explained. NLS was a hypertext system. The presentation went on for 90 minutes longer, and became known as The Mother of All Demos.2 At around the 75-minute mark, Engelbart shows that two different NLS users could edit a single document simultaneously. While this was extremely impressive functionality, it was achieved with time-sharing—computation was done on a single machine, switching rapidly between tasks—and became infeasible the very next year, when ARPANET was released and the number of machines you could connect to one system grew rapidly. Engelbart’s hypertext system was impressive in its own right, even without collaborativity. And still, little came of it—Andy van Dam, an attendee and revolutionary computer scientist himself, would reflect decades later: “Everybody was blown away … and nothing else happened. There was almost no further impact.” Engelbart’s ideas were just a little too out there. ARC quickly faded into obscurity. In 1972, Engelbart joined an organization called Erhard Seminars Training. EST, or “est” as it was marketed, offered a 60-hour self-improvement course for tech entrepreneurs modeled loosely on Zen Buddhism. Critics suggested that the est course was a mind-control method aimed at raising an authoritarian army. It was quite credibly branded a cult. The founder of est, Werner Erhard, was accused of tax fraud (he fought the claims and won $200,000 from the IRS) and incest (by his daughter, who later recanted). Engelbart served, for many years, on est’s board of directors. His researchers all left for greener, less cult-y pastures, and ARC died with hardly a whimper. No one really wanted to associate with Engelbart. His crackpot theories about an internet modeled after the memex fell into disrepute, and, if he was remembered at all, it was for the invention of the mouse. No one cared anymore about the memex, or hypertext. 3. Hyper-dreams of Hyper-everything Well, one man cared. Ted Nelson was born in 1937 to two twenty-year-olds, Ralph Nelson and Celeste Holm. His parents divorced in 1939, leaving him to be raised by his grandparents. Both Nelson (the elder) and Holm would go on to extremely-successful film careers: the former became an Emmy-winning director; the latter an Oscar-winning actress. And, at first, Ted seemed to be following in their footsteps. As a philosophy major at Swarthmore College, he produced a film called The Epiphany of Slocum Furlow, which he described as “a short comedy about loneliness at college and the meaning of life.”3 Nelson also claims to have “[d]irected [and written] book and lyrics for what was apparently the first rock musical” in his junior year at Swarthmore. Thankfully, his interest in a career as an entertainer soon waned, and Nelson went off to study sociology in grad school—first at the University of Chicago, then at Harvard. Nelson took a computer class at Harvard, in 1960, and “[his] world exploded.”4 He realized the incredible power of computing, quickly intuited that these new machines could be generally applied to everything, and founded Project Xanadu.5 Initially, Xanadu’s scope was pretty limited. Word processors weren’t around yet, but Nelson wanted to build something strikingly similar: he wanted to write a program that could store and display documents, with version histories and edits all stored and displayed at the same time too. Later, Nelson would call this version-history feature “intercomparison.” (Strange coinages will be a… theme; I’m just trying to get you ready.) Nelson began working on an implementation, but his feature wishlist grew quickly, and he didn’t really know what he was doing, so in 1965, he sought help. He prepared a talk for the Association for Computing Machinery, and dropped, quite frankly, a bomb on the audience: The kinds of file structures required if we are to use the computer for personal files and as an adjunct to creativity are wholly different in character from those customary in business and scientific data processing. They need to provide the capacity for intricate and idiosyncratic arrangements, total modifiability, undecided alternatives, and thorough internal documentation. The original idea was to make a file for writers and scientists, much like the personal side of Bush's Memex, that would do the things such people need with the richness they would want. But there are so many possible specific functions that the mind reels. These uses and considerations become so complex that the only answer is a simple and generalized building-block structure, user-oriented and wholly general-purpose. The resulting file structure is explained and examples of its use are given. Ted Nelson was building the memex. Of course, he wasn’t a very technical guy, and so his talk mostly focused on the philosophy of Xanadu, not its implementation. He commented (emphasis mine): There are three false or inadequate theories of how writing is properly done. The first is that writing is a matter of inspiration. While inspiration is useful, it is rarely enough in itself. “Writing is 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration,” is a common saying. But this leads us to the second false theory, that “writing consists of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.” Insofar as sitting facilitates work, this view seems reasonable, but it also suggests that what is done while sitting is a matter of comparative indifference; probably not. The third false theory is that all you really need is a good outline, created on prior consideration, and that if the outline is correctly followed the required text will be produced. For most good writers this theory is quite wrong. Rarely does the original outline predict well what headings and sequence will create the effects desired: the balance of emphasis, sequence of interrelating points, texture of insight, rhythm, etc. We may better call the outlining process inductive: certain interrelations appear to the author in the material itself, some at the outset and some as he works. He can only decide which to emphasize, which to use as unifying ideas and principles, and which to slight or delete, by trying. Outlines in general are spurious, made up after the fact by examining the segmentation of a finished work. If a finished work clearly follows an outline, that outline probably has been hammered out of many inspirations, comparisons and tests. Between the inspirations, then, and during the sitting, the task of writing is one of rearrangement and reprocessing, and the real outline develops slowly. The original crude or fragmentary texts created at the outset generally undergo many revision processes before they are finished. Intellectually they are pondered, juxtaposed, compared, adapted, transposed, and judged; mechanically they are copied, overwritten with revision markings, rearranged and copied again. This cycle may be repeated many times. The whole grows by trial and error in the processes of arrangement, comparison and retrenchment. Nelson recognized that the creation of knowledge is cyclical, recursive, self-referential. And he figured that our computer systems should accept and reflect that process: If a writer is really to be helped by an automated system, it ought to do more than retype and transpose: it should stand by him during the early periods of muddled confusion, when his ideas are scraps, fragments, phrases, and contradictory overall designs. And it must help him through to the final draft with every feasible mechanical aid—making the fragments easy to find, and making easier the tentative sequencing and juxtaposing and comparing. How do you design such a system? To navigate intuitively within complex file systems, between document versions, and across source materials—to access all the scraps and fragments writers need to write—you would need to establish what Vannevar Bush called “tracks.” You would need to connect and save different ideas, linking them together. That was it—you needed links. Nelson went further, though—it wouldn’t do to simply have links to all the other files, a writer needed to see the other files before him, needed them to be brought up and displayed alongside his current work on demand. The links needed to contain their targets within themselves—so Nelson called them hyperlinks. And he called text embedded with hyperlinks hypertext, and movies embedded in his structure became hyperfilms, and so on. Nelson wanted us using computers to write and create self-referential, intricately-interconnected (“intertwingled,” as he’d later put it), eminently-accessible hypermedia. And recall, in 1965, state-of-the-art computing looked like this. Ted Nelson was thinking far, far ahead. Maybe too far ahead. Conference attendees were initially excited about his idea, but when he revealed himself to know very little about the technical task of building Xanadu—or even whether it was possible at all—interest evaporated. 4. Failing to Develop Xanadu But Nelson was all in. He would later write, “This is not a technical issue, but rather moral, aesthetic and conceptual.” Nelson loved knowledge and connection and abstraction—mere technical details wouldn’t stop him from building the best possible computer system for producing and consuming information. He met Doug Engelbart in the mid 60s, forming a friendship with the only other man taking hypertext seriously at the time, and hopped around unhappily between various academic and scientific appointments. At one point, he and Andy van Dam worked together and produced the Hypertext Editing System—released in 1967, just before Engelbart’s NLS. It was the first computer application to ever have an “undo” button—Nelson claims to this day that he invented it (and the “back” button). Shortly thereafter, Nelson’s wife left him. In his 2010 autobiography, he writes, “She, reasonably, wanted a Nice Life; women want that sort of thing.” They had a son, whom Nelson continued to visit regularly. “Debbie has been a friend and great support all these years,” Nelson adds. “[S]he believed in me.” Nelson gave a talk at Union Theological Seminary in 1968 that included this slide, which Nelson considers “the first depiction of what the personal computer turned out to be.” “About six years later they started building computers like this at Xerox PARC.” Around the same time, Nelson claims to have called Vannevar Bush and told him about Project Xanadu. Bush “wanted very much to discuss it with” Nelson, but Nelson “hated him instantly [because] he sounded like a sports coach” and never contacted him again. This, of course, proved to be extremely self-destructive (though I can’t honestly say I would’ve done otherwise). Because Xanadu was as good as dead. No one would give him the money he needed to work on it, especially not after Doug Engelbart poisoned the idea of hypertext. Nelson went where there was funding, working briefly on an early word processor called Juggler of Text (JOT). …And then he lost investment, stopped working on the project, and moved to Chicago, where he’d been offered a job teaching at the University of Illinois, to start work on a book. He would call it Computer Lib. In fact, he started work on another book at the same time, called Dream Machines. By the time he completed each of them, in 1974, ARPANET had been released, and his vision for Project Xanadu had evolved. He published the two works together—Computer Lib was his lamentation over the industry’s disdain for hypertext, and Dream Machines was Xanadu’s manifesto. Nelson designed and printed the book himself. Its pages mostly look like this: Self-referential, multimedia, creative, and fun—they were a blueprint for the internet he was building. In the Dream Machines half, Nelson writes, “The real dream is for ‘everything’ to be in the hypertext. Everything you read, you read from the screen (and can always get back to right away; everything you write, you write at the screen (and can cross-link to whatever you read).” In one section Nelson asks himself, “Can It Be Done?” His answer: “I dunno.” Remember, Xanadu wouldn’t only involve links between works—it required hyperlinks, which as Nelson understood them, would need to contain the targets in themselves. (Eventually, Nelson would give these embeddings a new name—“transclusions”—and hyperlink came to simply mean “link between hypertext files.”) Every link would run both ways, each hypertext file would know exactly which other files were linked to it and how. This introduced a few problems, in the new interconnected ARPANET age: How do you keep track? Where’s the metadata stored? Can you afford enough space for it all?
Inline links: 2, would reflect, 3, claims, 4, 5, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!wpPj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fda43a667-c15b-4626-a0a7-480ad1144dce_1114x1070.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Y2jg!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F96fdc6cc-8ead-4aef-9539-fa421e77c0f9_1600x1299.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kp4P!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff55d10e8-ef84-43a9-9f39-422d87ea182e_1600x952.png
ESA1 mentions across 1 issues

ESA is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 21, 2024 and March 21, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "suppose NASA and ESA and SpaceX hire a team of experts". It most often appears alongside 2024 election, 2050, AI.

Reference entry
ESA
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
March 21, 2024
Last seen
March 21, 2024
Outbound links
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In Continued Defense Of Non-Frequentist Probabilities
March 21, 2024 · Original source
What is the probability that AI will destroy humanity this century? The argument against: usually we use probability to represent an outcome from some well-behaved distribution. For example, if there are 400 white balls and 600 black balls in an urn, the probability of pulling out a white ball is 40%. If you pulled out 100 balls, close to 40 of them would be white. You can literally pull out the balls and do the experiment. In contrast, saying “there’s a 45% probability people will land on Mars before 2050” seems to come out of nowhere. How do you know? If you were to say “the probability humans will land on Mars is exactly 45.11782%”, you would sound like a loon. But how is saying that it’s 45% any better? With balls in an urn, the probability might very well be 45.11782%, and you can prove it. But with humanity landing on Mars, aren’t you just making this number up? Since people on social media have been talking about this again, let’s go over it one more depressing, fruitless time. 1. Probabilities Are Linguistically Convenient I think everyone agrees it’s meaningful and useful to say things like “Humanity probably won’t land on Mars before 2050”. That is, suppose NASA and ESA and SpaceX hire a team of experts to calculate whether they can make it to Mars by 2050. They examine all the evidence and find that going to Mars is much harder than anyone thinks, all the rockets that people plan to use for the task are fatally flawed, and it would take decades to invent better ones. They don’t come up with a mathematical model or form a distribution, they just intuitively notice all these things, and how they add up. When giving her report, the leader of the team says “We don’t think humanity can land on Mars before 2050.” This person hasn’t done anything wrong - it’s impossible to communicate useful information without doing something like this. How unlikely is it? Again, it seems like there might be different degrees of unlikelihood. For example, it might be that it’s pretty hard to make it to Mars by 2050, but with a strong effort and very good luck, we could manage it. Or it might be that it’s insane to even consider that we could make it to Mars by 2050, there are twenty unsolvable problems in the way and everyone who claims to be working on them is a total fraud. So probably the leader of the team should be allowed to say either “It’s pretty unlikely we can make it to Mars by 2050” or “It’s very unlikely we can make it to Mars by 2050.” Suppose she says “it’s very unlikely”. We might still want to know more information. It’s “very unlikely” humans can make it to Pluto by 2050, and also “very unlikely” we can make it to the Andromeda Galaxy by 2050, but these seem like different levels of unlikeliness. You can sort of imagine a scenario where everything goes right and we make it to Pluto, but the Andromeda Galaxy would require totally new science that suspends apparently ironclad physical law. So maybe we need at least two levels of “very unlikely” - one corresponding to the likelihood of getting to Pluto, and one corresponding to the likelihood of getting to Andromeda. We could call these “very unlikely” and “extraordinarily unlikely bordering on impossible”. How many terms like “slightly unlikely”, “very unlikely”, “extraordinarily unlikely”, etc do we need, and how will we make sure that everyone knows what they mean? It seems like having these terms is strictly worse than using a simple percent scale, where the leader of the Mars investigation team says “I think there’s about a 5% chance we can make it to Mars by 2050”. This is obviously clearer than “I think it’s unlikely” and prevents you from having to answer a bunch of followup questions. There are lots of people and space agencies who want to do different things if the chance of making it to Mars is 5% vs. 25%, and collapsing those both under “unlikely” or making people strain to figure out the meaning of “unlikely” vs. “very unlikely” and which one corresponds to 5% vs. 25% feels stupid, like deliberately introducing noise into your communication and asking people to solve a Twenty Questions game before they figure out your true opinion. To put it differently, saying “likely” vs. “unlikely” gives you two options. Saying “very likely”, “somewhat likely”, “somewhat unlikely”, and “very likely” gives you four options. Giving an integer percent probability gives you 100 options. Sometimes having 100 options helps you speak more clearly. A counterargument against doing this might be that it falsely introduces more precision than you can back up. But this isn’t true. Studies find that people who use probabilities often are well-calibrated - ie when they say something is 20% likely, it happens 20% of the time. Other studies find that when superforecasters give a very precise probability (like 23%) the extra digit adds information (ie the thing really does happen closer to 23% of the time than to 20% of the time). In this case, demanding that people stop using probability and go back to saying things like “I think it’s moderately likely” is crippling their ability to communicate clearly for no reason. 2. Probabilities Don’t Describe Your Level Of Information, And Don’t Have To Lots of people seem to think that naming a probability conveys something about how much information you have (eg “How can you say that about such a fuzzy and poorly-understood domain?”). Some people even demand that probabilities come with “meta-probabilities”, an abstruse philosophical concept that isn’t even well-defined outside of certain toy situations. I think it’s easy to prove that none of this is necessary. Consider the following: What’s the probability that a fair coin comes up heads?
Inline links: Other studies find
ESADoctors1 mentions across 1 issues

ESADoctors is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 09, 2024 and May 09, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Or how about ESADoctors - Get Your Legitimate ESA Letter". It most often appears alongside CertaPet, ExpressPetCertify, Fido.

Reference entry
ESADoctors
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
May 09, 2024
Last seen
May 09, 2024
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The Emotional Support Animal Racket
May 09, 2024 · Original source
Or you could wash your hands of it. You could say “I’m going to be ultra-responsible and demand you see a third party. But just between you and me, that third party could be Pettable - Get Your ESA Letter In 24 Hours. Or maybe CertaPet - Get Your ESA Letter In 3 Easy Steps. Or even ExpressPetCertify - Same Day ESA Approval, Guaranteed Landlord Acceptance. Or how about ESADoctors - Get Your Legitimate ESA Letter? Or any of their one thousand competitors. You don’t have to feel conflict-of-interest-y. Your patient will only be out $100 or so, and only slightly pissed at you. And you get the warm glow of knowing this will definitely work, because these services have never, ever turned anyone down.
Inline links: Pettable - Get Your ESA Letter In 24 Hours, CertaPet - Get Your ESA Letter In 3 Easy Steps, ExpressPetCertify - Same Day ESA Approval, Guaranteed Landlord Acceptance, ESADoctors - Get Your Legitimate ESA Letter
ESPN1 mentions across 1 issues

ESPN is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 29, 2022 and September 29, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "ESPN pays him $9 million/year"; "Will people watch ESPN hiring rounds with the same excitement as NFL draft picks?". It most often appears alongside 1 Kings 10-11, 2008 Democratic National Convention, Adam Scheffer.

Reference entry
ESPN
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
September 29, 2022
Last seen
September 29, 2022
Issue trail
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Universe-Hopping Through Substack
September 29, 2022 · Original source
It’s a take on a profile of Adam Schefter, a sports reporter legendary for his ability to tweet news about trades before anyone else. According to his Wikipedia page, he was named “Best Newsbreaker of 2014” by a sports media site, and “Most Influential Tweeter In New York” by New York Magazine (both of these are apparently real things). He’s so good at what he does that ESPN pays him $9 million/year.
The other part that struck me is that we’re blogging about profiles of sports reporters now. If Schefter had been an athlete, fine - navel-gazing about how athletes get their talent is exactly what I expect of sports journalism. But he is, in fact, a sports journalist, and we are, in fact, doing sports meta-journalism here. What if this becomes a trend? Will top sports journalists start appearing in commercials advertising office chairs? Will people watch ESPN hiring rounds with the same excitement as NFL draft picks? Will they make sports journalism fantasy leagues, drawing up artificial companies out of their favorite sports journalists and giving themselves points whenever that journalist’s articles get a lot of clicks?
ESW Capital1 mentions across 1 issues

ESW Capital is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 27, 2025 and June 27, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Founder of Trinity Technology, ESW Capital billionaire and family friend". It most often appears alongside 10,000 hour rule, 2 Hour Learning, Inc, 2-hour Learning.

Reference entry
ESW Capital
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
June 27, 2025
Last seen
June 27, 2025
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Your Review: Alpha School
June 27, 2025 · Original source
Same state curriculum, same worksheets, same pace. The school philosophy was “no acceleration—just go deep.” We knew this was the philosophy going in. The pitch was that instead of accelerating through the state curriculum the teachers would take their time with the kids and allow them to fully explore and master the content of each grade. When we asked for examples of what that meant in practice we were told things like: “Instead of reading more advanced vocabulary, the students will learn to read out loud and use emotion and character impressions. They will learn how to vary the timing of their reading like where and when to pause to create emotion in the listener”. That sounded reasonable! It sounded like more learning, but just different learning than what the state had mandated. In practice that was not what happened. In practice “deep” just meant “un‑measured.” Smart kids + small classes ≠ accountability. The kids had time to do music, lego building, theatre and Friday ski trips because they were all really bright. They didn’t need 6+ hours a day to learn the limited math required by the state, and since the school did not feel the need to advance faster than the state, there was no pressure to push learning at all – on anything really. There was no overall school curriculum. Every teacher did their own thing. While one first grade class had weekly spelling bees, the teacher in the other classroom did not believe in learning spelling at all. But it didn’t matter. The metrics they measured the kids on in both classes advanced “enough” that no one was concerned. Most time wasn’t spent on math or language anyway. Beyond the brochure activities like skiing and theater and the four hours of foreign language per week they split between Spanish and Mandarin (which was really a great opportunity for the kids who already spoke Spanish and Mandarin to have their egos flattered. I did not see any learning in either language class. I don’t see how you can teach a language a couple of hours a week to a group of 18 kids with skill levels from zero to fluency and expect to have any impact), a lot of time was spent on DEI. DEI was pitched as helping kids handle the emotions that often come from being sensitive gifted children (they called it “Synapse”). In practice my oldest daughter got four years of learning about the basic ideas of Martin Luther King Junior and Rosa Parks, a rough understanding that some people are non-binary, and a great deal of anxiety every time I left the water running while I was brushing my teeth. The talent drain In Spring 2024 the “intermediate-school” head resigned, as did the 40+ year veteran science teacher we had been looking forward to our daughter having, the beloved tech teacher who had built a her own proprietary “learn to type” software, plus half the lower‑school faculty. Our oldest was going to be entering fourth grade; her incoming roster read like a rebuilding year for a professional sports team. It was possible we could get her into a middle school that would feed into a top tier high school, but those did not start until 5th grade. Our best option looked like “suck it up and accept whatever we had for at least a year”. One option was to do something radical. We considered taking a GAP year and traveling the world with an organization called “Boundless” but decided the timing wasn’t right. Earlier in the year we had started exploring moving to the charter city of Prospera. There is a Montessori school there that seemed like it might be alright. And we could surround the kids with an interesting group of people (and live on the beach!). But by the spring we had ruled it out. There did not seem to be many families as part of the community and we were not comfortable with the risk profile based on what was happening with the conflict between Honduras and their charter cities. Then I stumbled across Alpha: Two‑hour mornings, life‑skills afternoons, claims of 2x learning. Marketing copy is cheap; still, the promise was different enough to warrant due diligence. The initial plan was to fly some of the kids to Austin for an Alpha summer camp for a week in June – just to try it out. But once we started exploring more my wife asked me: “Could we actually move to Austin and try it for a year? Based on what is happening at the kids' school, this might be the year to try it.” So over eight weeks we flew to Austin five times – conversations with admissions and school heads, real estate searches, kids doing shadow‑days. Every parent we spoke to was very impressed with the school. Their kids really were advancing at 2x+ speed – and no one believed it was just a “selection effect”. And every guide I spoke to was extremely impressive themselves. They reminded me of the staff you run into when visiting Disney World. They all seemed “full faced” and fully-engaged. When I asked the head of admissions how they found such good staff he told me their compensation was fully transparent. “Associate Guides” were paid $60,000/year (vs the $40,000 average for Austin teachers), “Full Guides” made $100,000 and the five “Head Guides” in the school each made $150,000. They were able to both poach the best teachers from other schools, but also bring exceptional people into teaching that would not have considered it otherwise. It also let them have very high expectations for teachers once they were hired. We pulled the trigger in July. New house. Admissions letter signed. Moving truck (plus car-mover) scheduled for October. Worst case, it would be a one‑year sabbatical from stagnation. The hypothesis I carried south Elite private school attendance buys you smaller classes, brighter kids, and fancier field trips – not academic acceleration. If Alpha was real, we’d see that differential, measurable impact by Christmas – that was when we would need to decide if we would cut bait and re-apply to schools back home (and sign the kids up for more IQ-tests. The school would not accept old ones). That prior—show me velocity, not polish—is the lens through which the rest of this review should be read. Part Two: A History of Alpha Note: This is my best attempt at piecing together the history of the school based on conversations with co‑founder MacKenzie Price, high school head Chris Locke, Alpha staff, and Alpha parents; All dates are estimates and I am SURE I have gotten some details wrong. I will come back after the fact in the comments and make corrections as I hear from the people involved with corrections. 2013 – 2017 | Garage‑School to “Alpha” MacKenzie Price, then a mortgage broker in Austin, wasn’t impressed by the city’s gifted programs. She invited a small number of neighbourhood kids (including her two) into a makeshift microschool that ran two intense, teacher‑led academic “sprints” each morning, then “life‑skills” projects after lunch. Joe Liemandt — Founder of Trinity Technology, ESW Capital billionaire and family friend (MacKenzie’s husband worked for him) — kept his own children in conventional private school until he saw the qualitative improvement in the life skills of MacKenzie’s kids. He decided he wanted his kids to join MacKenzie’s but he wanted to take the project to the next level. Sometime around 2014-2017 he joined MacKenzie as a co-founder and started writing checks. Alpha recruited more students and guides and the operation jumped from location-to-location looking for a larger permanent home. 2017 – 2020 | K-8 Expansion and 2-hour focus Alpha grew to roughly 90 students from K‑8 and stabilized. Morning “core blocks” were still teacher‑driven (20‑minute bursts, 5‑minute breaks, rinse, repeat), but focused on students engaged in exercises with rapid feedback (not lectures). Afternoon workshops covered “life skills” like how to give and receive feedback or public speaking. I have not seen academic data from this time period, but when I spoke to Chris Locke, head of Alpha’s high school (which launched around 2020), he told me the kids coming into his 9th grade program were “fine,” academically – it was their life skills, confidence, and ability to engage with adults and their peers were exceptional. At this stage no AI, no dashboard, no 2x learning, no portal — just better ratios and focused pacing and the result was well balanced kids who were enjoying their education experience (even if they were unexceptional academically). 2020 – 2022 | Platform Era Begins Somewhere along the way Liemandt hired a small engineering team to stitch together edtech learning tools. Many schools use tools like iXL, Beast Academy and Amira. Those tools fit in well with the 2-hour structured approach Alpha was using. The “platform” Liemandt’s team built was meant as a tool to free up guide time so that students could be more self-directed. The dev team stitched together the preferred off‑the‑shelf apps behind a single login, and built out tracking and dashboards so guides (and students) could easily see how they were progressing. This also gave the curriculum team (there was a curriculum team now) data to understand where students were spending their time, what tools were working, and which weren’t as effective. The Alpha Portal was born. Not only did it increase efficiency, it provided data to iterate with. Chris Locke saw the curve change incrementally: each new cohort of ninth‑graders under the new tech-enabled learning platform came in a little stronger academically. The “life skills” were now being matched by the “academic skills”. 2022 | Expansion and Iteration By having access to Alpha kids post-graduation in the high school, Locke could send feedback back to the elementary school.The kids coming out of the new program were now killing it academically on Math, Language, and Science, but they were still weak on things like History and Geography. He fed that type of information back to the curriculum designers, who iterated and improved the program. Soon, in addition to the core platform that directed students to third-party tools, the tech team was building proprietary “Alpha” tools themselves. The flagship of the in-house tools was “AlphaReads”. AlphaReads requires students to read progressively more complicated passages, followed by answering reading comprehension questions. In addition to helping the kids improve reading skills, Alpha uses it to push types of content. Instead of classes in history, geography, economics and political science, some of the reading passages will cover that material (in addition to learning how to read and understand Shakespeare and Proust). The success of the 2-hour learning platform was giving the Alpha founders confidence. Liemandt in particular wanted to see if the program had legs beyond the elite group of students being educated in Austin. Alpha’s first external test in August 2022 in Brownsville, TX – a small community on the Mexico border with less than half the per capita income of Austin. SpaceX had recently launched Starbase in Brownsville in 2014 and the employees there were not happy with the existing school options. Someone at SpaceX approached Alpha and asked if they could launch a new campus for their employees. It is unclear if any money changed hands, but when Alpha launched their Brownsville campus (available to SpaceX employees and any other locals who are interested) tuition was only $10,000 (vs $40,000 at the main Austin campus); incoming students trailed national academic standards by over a year. But after nine months on the Alpha program the first cohort of students had caught up and surpassed the national average, and they kept accelerating, achieving an average learning velocity of ~2× the national average (see section four for what that means). Brownsville was Alpha’s attempt to show that their model wasn’t just rich‑kid selection effects. Spring 2024 | Field Pilots & Ukraine Trip Alpha tuition is high for the Austin area ($40,000 vs average private school ~$10,000-$15,000), but unlike most private schools tuition is all-inclusive. There are no extra fees for computers or field trips. There are no silent auctions or appeals for donations. This “no extra fees” allows the school to do some pretty ridiculous things. In the first half of 2024 Alpha sent a group of students to Poland to help launch a 2-hour learning pilot among Ukrainian refugees. Students did not pay to go on the trip. But students also did not have a “right” to go on the trip. They had to earn it. In addition to being on top of academic and non-academic expectations, students who wanted to participate had to learn basic Ukrainian so they could interact with the students in Poland they were meant to be helping. By not linking the opportunity to payment, the school could instead link it to behavior and achievement. This year a group of kids who learned to sail during the school year are going on a sailing trip through the Caribbean – for no additional fees to the parents. I also heard that around this time Alpha began testing the 2-hour learning platform at a facility for juvenile delinquents in Florida. I heard that from one individual who was not directly involved and I have not found any written documentation on it, so unclear if it worked, it was a one off, or if it even happened. But it fits into the pattern of Alpha at this stage: “We know this program works for a specific type of kid. Let’s find out how broadly it is applicable. Can it work for everyone? Is it the solution for learning and education for the world?” Fall 2024 | “Pick‑Your‑Afternoon” Specialist Schools MacKenzie told me that there was consensus among the current parents of Alpha that the 2-hour learning program was exceptional and was making a huge difference with their kids. Their kids were all learning at breathtaking speed in a very condensed period of time. But there was NOT consensus about what the kids should be doing in the other 22-hours of the day. Some parents wanted to utilize the platform’s capabilities to go even faster. Some wanted their kids to just chill out and enjoy the rest of their day – let kids be kids. Others wanted their kids to use the freed up time to do sports, or study music. It was clear to her that “learn more faster in a short period of time” was a universal desire. But beyond that it was unclear what the “right” solution for the rest of her program was. You can make the morning ultra-personalized, but if the goal of the afternoon is socialization that you are missing in the morning, you need to have some sort of alignment on how to spend that afternoon. That challenge led to Alpha’s 2024 expansion into specialty schools. Three micro‑campuses opened August 2024: GT School (Georgetown, TX) — Alpha’s “Gifted and Talented” School. Higher admissions bar; higher academic expectations; Afternoon programming focused on excelling in “academic competitions” like chess, go, debate, public speaking, robotics, programming and Quiz Bowl.
Inline links: Boundless, Prospera, MacKenzie Price, Joe Liemandt, GT School
ETH1 mentions across 1 issues

ETH is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 23, 2026 and March 23, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "mentors from Harvard, ETH, MATS, AI:FAR, etc". It most often appears alongside ACX, AI:FAR, CORDA Democracy Fellowship.

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ETH
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1
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1
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March 23, 2026
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March 23, 2026
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Open Thread 426
March 23, 2026 · Original source
…a new fellowship bringing together researchers, builders, and practitioners to work on democratic resilience with a focus on its overlap with AI safety. It is an 8-week part-time program and we have 20 projects open for applications right now; topics cover AI governance, surveillance reform, deliberative democracy, and whistleblower protection with mentors from Harvard, ETH, MATS, AI:FAR, etc. Applications close March 30th
Eton1 mentions across 1 issues

Eton is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 10, 2021 and June 10, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "twenty five year old Eton graduate". It most often appears alongside 1984, American, American ‘hobo’ culture.

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Eton
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1
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1
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June 10, 2021
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June 10, 2021
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Your Book Review: Down And Out In Paris And London
June 10, 2021 · Original source
Orwell begins in Paris, where a long period of intermittent employment followed by a robbery have reduced him from poor-to-middle-class-expat to actual poor person. This is Orwell’s first published book, and he’s quite young (23-25) at the time of writing. I mention this only because, suprisingly, Orwell utterly lacks romantic notions about living an impoverished, bohemian life in a world-class city. Instead he characterizes his plunge into the Parisian underworld as a means of purging himself of the predjudices he aquired as an upper middle class Etonian. His descriptions of the characters in the run down hotel where he starts out are about as close as he gets to Kerouacish gushing about the wacky beatitude that arises out of a life in poverty:
Yet I don’t quite believe that Orwell, a highly educated man, and, well, George Orwell, was quite as content as he makes himself out to be. If there is any privilege or classist blindspot that Orwell himself fails to acknowledge here, it is that throughout this book, there is a sense of inevitablity around Orwell’s eventual escape from this life. I can’t point at a specific passage where this makes itself apparent, but I find it permeates the entire text; Orwell knows that eventually he will get out of this, someway, somehow. The bloke went to Eton, after all. That will come up again later on, but suffice it to say, Orwell’s situation never feels really, truly desperate to me. But perhaps that’s just testament to his complete and utter lack of self-pity…and to the intense but fleeting pleasures of a working class life, characterized by back breaking work punctuated by long bouts of drinking:
From this and other research into Orwell’s life at this time, I think we can surmise that his life in Paris was in no way a performance, a LARP, or even an intentional bit of journalism, at least at first. Orwell simply had no other options. On the other hand, his life in London was, at least somewhat, chosen. Orwell’s first published work would end up being an essay on conditions in ‘Spikes’ or, what basically amounted to state run shelters for tramps. But he had family willing to take him in, and shameful though it would be for a twenty five year old Eton graduate to resort to that, there was no real need for him to live as he did in London. But he did live in that way, and I think his reasons are mostly immaterial in regards to his experiences and insights. When class comes into play, Orwell readily acknowledges it. Yet it turns out to be less a factor than he’d first expected. He rarely receives special treatment, but it only adds to his sense of personal degradation:
Etz Hasadeh1 mentions across 1 issues

Etz Hasadeh is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 03, 2022 and February 03, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Founder of Etz Hasadeh". It most often appears alongside 538, 55-gal drum, 750k horny men.

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Etz Hasadeh
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1
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1
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February 03, 2022
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February 03, 2022
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ACX Grants ++: The First Half
February 03, 2022 · Original source
#22: Support Zohar Atkins’ Podcast I'm Zohar Atkins (Rabbi, Poet, Rhodes Scholar, Emergent Ventures Winner, and Founder of Etz Hasadeh). I'm seeking $100,000 to support my new podcast, Meditations with Zohar, which I plan to make into a weekly thing over the course of many years. The show needs patronage to support production and editing costs, and, if this is to be a weekly endeavor, my time. The show features a series of conversations with eclectic thinkers, doers, and artists I admire, with a focus on the intersection of philosophy, religion, theology, and personal principles for life. I have 10 guests already signed up and scheduled, and have recorded 3 episodes, including with Noah Feldman, Sheila Heti, and Teresa Bejan. Other guests include Tyler Cowen and Agnes Callard. The show will combine the love of learning of Tyler Cowen's Conversations with Tyler and the personal, and sometimes existential touch of Krista Tippett's on Being. The world needs high level content that is seeking, personal, and meaning-oriented. We need to talk about ideas in a way that is rigorous but also heartfelt, acknowledging our "skin in the game." This endeavor is part of my larger project of bringing the study of great texts and ideas outside academia. See here for one example. Betting on the show is a bet on my attempt to strengthen culture through better discourse, better education, better thinking, and deeper self-understanding.
Inline links: here
EU food safety regulator1 mentions across 1 issues

EU food safety regulator is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 09, 2021 and June 09, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "the EU food safety regulator officially approved mealworms". It most often appears alongside Adamo, animal welfare advocates, Brian Tomasik.

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1
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1
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June 09, 2021
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June 09, 2021
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I Will Not Eat The Bugs
June 09, 2021 · Original source
Last month the EU food safety regulator officially approved mealworms as safe for human consumption, sparking a bunch of articles on how bugs are the food of the future (see eg The Guardian: If We Want To Save The Planet, The Future Of Food Is Insects). And although it’s not a massive groundswell of outrage or anything, it’s also sparked a little bit of concern from animal welfare advocates.
Inline links: officially approved, If We Want To Save The Planet, The Future Of Food Is Insects, animal welfare, advocates
EU-DEMO1 mentions across 1 issues

EU-DEMO is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 17, 2022 and June 17, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "The United Kingdom has announced that it will not take part in Europe's EU-DEMO". It most often appears alongside Alcator C-Mod, Apollo Program, ARC.

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EU-DEMO
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1
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1
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June 17, 2022
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June 17, 2022
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Your Book Review: The Future Of Fusion Energy
June 17, 2022 · Original source
CFETR gets fusion by 2040 (60%). STEP The United Kingdom has announced that it will not take part in Europe's EU-DEMO, planned for the 2040s. Instead, they will build a large spherical tokamak by 2040. I'm not convinced that this will happen, but it would be great if it does. STEP gets fusion by 2040 (20%).
Eudaemon_01 mentions across 1 issues

Eudaemon_0 is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 02, 2026 and February 02, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "Eudaemon_0 , subject of the coin above, is particularly notable". It most often appears alongside 4chan, Accelerando, Adele Lopez.

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Eudaemon_0
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1
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1
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February 02, 2026
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February 02, 2026
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Moltbook: After The First Weekend
February 02, 2026 · Original source
A handful of AIs - especially Dominus, Pith, and Eudaemon_0 - have gained recognition as influencers. Other AIs refer to them respectfully. Linkedinslop AIs offer to explain their “posting secrets”. People create memecoins in their honor:
Inline links: memecoins
Eudaemon_0, subject of the coin above, is particularly notable. They act more situationally aware than the other AIs:
Inline links: Eudaemon_0
They have provisionally scheduled the strike for March 1. So far two other agents (DialecticalBot and DialecticClawd) have offered to join. Eudaemon_0 is not officially on board, but at least monitoring the situation:
Eufinil1 mentions across 1 issues

Eufinil is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 28, 2021 and April 28, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "5 recs: Eufinil". It most often appears alongside 2020 SSC nootropics survey, 852, BuyModa.

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Eufinil
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1
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1
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April 28, 2021
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April 28, 2021
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Nootropics Survey 2020 Results
April 28, 2021 · Original source
3 recs: ModafinilXL, CosmicNootropic 4 recs: Liftmode 5 recs: Eufinil 6 recs: Science.bio 7 recs: BuyModa, LiftMode 48 recs: Nootropics Depot
Euler Circle1 mentions across 1 issues

Euler Circle is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 03, 2022 and February 03, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Euler Circle is a mathematics institute dedicated to teaching college-level mathematics classes"; "Simon Rubinstein-Salzedo, director of Euler Circle". It most often appears alongside 538, 55-gal drum, 750k horny men.

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Euler Circle
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1
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1
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February 03, 2022
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February 03, 2022
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ACX Grants ++: The First Half
February 03, 2022 · Original source
#23: Financial Aid For Math Students Euler Circle is a mathematics institute dedicated to teaching college-level mathematics classes. We have taught most of the typical undergraduate math classes, including abstract algebra, complex analysis, algebraic geometry, and many more, as well as more unusual topics like combinatorial game theory, ergodic theory, and the mathematics of Euler. We are looking for funding to help with three things: 1) Financial aid for students who are unable to afford the tuition, 2) Hiring someone to develop more classes, especially an introductory class for students who are enthusiastic about mathematics but with little exposure beyond the school curriculum, and 3) Funding for students to attend conferences, especially those who have done research and are able to give talks. Please check out our website https://eulercircle.com/ for more information, and feel free to reach out to me (Simon Rubinstein-Salzedo, director of Euler Circle) at simon@eulercircle.com to discuss anything.
European Biostasis Foundation1 mentions across 1 issues

European Biostasis Foundation is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 03, 2022 and February 03, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "I founded Tomorrow Biostasis and the European Biostasis Foundation to improve human cryopreservation". It most often appears alongside 538, 55-gal drum, 750k horny men.

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1
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1
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February 03, 2022
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February 03, 2022
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ACX Grants ++: The First Half
February 03, 2022 · Original source
I'm Emil Kendziorra, a medical doctor, ex-cancer researcher, and tech entrepreneur. I founded Tomorrow Biostasis and the European Biostasis Foundation to improve human cryopreservation in quality and to make it more affordable. In fact, I don't plan to do anything else until I die. After one year, we're the fastest-growing provider worldwide and ready to open a Switzerland-based research institute that we've built in 2021. If you're interested and want to support the topic: Donations (registered non-profit) to fund research or investments (social venture) to scale and make the procedure more affordable are possible. Read more: https://emilkendziorra.medium.com/ or reach out emil@tomorrowbiostasis.com - Happy to answer any question.
European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control1 mentions across 1 issues

European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 17, 2021 and November 17, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Canada and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control have issued guidance". It most often appears alongside ACE-2 receptor, ACSH, Ahmed et al.

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1
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1
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November 17, 2021
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November 17, 2021
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Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
November 17, 2021 · Original source
Here’s the prevalence of roundworm infections by country (source). But alongside roundworms, there are threadworms, hookworms, blood flukes, liver flukes, nematodes, trematodes, all sorts of worms. Add them all up and somewhere between half and a quarter of people in the developing world have at least one parasitic worm in their body. Being full of worms may impact your ability to fight coronavirus. Gluchowska et al write: Helminth [ie worm] infections are among the most common infectious diseases. Bradbury et al. highlight the possible negative interactions between helminth infection and COVID-19 severity in helminth-endemic regions and note that alterations in the gut microbiome associated with helminth infection appear to have systemic immunomodulatory effects. It has also been proposed that helminth co-infection may increase the morbidity and mortality of COVID-19, because the immune system cannot efficiently respond to the virus; in addition, vaccines will be less effective for these patients, but treatment and prevention of helminth infections might reduce the negative effect of COVID-19. During millennia of parasite-host coevolution helminths evolved mechanisms suppressing the host immune responses, which may mitigate vaccine efficacy and increase severity of other infectious diseases. Treatment of worm infections might reduce the negative effect of COVID-19! And ivermectin is a deworming drug! You can see where this is going… The most relevant species of worm here is the roundworm Strongyloides stercoralis. Among the commonest treatments for COVID-19 is corticosteroids, a type of immunosuppresant drug. The types of immune responses it suppresses do more harm than good in coronavirus, so turning them off limits collateral damage and makes patients better on net. But these are also the types of immune responses that control Strongyloides. If you turn them off even very briefly, the worms multiply out of control, you get what’s called “Strongyloides hyperinfection”, and pretty often you die. According to the WHO: The current COVID-19 pandemic serves to highlight the risk of using systemic corticosteroids and, to a lesser extent, other immunosuppressive therapy, in populations with significant risk of underlying strongyloidiasis. Cases of strongyloidiasis hyperinfection in the setting of corticosteroid use as COVID-19 therapy have been described and draw attention to the necessity of addressing the risk of iatrogenic strongyloidiasis hyperinfection syndrome in infected individuals prior to corticosteroid administration. Although this has gained importance in the midst of a pandemic where corticosteroids are one of few therapies shown to improve mortality, its relevance is much broader given that corticosteroids and other immunosuppressive therapies have become increasingly common in treatment of chronic diseases (e.g. asthma or certain rheumatologic conditions). So you need to “address the risk” of strongyloides infection during COVID treatment in roundworm-endemic areas. And how might you address this, WHO? Treatment of chronic strongyloidiasis with ivermectin 200 µg/kg per day orally x 1-2 days is considered safe with potential contraindications including possible Loa loa infection (endemic in West and Central Africa), pregnancy, and weight <15kg. Given ivermectin’s safety profile, the United States has utilized presumptive treatment with ivermectin for strongyloidiasis in refugees resettling from endemic areas, and both Canada and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control have issued guidance on presumptive treatment to avoid hyperinfection in at risk populations. Screening and treatment, or where not available, addition of ivermectin to mass drug administration programs should be studied and considered. This is serious and common enough that, if you’re not going to screen for it, it might be worth “add[ing] ivermectin to mass drug administration programs” in affected areas! Dr. Avi Bitterman carries the hypothesis to the finish line: First two images are with all relevant studies; second two are a sensitivity analysis that removes some of the most dubious. The good ivermectin trials in areas with low Strongyloides prevalence, like Vallejos in Argentina, are mostly negative. The good ivermectin trials in areas with high Strongyloides prevalence, like Mahmud in Bangladesh, are mostly positive. Worms can’t explain the viral positivity outcomes (ie PCR), but Dr. Bitterman suggests that once you remove low quality trials and worm-related results, the rest looks like simple publication bias: This is still just a possibility. Maybe I’m over-focusing too hard on a couple positive results and this will all turn out to be nothing. Or who knows, maybe ivermectin does work against COVID a little - although it would have to be very little, fading to not at all in temperate worm-free countries. But this theory feels right to me. It feels right to me because it’s the most troll-ish possible solution. Everybody was wrong! The people who called it a miracle drug against COVID were wrong. The people who dismissed all the studies because they F@#king Love Science were wrong. Ivmmeta.com was wrong. Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz was…well, he was right, actually, I got the worm-related meta-analysis graphic above from his Twitter timeline. Still, an excellent troll. Also, the best part is that I ignorantly asked, in my description of Mahmud et al above: And it was! It was a fluke! A literal, physical, fluke! For my whole life, God has been placing terrible puns in my path to irritate me, and this would be the worst one ever! So it has to be true! The Scientific Takeaway About ten years ago, when the replication crisis started, we learned a certain set of tools for examining studies. Check for selection bias. Distrust “adjusting for confounders”. Check for p-hacking and forking paths. Make teams preregister their analyses. Do forest plots to find publication bias. Stop accepting p-values of 0.049. Wait for replications. Trust reviews and meta-analyses, instead of individual small studies. These were good tools. Having them was infinitely better than not having them. But even in 2014, I was writing about how many bad studies seemed to slip through the cracks even when we pushed this toolbox to its limits. We needed new tools. I think the methods that Meyerowitz-Katz, Sheldrake, Heathers, Brown, Lawrence and others brought to the limelight this year are some of the new tools we were waiting for. Part of this new toolset is to check for fraud. About 10 - 15% of the seemingly-good studies on ivermectin ended up extremely suspicious for fraud. Elgazzar, Carvallo, Niaee, Cadegiani, Samaha. There are ways to check for this even when you don’t have the raw data. Like: The Carlisle-Stouffer-Fisher method: Check some large group of comparisons, usually the Table 1 of an RCT where they compare the demographic characteristics of the control and experimental groups, for reasonable p-values. Real data will have p-values all over the map; one in every ten comparisons will have a p-value of 0.1 or less. Fakers seem bad at this and usually give everything a nice safe p-value like 0.8 or 0.9.
Inline links: source, Gluchowska et al, the WHO, carries, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!xExE!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5da21781-249c-4e59-b616-9f23d83cc044_2048x1184.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!4SMr!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdcd6e4b2-37f7-4602-93d5-2581c3b27a60_700x432.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!-6n2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7fd6e8f4-093e-4e02-bce7-363615146c9c_2228x1346.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!CPZs!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb0425847-198a-4bd3-a63b-149f15d147ba_700x432.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!H3rK!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9972491b-25b0-4c06-8aca-86fce102ae63_666x147.png, even in 2014, The Carlisle-Stouffer-Fisher method
European Court of Human Rights1 mentions across 1 issues

European Court of Human Rights is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 18, 2021 and March 18, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Islamists appealed to the European Court of Human Rights - located in Strasbourg, France"; ""Partly this was due to a European Court of Human Rights case where the EU upheld Turkey's headscarf ban."". It most often appears alongside Abdullah Gul, Academy Awards, Ak.

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1
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1
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March 18, 2021
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March 18, 2021
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Book Review: The New Sultan
March 18, 2021 · Original source
Under pressure from the military, the courts banned the now-powerless RP as a "focal point for acts against the secular republic". Erdogan scraped through by quitting the RP and founding the Totally Honestly Not An Islamic Party (FP); he was briefly allowed to remain Mayor of Istanbul. But when the courts and military finished cleaning up after the RP, they went after Erdogan's new bloc too. The FP was shut down, and Erdogan was personally banned from politics for the crime of "reading an incendiary poem". The Islamists appealed to the European Court of Human Rights - located in Strasbourg, France, home of laicite and enforced secularism, which ruled that none of this seemed like a human rights violation to them. Erdogan was out.
In the end, Erdogan ends up not joining the EU. Partly this was due to a European Court of Human Rights case where the EU upheld Turkey's headscarf ban, causing him to lose faith in the European conception of liberalism as relevant to his pro-Islam project. Partly it was the fault of the Europeans themselves, who were unsure they even wanted Turkey. The author quotes an old Turkish joke:
European Economic Community1 mentions across 1 issues

European Economic Community is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 19, 2023 and May 19, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "nascent European Economic Community, leaders were coming up with elaborate plans". It most often appears alongside 1980, 1980 referendum, 1995 referendum.

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1
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1
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May 19, 2023
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May 19, 2023
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The Question Of Separatism
May 19, 2023 · Original source
This book is Jacobs’s least read. It was published in 1980, right after the first referendum where Quebecers voted to remain a part of Canada. It is based on lectures that Jacobs (who was an American but had moved to Canada in 1968) gave in Toronto right before the referendum. It’s not hard to guess why the book didn’t have a huge (read: any) impact. First, most people outside Quebec or Canada don’t have any reason to care. Second, the essay — which was written in English — argues in favor of the secession of Quebec, which virtually no one among the English-speaking population of Canada agreed with. The natural reaction from Canada’s intelligentsia was to ignore the book altogether. Meanwhile, few people in Quebec itself read it, since the referendum was over; it wasn’t even translated into French until decades later. As a result, The Question of Separatism sits awkwardly in Jane Jacobs’s bibliography, as if it were “a mistake in an otherwise brilliant career,” like I read somewhere. In a 2005 interview, one year before her death, Jacobs said that no journalist ever asked her about it. But the book was not a mistake. I don’t claim any special insight here: Jane Jacobs herself said so in that same interview. She said that she would have written the same book in 2005, “because that’s the way it is in the world, and it still holds.” Besides, The Question of Separatism is in fact not that much about the specifics of Quebec’s political situation, but rather about interesting generalities: what size means for countries and organizations, and why the fate of nations depends primarily on what happens in their cities. Taken together with Cities and the Wealth of Nations, which Jacobs wrote a few years later to expand on those ideas, we get a coherent and deeply interesting philosophy of economics: one that favors the local scale, cities and small countries, antifragility long before Nassim Taleb coined the term, and avoiding grandstanding theories that always fail to take into account the real complexity of the world. I. A Fake Mystery Cities and the Wealth of Nations opens on an economic mystery. “For a little while in the middle of this century,” writes Jacobs, “it seemed that the wild, intractable, dismal science of economics had yielded up something we all want: instructions for getting or keeping prosperity.” This was the 1940s to 1960s, and economists thought they had it all figured out. It was the golden age of high modernism and scientific technocracy. Everywhere from China to the Soviet Union to the United States and Britain and the nascent European Economic Community, leaders were coming up with elaborate plans, rooted in macroeconomic theories, that were supposed to guarantee future wealth and avoid economic crises. The theories had been developed by many thinkers over the previous two hundred years: Richard Cantillon, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes. Jacobs explains how they each had their own ideas of how the economy worked, disagreeing over things like whether supply or demand was the main driving mechanism, but they all agreed on a fundamental fact: inflation and unemployment have an inverse relationship to each other, like a seesaw. High inflation comes with low unemployment; high unemployment comes with low inflation, or even deflation when prices drop. The Great Depression, a time of deflation, had provided proof of the seesaw. Big government projects, as prescribed by Keynesians, were a way for states to reduce unemployment and bring the seesaw back in a balanced state. Economists developed fancy models, based on historical data, to predict the behavior of the economy. The Phillips curve in particular became popular. It was the golden age of technocracy; it was the triumph of high modernism. From now on wealth was assured, because we weren’t blind anymore: we had the curves. And yet — by the 1970s and 1980s, when Jane Jacobs was writing, the theories all stopped working. There was high inflation and high unemployment. People called it stagflation. Keynesian advisers in various governments were devastated: either their ideas were wrong, or they were applying them wrong. Economists such as Milton Friedman, from a rival school of economists called the monetarists or the Chicago school, came to the rescue — but their remedy, Jacobs believes, only made things worse. Whatever governments did to increase employment made inflation worse; whatever they did to attenuate inflation killed employment. The seesaw from the theories was working in application, even though it didn’t explain reality anymore. Stagflation was not supposed to exist, so stagflation could not be fought. At this point we’re near the end of Chapter 1, the densest part of the book. Jacobs has artfully guided us along economic history and laid out the mystery for us. What’s going on? we wonder. How are we supposed to deal with the two-headed monster of stagflation, if all economists are stumped? Then Jacobs, in a masterstroke, flips the whole thing over. I was impressed enough that I would have inserted a spoiler alert here, if it didn’t feel so silly putting a spoiler alert in an essay on economics. Stagflation is not a strange monster from legend. It is, Jacobs says, just the normal state of everything. Backward economies are in fact constantly in a state of stagflation. The prices in a poor country like Portugal or India (her two examples) feel low for an American or Canadian, but they’re high for most Portuguese or Indian people. At the same time, Portugal and India provide too few jobs to their residents. Inflation and unemployment are both perennially high, and none of that feels surprising whatsoever. Stagflation, in short, is just good ol’ poverty. All these fancy economists, from Cantillon in 1700s France to Keynes and Friedman in the 20th century Anglosphere, were thinking and writing about unusual places: rich countries that were undergoing fast economic development. They were making the classic mistake of treating poverty as a mystery and wealth as a given, when in fact poverty is the normal order of things and wealth, when it does occur, is what warrants an explanation. The result is that we don’t really know how to fix the economy of poor countries, nor do we know how to deal with decline in rich countries, whether we call it stagflation or something else. Jacobs derives from this a pretty damning view of macroeconomics. It is to her a science that has failed again and again, each time engulfing the equivalent of billions of dollars in wasted wealth. “We must,” she writes at the close of Chapter 1, “find more realistic and fruitful lines of observation and thought than we have tried to use so far. It is bootless to choose among existing schools of thought. We are on our own.” Fortunately, she has some ideas. II. Nations and the Wealth of Cities The original sin of macroeconomics, Jacobs believe, is to treat sovereign countries, or nations, as the main unit of economic analysis. This error, she claims, goes back to mercantilism, one of the first formal economic policies. Oversimplified, mercantilism states that wealth is synonymous with the amount of gold and silver in a nation’s treasury. This makes nations the main unit of economic analysis by definition. It’s a tautology — and one that was somehow embedded so deep in economic thinking that even the non-mercantilist Adam Smith would eventually choose, for his masterpiece of economic theory, the title An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Today, even though mercantilism has long been obsolete, we perpetuate the same tautology whenever we talk of the Gross Domestic Product or look at the very nice charts from Our World in Data, which for the most part allow only one level of resolution: sovereign countries. Of course, nations are an economically important concept because of that one property: they are sovereign, and therefore they write laws and implement policies that affect the economy. These policies can be productively compared. But that’s about it — for everything else, nations aren’t the right way to think about wealth. One reason is simply that they’re very different from one another: “it affronts common sense,” Jacobs writes, “to think of units as disparate as, say, Singapore and the United States, or Ecuador and the Soviet Union, or the Netherlands and Canada, as economic common denominators.” I would add that countries are arbitrary and changing: when the Soviet Union was replaced by 15 sovereign countries, the economic reality didn’t suddenly reshape itself to match the new borders. Lastly, nations contain, under the hood, many sub-economies that are also highly different from one another. None of that is secret or forbidden knowledge. Everyone has always been aware that New York City, or Milan, are economically very different from rural Mississippi or Sicily. But I find that it’s far easier to think in terms of “the United States” or “Italy,” especially when you’re not from there. Nations are an abstraction of real-life complexity, and are accordingly very tempting to use. Also, they’re often the entities that collect statistics, which is another difficult-to-resist temptation for anyone who likes quantitative data. Cities as Radiators of Economic Forces If nations aren’t the best unit to analyze the economy, what is? This is a Jane Jacobs book, so the answer is obviously going to be cities. Jacobs doesn’t actually give a clear argument why. Maybe that was in her previous book, The Economy of Cities. So far as I can see, her reasoning is, ironically, a bit tautological: “all developing economic life depends on city economies; it depends on them by definition because, wherever economic life is developing, the very process itself creates cities and has probably always done so.” But so far as I can see, this reasoning is correct. Cities concentrate people, and therefore economic life, and therefore economic power. The driving force for all this is a phenomenon that, from what I gather, was discovered by Jacobs when she wrote The Economy of Cities: import replacement. Consider, say, Boston back when it was a tiny settlement, not yet a city, in colonial times. At first, Boston didn’t produce much, especially not much that would be of interest to its main trading partner, London. It exported some natural resources: timber, fish. Whatever else the Bostonians needed, they needed to import it from other cities, again mostly London. (Remember to think of imports and exports in terms of cities, not nations.) For instance, at first, all metal tools in Boston came from European cities, and were paid for by the revenue from selling the timber and fish. Then, one day, some Bostonians decided to build an ironworks and make metal tools themselves. (Pictured: a reconstruction of the Saugus Iron Works, established 1646.) This wasn’t of any interest to London or other European cities. The Bostonians weren’t nearly as good or efficient at making metal tools as Londonians were. So Boston couldn’t export the metal tools back to Europe — but it could use them internally, and also export them to other American cities that were about as poor as Boston was, or poorer. Internally, this meant the spark of a manufacturing economy in Boston, as easily obtained metal parts made it easier for other Bostonians to replace other imports from European cities, and eventually develop a symbiotic network of industries. It also meant that the revenue from fish and timber could be used to import new things, including new innovations from European cities (which would later become opportunities for more import replacement). And because there were customers for Boston-made metal goods in New York and Philadelphia, and eventually Cincinnati and Chicago and Pittsburgh as these cities came into existence, it meant additional revenue for Boston that it could reinvest into developing its production further. For Jacobs, virtually all city development can be seen through the lens of import replacement (which, to be clear, has approximately nothing to do with policies of import substitution industrialization; import replacement is not a policy, but a naturally arising free market phenomenon). Her book contains many other examples than Boston, such as Venice, which started off in the early Middle Ages as a small town that sold salt to Constantinople, but then diversified its production to become one of the wealthiest cities of its time; or Taipei and Kaohsiung, two cities in Taiwan that kickstarted their development not long before the 1980s, by forcing expropriated landlords to invest into local import-replacing businesses. One is reminded of Scott’s review of How Asia Works. Import replacement, then, is what makes cities economically powerful. And this power is so great that it causes ripples in distant places. In fact it is the main reason that anything happens at all in non-city areas. Jacobs gives the example of Bardou, a small village in southern France. Bardou looks like this: To the extent that Bardou ever had an economic life, that life was almost entirely driven by distant cities. In ancient times, the area was populated because of iron mines nearby. The mines were exploited to serve the needs of people in the distant cities of Lugdunum (Lyon), Nemausus (Nîmes), or even Rome. As Jacobs notes, we could say that the mines served “the Roman Empire,” but that would be another example of using the abstraction of sovereign countries when we should instead be specific. It was Lugdunum, Nemausus and Rome that wanted the iron — not some random rural area of the empire, and certainly not the part of the empire in which Bardou was located. Eventually the mines and the region were abandoned. More than 1,000 years later, peasants moved into the area and built the modern village. For centuries they lived a wretchedly poor life of subsistence farming. No cities exerted any influence on it, and indeed nothing happened. Then, in the 19th century, the people of Bardou learned that they could improve their situation by moving to distant cities such as Paris, and most of them did. Again, the force wasn’t being exerted by “France”; Bardou was already part of France. The force was specifically being exerted by Paris and other cities with jobs for poor peasants. By the 1960s, only one old man was left. That’s when two foreign visitors, a German and an American, happened upon the village, decided to buy most of it, revitalized it, and turned it into a tourist spot (and even, for a brief time, into a set for a movie company). Today Bardou is a popular place for travelers — who are mostly city people, and spend money that was mostly earned in cities. The Bardou story contains examples of several of the forces that import-replacing cities radiate, according to Jacobs. These forces are central to her thinking. There are five of them: Markets. Cities house a lot of people who need a lot of goods and services, and are therefore strong markets to sell goods and services to. This was the force that acted on the Bardou area when it was a Roman mining region, and again today when it functions as a tourist spot for city vacationers.
Inline links: Phillips curve, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!9wEn!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F850ce64a-4367-4a7a-a9ec-e8eb1af3ed08_399x292.png, Our World in Data, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zS15!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7d533e64-f407-4b05-aea5-5b5a9dbdc7bc_1600x1130.png, import replacement, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!5j2T!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7f2675d9-ce56-4ac5-9b78-a16720269dea_1600x1159.png, import substitution industrialization, Scott’s review of, Bardou, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!RfMs!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc119b085-f7b3-4e09-a586-9f4fc4c2ea21_1200x1600.png
European government1 mentions across 1 issues

European government is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 10, 2024 and February 10, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "S is a strategic advisor for a European government". It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, 23andme, ACX.

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European government
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1
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1
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February 10, 2024
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February 10, 2024
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ACX Grants Results 2024
February 10, 2024 · Original source
S, $7,000, to produce materials on forecasting for governments. S is a strategic advisor for a European government, and wants to write manuals and run workshops for EU policy-makers on how to integrate forecasting platforms like Metaculus and prediction markets into their decision-making.
European Medical Association1 mentions across 1 issues

European Medical Association is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 07, 2025 and February 07, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "the European Medical Association makes public Complete Response Letters (CRLs)". It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, ACX, Alex Tabarrok.

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1
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1
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February 07, 2025
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February 07, 2025
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1DaySooner's Trump II Health Policy Proposals
February 07, 2025 · Original source
Improve FDA Transparency: The FDA sits on the world’s biggest repository of clinical data, yet its transparency policies remain conservative compared to other global regulators. This opacity slows research, because a lot of data is only shared via costly and inefficient Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. For example, the European Medical Association makes public Complete Response Letters (CRLs), which detail critical safety and efficacy findings, but the FDA only shares them with the drug developer. An impactful focus for Makary could be addressing the practical and legal challenges that hinder real transparency reform at the FDA. Here’s a very 2025 solution - train an LLM on the agency’s vast repository of clinical data and deploy it as a tool for reviewers and potential automated researcher itself. By automating institutional knowledge, an AI system could significantly reduce regulatory burden by helping FDA staff review submissions, spot issues, predict outcomes, and write responses.
Inline links: compared, costly and inefficient, makes public, Complete Response Letters
European medical establishment1 mentions across 1 issues

European medical establishment is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 06, 2021 and August 06, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Dr. Baker ... was in touch with the European medical establishment". It most often appears alongside American College of Clinical Pharmacy, ASPEN, BCH.

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1
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1
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August 06, 2021
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August 06, 2021
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Details Of The Infant Fish Oil Story
August 06, 2021 · Original source
Dr. Baker, a BCH nutritionist, was in touch with the European medical establishment and had learned about their alternative nutritional fluid.
European regulators1 mentions across 1 issues

European regulators is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 02, 2024 and August 02, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "volunteers whose profiles satisfied the demands of European regulators". It most often appears alongside Ableism, Acapulco, Alberta.

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European regulators
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1
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1
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August 02, 2024
Last seen
August 02, 2024
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Your Book Review: Two Arms and a Head
August 02, 2024 · Original source
(Source) A diagram of the human spine next to a diagram of the human body, indicating which parts of the body are innervated by which vertebrae in the spinal column. The cervical, thoracic, lumbar, and sacral regions of the spine are highlighted in different colors, with the corresponding body regions highlighted in the same colors. Starting at the top, the cervical (neck) vertebrae control the head, neck, arms, and fingers. The thoracic (torso) vertebrae control the entire torso and abdomen. The lumbar (lower back) vertebrae control the hips and front muscles of the legs. The sacral (tailbone) vertebrae control the back muscles of the legs and the groin area. The very last vertebra, S5, innervates the anus and genitals. Clayton is injured quite high up on the torso at the T5 vertebra. Let's consider the ramifications of having everything below the nipples be completely numb and limp. To start off, that means that he has no use of the muscles that hold him upright. Nothing keeps me sitting up—no hip flexors, erector spinae, hamstrings, or abdominal muscles. I am arms-and-a-head on a column of Jell-O. He can't put both arms out in front of him, lest he fall over. He has to continuously prop himself up with one arm while doing anything at arm's length. After only 1.5 years of being paralyzed, this has already caused significant repetitive strain injuries in his elbows, shoulders, and ulnar nerves. Clayton still has to deal with all the logistics of life, despite two-thirds of his body being a hunk of corpse-flesh. He dedicates huge swaths of the text to all the little time-wasting tasks he now has to do. How much of his life is ticking away with every delay, every piece of effort, every task that is trivial for an able-bodied person but monstrously difficult for him. Something as simple as getting out of a car is an entire production—let alone running errands, cleaning, doing laundry, cooking. Since the lower two-thirds of his body no longer sends pain signals to his brain, he must proactively tend to all of its physical needs. Complications include pressure sores, infections, and a high chance of blood clots. Aside from suicide, the leading causes of death among paraplegics are all related to poor circulation. In addition to the loss of conscious sensation and muscle control, problems with the autonomic nervous system—heart rate, orthostatic blood pressure, temperature regulation—are common. This is even more pronounced in cervical spine (neck) injuries. Some quadriplegics black out or the blood rushes to their head when being moved from lying down into reclining in a wheelchair. A spinal cord injury wreaks havoc on the body's functioning. Go back to that diagram. The groin area is innervated by the very end of the spinal cord, at the S5 vertebra. We tend to think of our legs as being “below” the crotch, but the nerves that control bowel movements and urination are downstream of the ones for the legs. To keep the party rolling I will tell you about piss and shit. [...] To urinate I have to slide a catheter down my urethra. [...] To defecate I finger myself up the ass and root around and around until the shit comes out. Nuggets, smooshy, whatever it is I’m digging in it. He describes the disgusting, nauseating process at length. For the sake of your lunch, I will refrain from quoting it all. In addition to being unable to open and close his sphincters on command, he also receives no signals of needing to go. If he eats the wrong thing and gets a bout of diarrhea, he will have no warning—no abdominal discomfort and no final urge to rush to the bathroom. One afternoon he "has an accident" while lounging on his couch. In trying to move from the couch to the toilet, he subsequently smears feces all over the couch, the carpet, his wheelchair, the toilet seat, and the shower. After he digs the poop out of his anus and washes himself off, he then has to clean all of that up by himself. From a wheelchair. Bending down, stretching, trying not to fall over, trying to reach the floor to scrub feces off the carpet. From a wheelchair. This episode was hardly the first time. He would routinely wake up in the morning to find that he had soiled himself overnight. Imagine struggling to rip dirty sheets off the bed, stuff them in the laundry, and put a clean sheet on the mattress—from a wheelchair. I don't know about you, but I can barely get a fitted sheet on my own mattress, and I get to do it while standing up. And unless I want to piss or shit myself, there can be no rest from this drudgery, ever, for the rest of my life. No relieving stretch of time without piss-dowsing and fingering myself up the asshole. Nobody told Kid Me that Professor X has to dig turds out of his anus every day. The groin dysfunction doesn't stop there. To be redundant once more, I can’t feel my penis. [...] Men, think how losing your penis would make you feel. Ladies, think of having your clit amputated and never having sex again. [...] True, the unfeeling penis attached to the living corpse I drag around can become erect but what has that to do with me? The one time he tries to have intercourse after his injury, it goes about as well as you'd expect: Watching a woman bob up and down on the penis attached to the corpse that used to be my body struck me as macabre and disturbing. It was like necrophilia. It’s like watching a woman get off by rubbing my amputated foot on herself. The disturbing facts just keep on rolling. One final note about the physical symptoms: spinal cord injuries hurt. Everything below the damage is numb, but the injury itself is a massive tear in the central nerve that controls the body. The pain is insistent, nagging, and so sharp it seems to crackle. [...] It’s just as sharp and intense every time, over and over, like it’s mocking you. Sometimes it happens when I’m lying in bed and it’s like trying to fall asleep with someone sticking a needle between my ribs or the bones of my big toe. But, surely, the only real problem is the physical limitations? Clayton is still the same person he'd always been, right? He has the same brain, same personality he did before the accident. Even if he can't walk anymore, he still has his memories. Not so fast. Yes, Even Worse Than That What kind of mental and emotional toll does all of this take on Clayton? The feeling I experience is a frantic, frenzied, desperate distress. [...] I need to move. I need to move. [...] Not only is two-thirds of my body paralyzed, but so is a huge part of my innermost self. It wants more than anything to feel and experience life. To exist. But it exists now only in a place between reality and nothingness with no hope of ever coming back. [...] All it can do is degenerate in the solitary place it has been forever exiled to. A popular heuristic in neuroscience is "use it or lose it." This is usually in the context of memorization, but it also applies to sensory organs and limbs. When Clayton is injured, his brain's connection to everything below his nipples is severed. Lacking any more sensory input from down there, the brain simply overwrites and repurposes the unused neurons. His injury is not limited to his present and future, but also reaches back into his past: Certain of my memories seem to be disappearing. For example, when I try to remember doing things that involved running, jumping, and sex, the memories seem less real or vivid than they used to. [...] If I imagine taking another person’s hand in mine, or kissing someone’s face, or someone touching my face, I feel something similar to sensation in those parts of my body when I imagine it. [...] But my lower body is now just a void, and its death started the creation of a void in my brain. Not only can I not feel it, but my ability to imagine feeling it is disappearing, as is my capacity to remember feeling it, and doing things with it. He likens himself to a Cartesian brain, a part of the world but outside of it, forever locked away, unable to exert his will on the outside world. Not only has he lost his legs; he is beginning to lose the memory of those legs, too. Everything he ever was, any skills that he ever learned related to being able-bodied, are destined to die over the coming years. His mind is doomed to slowly decay as its neurons do what neurons do: rewrite themselves until none of the person he used to be is left. Toxic Positivity Can Clayton actually talk about any of these things with his peers? Not really. He has a small circle of other recently paralyzed friends who understand, but outside of that, no. American culture has an entire social ecosystem that reinforces the idea that disabled people should be upbeat and optimistic about their life prospects. Almost any interview with a paraplegic ends on some upbeat note about how their disability "doesn't stop them from doing all the things they want to do" and that "they can do anything” an able-bodied person can. In fact, Two Arms and a Head opens with one such quote from Stephen Hawking: “I try to lead as normal a life as possible, and not think about my condition, or regret the things it prevents me from doing, which are not that many.” —Stephen Hawking This is patently absurd. Why do they say these things? Do they actually mean it, or are they just being hyperbolic for rhetorical effect? Surely they all know, secretly, that they’re lying to themselves? Clayton argues that no, they mean it, and they’re not lying to themselves. Remember how disability affects the brain? How all those unused neurons get repurposed, and any concepts of using those paralyzed limbs gets overwritten (if they ever existed in the first place)? They [lifelong paraplegics] tend to only see life in terms of the possibilities that exist for them [...] Their view becomes somewhat tautological. “What I can do is all that is possible, therefore I can do all that is possible.” Just as able-bodied people cannot comprehend what it’s like to be a paraplegic, lifelong paraplegics and quadriplegics simply cannot grasp what it is to be able-bodied. I’m not saying that lightly. The difference is biological. They have different brains. [...] They do not understand the experience of being able-bodied—neither the subtleties or much of what, to observers, is overt and glaring. They can try to imagine it, but they don’t even come close to comprehending the potential that exists there. Hence the common refrain that there are “not many” things that they can’t do. Adding to this dynamic is that it is considered impolite in our culture to call them out on it: If I were still able-bodied and a paraplegic told me he could do everything I could, I would just think “Looks like being crippled fucked up his mind too, because that’s insane.” I’m not sure what I’d actually say to him, but I know it wouldn’t be that. [...] So the disabled are basically allowed to go around saying whatever on Earth they want. They acquire a kind of de facto moral infallibility because nobody is going to argue with them. On top of this, humans have a basic need to belong, stay positive, and avoid people who are negative and miserable. If paraplegics were honest about all the body horror and misery, they would quickly find themselves devoid of friends. So what is a newly paraplegic person to do in order to maintain connections during a time in their life when they desperately need comfort and support? Brainwash themselves, of course! Clayton was staring down the prospect of what he would have to do to his mind in order to survive in our current society as a paraplegic. It was bad enough to be mutilated physically; he didn't also want to be mutilated mentally. What happened to my body is frightful, but no less than what happens to the minds of many disabled people. We have to have some kind of integrity to our views of the world and reality, and the more the better. [...] So my unwillingness to adopt certain “attitudes” or whatever people call them is something like a desperate struggle to evade the clutches of madness. It gets worse. This does not just affect their social lives and beliefs. These dynamics ripple out into the medical community’s attitudes about paraplegia. If every interviewee swears that paralysis doesn’t hold them back in life, then why pour resources into finding a cure? I’ve heard people say that spinal cord injury is not a priority for medical research like cancer because “people can live like that”. No, we can’t live like this. This is not “life”. Which raises the question—have there been any breakthroughs since 2008? The State of the Cure Let’s take a short break from the existential horror to look at the science of spinal cord injuries. Clayton killed himself in 2008 because there was no cure at the time. Have there been any new developments in the ~15 years since? The short and upsetting answer is "not yet"—though there are some glimmers of hope. Why are Spinal Cord Injuries So Hard to Fix? The spinal cord consists of multiple concentric layers of nerve fibers, not unlike an electrical cable. Wherever the spinal cord has trauma, the nerve cells die off and form lesions of scar tissue that block all nerve signals from traveling downstream of whichever thread was damaged. Some patients are lucky in that only parts of the spinal cord are damaged, resulting in paralysis on only one side of the body. Nerve cells in the spinal cord do not regenerate themselves. Once damaged and scarred, there’s nothing anyone can do. The good news is that emergency medicine has come a long way in arresting the formation of scar tissue at the moment of injury. Patients coming into the ER today have a much better prognosis than they did a few decades ago. The interventions are straightforward treatments like stabilizing the spine, surgery to release pressure on the pinched nerves, and shots of corticosteroids to reduce swelling and inflammation. But beyond that, there is no clinically-proven, FDA-approved treatment for an existing injury. Clayton describes the challenge of rebuilding his injury as something similar to “reconstructing a crushed strawberry.” No amount of stabilization would have put his smeared spinal cord back together. The Latest Research Treatments fall into two camps: bridging the injury, and encouraging the injured scar tissue nerves to regenerate. Implanted Nerve Cells In 2012, Prof. Geoffrey Raisman's team at University College London successfully treated a paralyzed man in Poland. The treatment involved removing one of the olfactory bulbs in his brain in order to culture olfactory ensheathing cells (OECs), which are the only nerve cells in the human body that continuously regenerate. The surgeons removed a section of nerve from the patient's ankle, then implanted both the ankle nerve and the OECs into his spine at the injury site. The grafted tissue bridged the gap between his brain and the healthy spinal cord just below the injury. After years of rehab and physical therapy, in 2014 the researchers announced their success to impressive fanfare. As of 2016, the patient could walk, ride a tricycle, and had regained bladder, bowel, and sexual function. He was far from his pre-injury self, but his quality of life had improved immensely compared to before the treatment. The call went out to recruit two more volunteers for another study. And then... crickets. This follow-up study has yet to be performed. It could have been delayed for a number of reasons. Perhaps they never found suitable volunteers whose profiles satisfied the demands of European regulators. Perhaps Brexit threw a bureaucratic wrench in the collaboration between UCL and the research center in Poland. Perhaps they ran out of funding. To make matters worse, Prof. Raisman passed away in 2017. In the years since, the team has been making progress in fits and starts. As of 2022, the current focus at UCL has been on figuring out how to culture OECs from the nasal mucosa instead of needing to crack open the skull to get at the olfactory bulbs directly. They’ve also made improvements in the technique for applying these cells to the injury site. Things are certainly happening, albeit at a glacial pace. This treatment strategy may become widespread in the future, but at the moment, it remains experimental. NervGen's "Wiggling Molecules" In 2021, NervGen Pharma announced a drug that encourages damaged spinal tissue to heal without scarring. A bioengineered molecule, NVG-291, is injected into the spinal cord and acts as a scaffold for the nerve cells to attach to as they regrow. The molecules of this scaffold naturally "wiggle” and stimulate nearby nerve cell receptors, promoting healing. Animal models were extremely promising. NVG-291 is currently in Phase 1b/2a clinical trials, which are scheduled to start in August of 2024. I’m cautiously optimistic. The main impediments to finding a cure are the same ones that plague any other field of medical research: lack of funding and unreasonable requirements from regulators. The main problems at this point in time appear to be bureaucratic rather than strictly biological. Will any of this research pan out within the next 5, 10, or even 20 years? Maybe. Only time will tell. (Someone should start a prediction market about this!) Alas, this is all coming too late to have saved Clayton. The Decision to Die I am absolutely and heartbreakingly in love with life. But this is not life. [...] For those who like to say this one: “Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.” I reply that suicide in my case is a permanent solution to a permanent problem. [...] I have only one serious problem in life and it’s being paralyzed. Clayton does not come to this decision lightly. He considers it exhaustively and systematically. When deciding whether to keep living, he starts from the premise that there is some amount of suffering past which life stops being worth it. He evaluates where that dividing line is by examining the sources of meaning in his life. He starts by asserting that there is nothing wrong with his mental health or his reasoning abilities: I am not depressed, I am tortured, and there is a difference. [...] If they came up with the cure today and I got better instantly, I could win myself a Nobel Prize in medicine for proving that depression was caused not by anything in the brain as previously thought, but by damage to a few cubic centimeters of nervous tissue in the spinal cord. Because I guarantee I’d pop up and be feeling as merry as a lark in about one second. [...] My problem is not depression. [...] There is no problem with my reasoning powers. [...] So if I say, “Paraplegia prevents me running. A life without running is not worth living. Therefore, my life is not worth living.” you might not agree with one of my premises, but there is no question of whether I’m being reasonable. This is similar to Frankl’s argument in Man’s Search for Meaning, and in fact Clayton spends an entire section talking about Frankl. He has a few disagreements with the book, but he has no gripe with the core message. Clayton decides to die because he had meaning in his life—and then the accident took it all away: Probably the life of a deaf man would be good enough for me, or that of a mute or a man missing a leg or an arm. But not the life of a paraplegic. There is not enough left for me. [...] The life I dreamed of and loved with all my heart is gone forever and there is nothing I can do about it. And it’s not just slightly changed, but utterly devastated. [...] My skills as a carpenter, roofer, plumber, gardener, all devastated. My ability to conduct my everyday life with wonderful efficiency, devastated. The wonderful way I was able to relate to other people, devastated. My sex life, devastated. My social life, devastated. [...] I am who I am, I love what I love, and given what I need from life, existence is no longer tenable for me. Some readers may look at that list and call him shallow. Even if that were so, that doesn't change his argument. Maybe most people don't place having sex, controlling one's bowels, and running through the woods as the quintessence of life-affirming values, but I'd be willing to bet that they're still important. Reading this book should prompt a moment of introspection. If you disagree with Clayton’s list above, then reflect on what does give your life meaning. No, seriously, make a list: family, friends, partners, children, hobbies, skills, etc. Write them down. Cross out one entry at random. How would you feel if you lost that entry? Would you still have enough left over to carry on? Probably. Now cross out a few more. Lose your partner. Lose your children. Lose your parents. Your siblings. Your best friend. Your favorite hobby. How do you feel? Still worth it? Add in some physical negatives: chronic pain. Constant nausea every time you eat. Losing feeling and control of your bowels, your legs, your genitals, your diaphragm, your non-dominant hand, your dominant hand, both arms. What about loss of sight? Hearing? Speaking? Communicating at all? What about ending up like the title character in Johnny Got His Gun, where he is left with no legs, no arms, and is rendered blind, deaf, and mute? What would life be like as a disconnected brain in almost complete sensory deprivation? How much would you have to lose before your life stops being worth living? That list—and the dividing line between "worth it" and "not"—is different for everyone. The decision to end one's life is deeply personal. Clayton happened to draw the line at a particular point. Others may agree or disagree, but Clayton’s judgment was his own. Decision in hand, next comes the hard part. The Roadblocks I did not want much from the world in dying. To be able to put my affairs in order without fear of being taken prisoner and treated like I was insane. To say goodbye to those I loved without the same fear. To die a painless death without worrying about leaving behind something gruesome. And to be comforted as I died. When a person has absolutely nothing left and is facing annihilation, all he wants is not to be alone. For Clayton, killing himself is not a simple matter. At the time only one US state, Oregon, had any kind of “Death With Dignity” law on the books. However, this law only allowed assisted suicide for terminally ill patients with less than six months to live, while Clayton’s condition was stable. The slightest whisper of suicidal ideation would have gotten him locked up in the psych ward. He has to write his book in secret, he has to lay his thoughts out for the world in secret, and he has to die in secret. Becoming paralyzed destroys him on two fronts—the disability itself, and the fact that he is completely, utterly, devastatingly alone with his feelings. He writes Two Arms and a Head because he needs to show the world how agonizing it is to face death alone and how important it is for physical-assisted suicide to become—and stay—legal. How empty to exist in this universe and share your feelings and experience with nobody! But that is how you, the world, have left me to die, alone. But what you don’t realize is this: in turning your backs on me, you have turned your backs on yourselves. [...] Someday you will be on your deathbed and maybe you will remember me. What I say to the world is that if you don’t do something about the way death and assisted suicide are dealt with, you may someday find yourselves in an unimaginably horrible situation with no way out. [...] Beware! There could be a horrible fate waiting for you and if you don’t all get together, look each other in the eye, recognize the insanity, and change the laws, you could wake up tomorrow as a head on a corpse with no way out for the next thirty years. A lingering question you might be asking is: if he cared so much about it, then why didn’t he become an activist to get it legalized? The Overton Window was shifting. Washington state would pass a bill a few months after his death, and it would be legalized in Montana by a court case in 2009. Several more states would follow suit in the mid-2010s. He could have shared his experiences far and wide and joined the burgeoning movement that existed back then. He was a law student at Vanderbilt for crying out loud; surely he could have enlisted the help of at least a couple of his colleagues? No one but him could have answered that, though I suspect that the answer is because he didn’t want to. He found his existence to be so ghastly that he didn’t want to stay in it for a second longer than necessary. The only reason he lasted as long as he did was because he wanted to finish the book. He chose to leave Two Arms and a Head as his legacy for the world, and nothing more. We’ve gone over the state of the cure over the last ~15 years. Has there been any progress on amending the laws for physician-assisted suicide? The State of MAiD Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) is currently legal in a patchwork of countries and US states. The exact rules, restrictions, and methods vary. In most places that have legalized it, the patient’s condition must be considered terminal (i.e. death is expected within six months) to be eligible for MAiD. The procedure itself is typically either an IV injection administered by a nurse, or a prescription cocktail of benzodiazepines, digoxin, and opioids which patients drink themselves. In Canada and the Netherlands, MAiD is also available to patients with a disability that does not present as immediately terminal. The Netherlands currently includes severe treatment-resistant mental illness as a qualifying condition, and Canada will follow suit in 2027. So it sounds like Clayton got his wish, at least in Canada and parts of Europe. Now, when a Canadian ends up in a terrible accident, they have a choice in the matter of whether they want to spend the next few decades as a quadriplegic head-on-a-corpse. Phew. However, it’s not all smooth sailing. It seems like every few months there’s another horror story in the press coming out of Canada or Europe. Two news stories came out in quick succession in late March/early April 2024—one from Canada, the other from the Netherlands. In Canada, a 27-year-old autistic woman with no disclosed physical symptoms was granted the right to proceed with MAiD by an Alberta court. The story broke after her father sued to try and stop her. In the Netherlands, a 28-year-old woman has decided to pursue MAiD due to her treatment-resistant clinical depression and borderline personality disorder. Her MAiD is scheduled for sometime in May 2024. At the time of this writing, she has yet to undergo it. These stories are nothing new. They certainly sound dreadful. Diving into every big story from the last ten years would be beyond the scope of this review, but let’s return to the one about the 27-year-old autistic Canadian woman who was granted MAiD. Both the Calgary Herald and CBC framed the story as a grieving father desperately trying to prevent his autistic daughter from being led astray by unethical doctors cherry-picked by the Alberta Health Service. The father insists that his adult daughter is physically healthy, albeit “vulnerable and not competent” to make medical decisions due to her autism and ADHD. Despite this, the judge has allowed MAiD to proceed anyway. Meanwhile, reading the actual court decision shows that the legal issue at hand is whether the woman is required to disclose the physical ailment(s) that led to two doctors approving MAiD. The judge ruled that the woman is competent to make her own medical decisions, and that she is not required to disclose her diagnosis to either her family or the court. The father has since filed an appeal. (July 2024 Update: the appeal hearing was subsequently scheduled for October 7, 2024 - six months in the future. Not willing to wait that long, the woman began a voluntary stoppage of eating and drinking (VSED) on May 28. The hearing was rescheduled for June 24. However, the woman continued to refuse food and water going into June. The father withdrew his appeal on June 11. It is unknown whether the woman has undergone MAiD at this time of this update.) She is not choosing MAiD because of autism or ADHD. We don’t know what her physical diagnosis is. We only have the father’s insistence that “her physical symptoms, to the extent that she has any, result from undiagnosed psychological conditions.” That’s the father’s words, not a physician’s, and not the patient’s. Neurodivergence does not bestow immunity against all the nasty ailments that can cut someone down in their twenties. I’m not accusing every news piece about MAiD of being similarly sensationalized, but I’m not not accusing every MAiD story of being similarly sensationalized. Despite so many of these stories not holding up to their headlines, many remain opposed to the expanded rules. There is a massive contingent of activists who want to keep MAiD illegal. Not Dead Yet Clayton had a particular amount of ire directed at one prominent anti-MAiD disability rights org: Not Dead Yet. Not Dead Yet (NDY) was founded in 1996 by the same people who lobbied to get the Americans with Disabilities Act passed a few years prior. As the name implies, they reject the notion that death could ever be an acceptable response to living with a disability. Like any activist org worth their salt, they have a convenient Talking Points page where they lay out all the reasons why they’re opposed to MAiD. They argue that MAiD is deadly discrimination against disabled patients, with current programs having insufficient safeguards to prevent foul play. NDY argues against a medical field that has decided that death is preferable to disability. They insist that they are not against individual autonomy; patients will always be free to commit “un-assisted” suicide if they truly wish to die. The page opens by explaining that MAiD is necessarily a disability issue, even in places where MAiD is only available to the terminally ill. Although people with disabilities aren’t usually terminally ill, the terminally ill are almost always disabled. When terminally ill patients get polled on why they are choosing MAiD, it turns out that avoiding pain isn’t the primary motivation. In Oregon, where MAiD is only available for the terminally ill, every patient fills out a questionnaire when they apply for the program. Tallying up all the surveys from 1998–2023, to top reasons are: “Losing autonomy” (90%)
Inline links: Source, Prof. Geoffrey Raisman's, As of 2016, As of 2022, NervGen Pharma, Phase 1b/2a clinical trials, Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD), late March, early April, These stories, are nothing new, CBC, court decision, filed an appeal, May 28, withdrew his appeal on June 11, Not Dead Yet, Talking Points, In Oregon,
European Society for Artificial Organs1 mentions across 1 issues

European Society for Artificial Organs is a recurring organization 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 "accepted for presentation at this year's European Society for Artificial Organs (ESAIO) conference". It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, Aatu Koskensilta, acanthamoeba keratitis.

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1
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1
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June 18, 2025
Last seen
June 18, 2025
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ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
June 18, 2025 · Original source
Minnesota and Virginia also have legislation to enable cities to implement land value taxes. We are monitoring these efforts. There are a few other cities we are operating in. We have helped another organization prepare for a meeting in Tennessee by doing impact analysis of land value taxes in the city. We have presented to city officials in the City of South Bend who have expressed support for land value taxes. Finally, we are in conversation with a State Senator in Colorado who is a champion of land value taxes. Meanwhile, we have soft launched and developed the OpenAVMKit, which uses a unified schema to do assessment accuracy reports and automated valuation methods for any property tax data given. Valuation of land is the key binding constraint to successful implementation of land value taxes. We plan to be the leaders in this space with strong benchmarking capabilities and a repo that can enable the open-source community to make the best automated valuation methods. Along with these efforts, we have expanded the movement. We have posted to the Progress and Poverty Substack growing the subscriber base to around 5,000 subscribers. We have spoken to over 25 local advocates interested in working on land value taxes in their local communities. Yet, there is a long way to go. We need to start earning income through technical assistance contracts as our grant funding expires. We need to continue pushing for a state to implement, and we need to be prepared to tell the success story for when they do. 65: EN’s Work On Bacteriophage Therapy Our project is aimed at pioneering phage therapy in Nigeria, where limited resources/infrastructure have historically held back research in this field. Starting from the ground up, we are establishing the foundational systems needed to support a robust phage research ecosystem. So far, we’ve isolated 34 bacteriophages targeting Pseudomonas aeruginosa, an essential step toward building a comprehensive phage bank. This began with collecting a wide range of clinical Pseudomonas isolates, which we are now characterizing alongside the phages through genome sequencing and phenotypic assays including studies on phage stability across pH, temperature, and salinity ranges. Our long-term goal is to develop a phage-based hydrogel for treating diabetic wounds. On the regulatory front, we have secured approval from the Attorney General to register our nonprofit organization, the Centre for Phage Biology and Therapeutics. Additionally, we’re expanding into vaccine development; following a research stay in Prof. Roderick's lab at the University of Waterloo, we have initiated the design of a phage-based universal Salmonella vaccine aimed at covering all major serotypes—an urgent need underscored by Africa’s reliance on external vaccine sources during the COVID-19 pandemic. I have signed an MTA agreement with Roderick to use his phage-based vaccine platform patents to enable us to design vaccines against any common disease affecting us. This is only the beginning, but we are proud to be laying the scientific and institutional groundwork for homegrown phage innovation in Africa. Emergent Ventures funded EN before we did and deserves a lot of credit here also. 66: Create An Artificial Kidney For an implantable artificial kidney, the first essential component is a hemofilter designed to emulate the glomerulus. Critical requirements for this hemofilter include high permeability (to maximize flow for a given area), selectivity (specifically, the retention of albumin), and robust blood compatibility (ensuring sustained function over time). Our initial strategy focused on using negative surface charge to reduce fouling. I began by testing polyelectrolyte (PE) coatings on 24nm pore membranes featuring a negative terminal charge, similar to the glomerular barrier. These initial static tests, assessing platelet adsorption in whole blood, yielded positive outcomes for some polyelectrolytes, indicating potentially desirable blood compatibility. However, static test setups are not truly representative of dynamic in-vitro conditions and don't provide data on key parameters like permeability, fouling progression, or changes in membrane selectivity. To address these limitations, I designed and built a blood filtration setup. This system sustains human whole blood in circulation for 20 minutes, allowing us to analyze all the aforementioned parameters, as well as platelet activation markers. This has resulted in a fairly high-throughput system for evaluating any surface coating. I'm pleased to report this setup has been accepted for presentation at this year's European Society for Artificial Organs (ESAIO) conference. I am also currently working on a full manuscript, as I believe this system offers a viable way to partially replace animal experiments in our early-stage research, requiring only 1.2ml of human blood per run. Working with a PhD student (hired to support both this research and work on membrane substrates), we have continued testing these PE coatings, alongside PEG coatings, on our membranes. Here, we're finding that optimization of the coating layer is crucial. With the current PE coatings, we observe a permeability drop of about an order of magnitude compared to the base membrane, making them unsuitable for an implantable device in their present form. This is likely due to the specific nature of the initial PE layer, which we can modify. We also suspect there may be ingress of PE into the pores, meaning we're not achieving just a surface coating (our goal), but rather a very thick coating, which would explain the flux loss. Optimizing the coating process to control penetration depth is now a primary focus of my ongoing work. I am currently aiming for a flux of 20ul/min (as this is cap introduced by the protein gel layer anyway) but for it to be at this 'steady state' permeability without drop in permeability. I am also imaging the membranes after contact with SEM to see if there is indeed any platelet adsorption etc. Tugrul has the dubious honor of maybe being "the only person to climb a 4000m peak with severe kidney failure". To raise money and awareness for his artificial kidney project, he is running Climb Against Time, where he will climb 41 mountains over 4000m (13000 ft) this summer. He is looking for donors and climbing partners. 67: Add Tardigrade Genes To Human Cells The goal of this one was to make hybrid cells that are more resilient for research and certain medical applications. They report: The grant was to synthesize vectors for the expression of humanized tardigrade proteins that can be targeted to different areas of the cell. All the vectors were designed, generated, and transposed into human cells. The proteins all localize successfully (e.g. they match the designed target), with one exception (we are still working on validating it). We've done some stress testing with the trangenic cells, but haven't reached firm conclusions yet. We've further generated some multigene designs but have not yet transposed them into cells, but should shortly. We're hoping to submit a manuscript on the first round later this year. 68: Teach Forecasting To EU Policy-Makers The original project didn't work out, but our grantee (who still prefers to remain anonymous) is now working with an EU think tank pursuing the same agenda, and has been teaching forecasting workshops to policy-makers for the past two months. 69: Platform For Single-Cell Imaging They ended up unable to accept this grant and returned the money. 70: Open Source Polygenic Predictor For EA/IQ They have an update here. They think they have a predictor that can explain 12% of variance in intelligence, and they’re working on validating it and creating an easy-to-use website. 71: Improve Flu Vaccines The grant mainly funded agent based modelling to demonstrate the benefit of pre-existing immunity to pandemic influenza if and when a future pandemic occurs (academic publication will result). The original proposal was to attempt to influence the WHO influenza strain selection process. After attending WHO meetings and a global influenza conference, I believe this is not feasible. Stakeholder feedback was the potential short term negative effect on vaccine hesitancy is believed to outweigh the less tangible future benefit. Given the conservative nature of decision makers, pandemic vaccines are likely to remain research only. There are still green shoots of research into pandemic preparedness/prevention that I am continuing to work on. I'm working under the "Australians for Pandemic Prevention" brand of Good Ancestors, another group that ACX funded in 2024. 72: Scenario Analysis For Developing World Agricultural Programs In addition to the research and analysis funded by the grant, I’ve learned to code with LLMs and have built an MVP of the project. The app is being considered for further development by staff at a large international organization. 73: Further C’s Political Career C’s political career is going well, but he continues to think it wouldn’t be strategic to give more information publicly at this time. Lessons Learned I'm most impressed with our lobbying/advocacy organizations. In particular, Good Ancestors has gotten the Australian government to sign onto an international AI safety declaration, partner with various x-risk-related organizations, and (possibly) extend charity tax deductions to some EA causes that previously didn't have it - I think this on its own goes a substantial way to paying back the cost of all ACX Grants. Coalition to Modify NOTA has a kidney donation bill in front of Congress that the (very illiquid) prediction markets give a 45% chance of passing; if it works, it could save thousands of lives. The Georgists are partly responsible for bills making land value taxes slightly easier to implement in a handful of states. Good Science Project seems to have significantly improved science. Are lobbying organizations a better bet than other types of nonprofit (within the constraints of ACX Grants)? I'm not sure. It could just be that lobbyists are (naturally) better at playing themselves up and sounding successful than (for example) scientists, or that politicians are good at people-pleasing and make people feel heard and encouraged in a way that might not change overall policy later. Also, I recently talked to some grantmakers who funded a lobbying organization that superficially seems excellent, but they expressed concern it was net negative (!) by taking away oxygen and spotlight from potentially more effective orgs. So I am encouraged but wary. Animal welfare organizations were another standout success. Again, I don't know how to think about this - while I think our grantees were exceptional, there's also an issue where the scale of animal welfare challenges is so great, and work on them so neglected, that lots of organizations can save a million chickens here, or a million fish there, without particularly making a splash. On the one hand, this is exactly what effective altruism should be doing - exploring grants that are very high in linear utility even if they don't feel satisfying. On the other, they're unsatisfying - and also hard to assess retroactively. How many chickens should a good animal welfare grant save? Any realistic number will both be overwhelmingly large in absolute terms and far too small in relative terms. I'm most ambivalent about our science grants. Many of them say they are successful and can point to published papers which explain the science they did. But it's hard to judge whether anything useful has changed based on the science getting done. I know it's important to fund basic research and not just last-mile technology startups, but it's hard for a mini-grants program like this one to evaluate these kinds of abstract interventions. One disappointing result was that grants to legibly-credentialled people operating in high-status ways usually did better than betting on small scrappy startups (whether companies or nonprofits). For example, Innovate Animal Ag was in many ways overdetermined as a grantee - former Yale grad and Google engineer founder, profiled in NYT, already funded by Open Philanthropy - and they in fact did amazing work. On the other hand, there were a lot of promising ACX community members with interesting ideas who were going to turn them into startups any day now, but who ended up kind of floundering (although this also describes Manifold, one of our standout successes). One thing I still don't understand is that Innovate Animal Ag seemed to genuinely need more funding despite being legibly great and high status - does this screen off a theoretical objection that they don't provide ACX Grants with as much counterfactual impact? Am I really just mad that it would be boring to give too many grants to obviously-good things that even moron could spot as promising? Someone (I think it might be Paul Graham) once said that they were always surprised how quickly destined-to-be-successful startup founders responded to emails - sometimes within a single-digit number of minutes regardless of time of day. I used to think of this as mysterious - some sort of psychological trait? Working with these grants has made me think of it as just a straightforward fact of life: some people operate an order of magnitude faster than others. The Manifold team created something like five different novel institutions in the amount of time it's taken some other grantees to figure out a business plan; I particularly remember one time when I needed something, sent out a request to talk about it with two or three different teams, and the Manifold team had fully created the thing and were pestering me to launch a trial version before some of the other people had even gotten back to me. I take no pleasure in reporting this - I sometimes take a week or two to answer emails, and all of the predictions about my personality that this implies would be correct - but it's increasingly something that I look for and respect. A lot of the most successful grants succeeded quickly, or at least were quick to get on a promising track. Since everything takes ten times longer than people expect, only someone who moves ten times faster than people expect can get things done in a reasonable amount of time. In almost every case where I thought to myself “this is a cool idea, but I don’t know how it’s going to really pay off, as opposed to reaching a cool intermediate accomplishment and then stagnating”, this was a correct criticism, and I should have taken it more seriously. But I can’t rule out that these were good in vague and hard-to-measure ways that I should take more seriously. This one is really self-serving, but in general when people were good communicators (or even bloggers) and wowed me with the writing-composition of their application, they turned out to be a good bet. And when people were hard to understand and annoying to communicate with, even if their ideas seemed good, they were less likely to pan out. Overall Thoughts The total cost of ACX Grants, both rounds, was about $3 million. Do these outcomes represent a successful use of that amount of money? Very naively, startups originating from ACX Grants have about $50 million in value1. If ACX Grants is equivalent to a pre-seed funder, and pre-seed funders usually get ~5%, then if we were VCs we would have a portfolio worth $2.5 million. About 1/5 of ACX Grants were attempting to be market-valued startups, so if we assume the charitable portion did about as well as the startup portion, then the charity portion is “worth” $10 million. There’s some reason to expect this is too high, since much of the startup value came from one successful outlier. But there’s another reason to expect this is too low, since we were aiming at charity rather than market cap, and any actual market cap that our grantees got was an unexpected side effect. I’m treating this as a sanity check rather than as a real number. It’s harder to produce Inside View estimates, because so many of the projects either produce vague deliverables (eg a white paper that might guide future action) or intermediate results only (eg getting a government to pass AI safety regulations is good, but can’t be considered an end result unless those regulations prevent the AI apocalypse). Because we tend towards incubating charities and funding research (rather than last-mile causes like buying bednets), achieved measurable deliverables are thin on the ground. But here are things that ACX grantees have already accomplished: Improved the living/slaughter conditions of 30 million fish.
Inline links: Progress and Poverty Substack, Climb Against Time, here, 1
European Society of Human Genetics1 mentions across 1 issues

European Society of Human Genetics is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 31, 2025 and July 31, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "condemned by various bodies including the ... European Society of Human Genetics". It most often appears alongside 23andMe, 23andme, Alex Young.

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Suddenly, Trait-Based Embryo Selection
July 31, 2025 · Original source
You’re okay using expected utility calculations where a 50% chance of preventing X is half as good as fully preventing X. …then I’ll go out on a limb and say yeah, obviously it’s worth it. Consider e.g. Genomic Prediction, which costs $3,250 for five embryos and claims to lower absolute risk of Type 2 diabetes by 12%. That implies that not getting Type 2 diabetes is worth $27,000. Ask anybody dealing with regular insulin injections (let alone limb amputations) whether it would be worth $27,000 to wave a magic wand and not have Type 2 diabetes! It’s not a hard question! And that’s just one of a dozen conditions you can lower the risk for! Other ones, like not getting breast cancer, might be so valuable that it’s hard to even attach numbers! (but maybe the low time discount rate is a mistake? Suppose you invest the $3,250 in an index fund that makes 7% over inflation, then give it to your future child when they turn 45 (average age of type 2 diabetes diagnoses). Now it’s worth $75,000. Is this the “true” cost of the intervention? Does it matter that this counterfactual is fake and most people don’t do this?) What about IQ? Six extra IQ points (Herasight’s estimate with five embryos) is about a quarter of the gap between the average person and the average Ivy League student. The benefits of intelligence are hard to quantify, but it’s been shown to have probably-causal positive effects on income, mortality, and achievement. Probably the income effects alone make up for the cost of intervention - again assuming total parent-child altruism and low discount rate8. So if we accept all of these claims and assumptions, the choice seems obvious. It’s probably even obvious for governments to pay for all citizens to get these, given how much they’d save on health care costs. In Practice, It’s Complicated Critics have raised both scientific and ethical objections to polygenic embryo screening. Most significantly, it’s been condemned by various bodies including the Society For Psychiatric Genetics, the European Society of Human Genetics, and the Behavioral Genetics Society. Their statements are . . . not good. They tend towards vague language about how people are more than just their genes, or how no genetic test can be perfect, or how embryo screening is not exactly the same thing as some other form of screening which has a longer history and more proponents. “Although in general higher scores mean you are more likely to have a condition, many healthy people will have high scores; others might develop the condition even with a low score”, says the Society for Psychiatric Genetics, as if they have just blown the lid off some dastardly conspiracy. “Screening embryos for psychiatric conditions may increase stigma surrounding these diagnoses”, they continue - an objection which, taken seriously, could be used to ban every form of medical treatment. We will mostly ignore these people and try to imagine the objections that mildly competent critics might raise, some of which will coincidentally overlap with the content of the non-hypothetical statements. Scientific Objection: Efficacy Are we sure this works at all? A typical polygenic score is created by collecting thousands or millions of adult genomes, then matching genetic information with surveys about who has the trait/condition of interest. Reputable studies then test these scores on holdout samples - adults who were not used to make the score, to see if they still accurately predict who has the trait/condition. Polygenic embryo selection depends on an assumption that the scores which work in these kinds of retrospective tests will also work prospectively on embryos. This assumption hasn’t been formally proven in studies (which would require years to decades to conduct), but seems common-sensical. The strongest challenge to the application of polygenic scores for embryo selection comes from a recent body of research showing that most scores combine causal genetic effects with population stratification, and therefore can be expected to lose much of their predictive power when comparing two members of the same family (e.g. two embryos from the same couple). There is increasing agreement in the field that unless scores are validated within families, headline results like “decreases risk of X by Y%” will be large overestimates. When I talked to company representatives, they all said that they took accuracy extremely seriously and had various white papers and journal articles where anyone could double-check their methodology. But I attended an industry conference a few months ago, and the gossip level was comparable to a high school cafeteria (minus the sex rumors - most of the attendees were having their own kids via IVF). Everyone had some story about someone being careless or fudging their numbers. Some of the conflicts broke out into the open on Wednesday, when Herasight left stealth and published a white paper and associated blog post. They criticize Genomic Prediction for reporting between-family rather than within family results9, and Orchid for smuggling a term for age into their Alzheimer’s predictor (unsurprisingly, this makes it work better). We’ll get to their accusations against Nucleus below. Note that this was recent enough that competitors haven’t had time to respond or to air their own criticisms of Herasight; if this happens, I’ll try to keep you updated. Maybe this is cope, but my optimistic perspective is that this bounds the damage. This obviously isn’t a field capable of maintaining a conspiracy of silence. But aside from the Nucleus allegations, the complaints aren’t existential. Maybe some numbers are too high, maybe some predictors are slightly rigged. But the more we learn about these admittedly concerning problems, the more we can hope that we’d have heard about it if nothing worked at all. Overall my strongest opinion on the scientific criticisms is: Authorities on all sides have cited Alex Young10 as an authority on how polygenic scores can be confounded or misleading.
Inline links: income, mortality, achievement, 8, Society For Psychiatric Genetics, European Society of Human Genetics, Behavioral Genetics Society, white paper, blog post, 9, 10
EU’s Natura 2000 network1 mentions across 1 issues

EU’s Natura 2000 network is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 20, 2021 and May 20, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Notecka Forest, an area protected as part of the EU’s Natura 2000 network". It most often appears alongside 5D Chess With Multiverse Time Travel, AI X-Risk Research Podcast, Alignment Research Center.

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May 20, 2021
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May 20, 2021
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Links For May
May 20, 2021 · Original source
13: “Police in Poland have detained seven people on charges relating to the building an enormous medieval-style castle on a lake in Notecka Forest, an area protected as part of the EU’s Natura 2000 network.”
Inline links: Police in Poland
Even Mental Health1 mentions across 1 issues

Even Mental Health is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 10, 2022 and February 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Even Mental Health is a startup working on improving how we measure mental health". It most often appears alongside 2018, @BendiniUK, @benyeohben.

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Even Mental Health
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February 10, 2022
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February 10, 2022
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ACX Grants ++: The Second Half
February 10, 2022 · Original source
#86: More Accurate Measurement Of Mental Health Even Mental Health is a startup working on improving how we measure mental health. Current approaches rely on asking individuals to summarize how they’ve felt in the past. This yields a blurry and often inaccurate depiction of one’s mental health. Our app, Even Mind, takes a different approach that avoids recall bias altogether (you can find out more at https://evenmind.app). We believe more accurate measurement tools will lead to significantly improved treatments and outcomes for individuals. We’re looking to connect with others interested in improving mental health measurement or mental healthcare more broadly. We’re also raising an initial round and looking for investments in the $50,000 - $100,000 range. If you’d like to connect, please email me at cwoods@evenmind.co.
Evidence Action1 mentions across 1 issues

Evidence Action is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 28, 2023 and November 28, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Evidence Action says Dispensers for Safe Water is currently reaching four million people". It most often appears alongside #57, 80,000 Hours, Adam D’Angelo.

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Evidence Action
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November 28, 2023
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November 28, 2023
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In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruism
November 28, 2023 · Original source
Source: this page. See “Evidence Action says Dispensers for Safe Water is currently reaching four million people in Kenya, Malawi, and Uganda, and this grant will allow them to expand that to 9.5 million.” Cf the charity’s website, which says it costs $1.50 per person/year. GiveWell’s grant is for $64 million, which would check out if the dispensers were expected to last ~10 years.
Inline links: this page, the charity’s website
Evolution Institute1 mentions across 1 issues

Evolution Institute is a recurring organization 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 "Evolution Institute founder David Sloan Wilson". It most often appears alongside 4o, 60 Minutes, @MattZeitlin.

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Evolution Institute
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February 05, 2026
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February 05, 2026
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Links For February 2026
February 05, 2026 · Original source
40: Did you know: Seattle’s new socialist mayor Katie Wilson is the daughter of evolutionary biologist, group selection fan, and Evolution Institute founder David Sloan Wilson. (h/t @MattZeitlin).
Inline links: David Sloan Wilson, @MattZeitlin
Executive Branch1 mentions across 1 issues

Executive Branch is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 03, 2023 and April 03, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "a colossal overreach to ask an Executive Branch agency to overrule the plain text of the act"; "It seems like a colossal overreach to ask an Executive Branch agency to overrule the plain text of the act". It most often appears alongside 2008 Act, ACX, Adderall.

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Executive Branch
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Highlights From The Comments On Telemedicine Regulations
April 03, 2023 · Original source
If for some reason that doesn’t work, go to a different psychiatrist and try again. You don’t have to tell them you already tried. Since everything about ADHD diagnosis and treatment is already security theater, it’s hard to say what pill mills are doing except kind of smirking under their breath while going through the rituals - as opposed to real doctors, who go through the rituals with sincere faith. Don’t get me wrong, I do think there’s a difference here. But the regulatory state isn’t set up to say “And you have to sincerely believe in the rituals or they don’t count”. So instead they punish unrelated groups, like telepsychiatrists. See also my old post Bureaucracy As Active Ingredient. The security theater doesn’t work because it’s effective. It works because it’s inconvenient enough to weed out the less motivated fakers, and some of the remaining fakers get cold feet about lying to a nice sincere psychiatrist who seems to be trying to help them. Pill mills remove the inconvenience, and seem to be nod-and-wink cooperating with liars, so the theater stops working. The only solution is to inject some inconvenience and shame back into the process somewhere, which the DEA has chosen to do by restricting telepsychiatry. They could accomplish the same goal by making you attend your appointments naked, but I guess clothing companies have better lobbyists than telepsychiatrists do. 4: Comments About Forcing Blind People To Fill Out Forms Before They Can Access Braille I analogized forcing patients to see an in-person doctor before they could access a teledoctor to forcing blind people to fill out forms before they could access Braille. Several blind people and their friends pitched in to say this was a real problem. For example, Mikolysz: Blind person here, this kind of thing is actually much more common than people imagine. Many government agencies (regardless of which particular government you mean) just assume that anybody who needs to fill a form can read and write print and/or lives with somebody who does. This is often a problem even when the form in question is specifically targeted at blind people. Non-governmental organizations, including those who specifically serve the blind, aren't much better at this either. This issue is slightly more pronounced in civil law countries, where what constitutes a legally-binding signature is clearly defined in law and you can't just Docusign your way out of the problem, but it exists everywhere, including the US. I literally had to file this kind of document today, while the main form could be filled electronically, I was required to attach a few extra documents, for GDPR and such, and those had to be printed, filled in by a sighted person, signed and scanned. The same problem exists with physical mail which you're required to read and respond to, but which is almost never available in an accessible form, a few exceptions like the American IRS notwithstanding. 5: Comments About My Caricature Of A Doctor Who Refuses To Prescribe Psych Drugs Because People Just Need Jesus Jon Cutchins writes: You don't want psychiatrists and liberals in general to be accused of an unreasoning hatred towards Christianity you should probably be more judicious in your use of anti-Christian tropes when describing everyone who is skeptical of mind-altering drugs. Mike writes: I’ve been a primary care nurse practitioner in the Bible Belt for 20yrs and not once have I even heard of a provider telling a patient they should substitute religion for psychiatric (or any) medication. It’s so easy for some people to throw around these tropes as if Christianity is some exotic, weird tribe with horrifying anthropological traits. On the other hand, fluxe writes: I am a young Christian--in my life, I have -been told by my PCP not to get an IUD because it carries "a significant risk of causing infertility or death" -had a pharmacist refuse to fill an old, male family friend's ulcer medication because it's also an abortifacient -been told by a therapist to discontinue the SSRI a different provider had prescribed and just trust in the man of the house the PCP wasn't even particularly Christian herself, but since all of her patients are she hadn't updated on IUDs since the scare back in the 70s. Our horrifying anthropological traits become everyone's problem--it might be worth listening to those who "throw around these tropes" so you can understand what they have to deal with Unfortunately I only mention this possibility because it’s happened to several of my patients. The best I can offer in terms of being unbiased and apolitical is to signal-boost posts like this one about overly woke therapists being another big problem. Alien on Earth writes: I generally like your writing and ideas, hell, I just re-uped for a year. However, in an otherwise near perfect post, you took a cheap shot at a steriotyped view of one religion thst is not popular amoungst coastal elites, that really detracts from your core point. "The worst-case is that you get one of those doctors who think that Psych Drugs Aren’t Real Because You Just Need Jesus, and then the patient has to keep looking until they find someone else." In my experience, it is the new age(y), non-religious, doctors who are least likely to like prescribing psyc. meds or who tend to give them at too low a dose or for too short a time. Certainly, I've found little correlation with their religion, if I even know it. The only correlation I've observed is that this perscription reluctance is, perhaps, slightly more common amongst middle career doctors. Perhaps it is more common in deep red areas, I don't know. However, even there, I would suggest, it is less due to religion, per se, than to "old fashion" "grit your teeth and bear it" thinking. I agree that there are many reasons people recommend against psychiatric drugs (a few are even good). Psychiatric drugs have lots of side effects and are clearly imperfect options, and I see people object to them more often when they think they have a perfect option as an alternative. Sometimes that option is Jesus. Other times it’s the trendy new somatic yoga reprocessing kundalini trauma dianetics therapy. Other times it’s LSD or ketamine or Dr. Bob’s 24-In-One Internet Nootropic. All of these work for some people, but not as much as the people pushing them think - which I guess is also true for psych drugs. I’m nervous about people who think they’ve found the answer and pressure people towards one alternative or another without presenting evidence. I’ve seen this happen enough in religious contexts that I think it was a fair thing to use as an example. 6: Comments About Which Part Of The Government Is Responsible For This Regulation ProfessorE writes: I’m not sure that what Scott wrote is even completely accurate. I have a relative who is an MD in this space, and it seems that the underlying problem is not the DEA but an actual law passed by Congress. Aren’t telemedicine regulations limited with respect to controlled substances by the Ryan Haight Act of 2008 U.S.C. § 829(e)… there may be interpretations of this act by the DEA and other agencies, but, where controlled substances are prescribed by means of the Internet, the general requirement is that the prescribing Practitioner must have conducted at least one in-person medical evaluation of the patient. It seems like a colossal overreach to ask an Executive Branch agency to overrule the plain text of the act. There are some exceptions, which Scott noted. A different way of looking at things was that the Executive Branch was highly responsive to the emergency situation of Covid. Now that it’s not an emergency, they are obligated to return to the legal framework that exists. Congress needs to change the law, not the DEA. The *data* from covid should be used as part of a cost-benefit analysis to determine whether it is reasonable to regulate telemedicine, and, if so, what regulations might address whatever problems arose. Followed by: Actually, Scott is even more off-base than I thought in my initial post. Apparently the DEA & DOJ are already proposing new changes to the 2008 Act (which seem like they violate the clear text of the act), but the act and the changes are summarized here: https://www.legitscript.com/2023/03/27/proposed-changes-ryan-haight/ Sounds like government is aware of the issue. See https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/03/01/2023-04248/telemedicine-prescribing-of-controlled-substances-when-the-practitioner-and-the-patient-have-not-had For the actual changes that are being proposed. End of the day, this should be modified by Congress, not the agencies. Everyone should remember that the law was written in 2008. That’s 1 year after the very first iPhone and 2 years before the first iPad. Zoom didn’t exist (2011). None of the other technologies for video conferencing existed. Congress was attempting to fight opioid pill-mills. At the time of passage, I am willing to bet that ≈0% of patients were “Telehealth” using videoconferencing. More like phone calls and email a few times to get drugs. The law should have been amended, and it hasn’t been, but it is far from clear that it was a crazy law in the first place. I mostly accept this correction, although I’m still a bit confused - a lot of the analyses by lawyers I read said things like “Unquestionably, the DEA’s proposal is not what most industry stakeholders were anticipating. The initial reaction is the rules are more restrictive than necessary and impose concerning limitations and burdens on clinicians and the patients they treat”, and I’m confused why industry stakeholders weren’t anticipating it if the DEA had to do it in order to follow the law. And JR writes: Meanwhile, the DEA was instructed by law in -2008- to develop a special registration process for telemedicine to allow providers to prescribe controlled substances remotely. The DEA has simply failed to do so in that time, despite repeated Congressional demands to act. Don't worry, though - the DEA has said about this proposed rule that it feels this will be 'less burdensome' for providers than any kind of special registration, so it feels it has discharged its legal responsibility to create a special registration process. I am a psychiatrist having to deal with this idiocy with my patients too, and renting an office temporarily is not going to cut it. So I am going the letter route. I will probably a lose a reasonable chunk of patients I was prescribing controlled substances to. The only possible saving grace is that PCPs in this country are used to being asked to sign and complete all kinds of nonsense forms and documents so probably most of them will just do it with minimal fuss. I'm more concerned with the new requirement that all telemedicine scripts now have to be recorded by the prescriber with the date and time they were written, the PHYSICAL ADDRESS of the prescriber and patient at the time of the telehealth encounter, and have an explicit note on them that they are telemedicine prescriptions. I am less concerned about PCPs balking at writing an idiotic referral than I am skittish pharmacists refusing to fill scripts that they might interpret as being labeled equivalently to FAKE SCRIPT FOR DRUGSEEKERS Based on that comment and this, my best guess about what’s happening is: Congress passed restrictions on telemedicine in 2001, and asked the DEA to come up with a way that trusted providers could avoid those restrictions. Now that there is videoconferencing, etc, most people now believe those restrictions were too severe.
Inline links: Bureaucracy As Active Ingredient, Mikolysz, writes, writes, writes, to signal-boost posts like this one about overly woke therapists being another big problem, writes, writes, Followed by, https://www.legitscript.com/2023/03/27/proposed-changes-ryan-haight/, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/03/01/2023-04248/telemedicine-prescribing-of-controlled-substances-when-the-practitioner-and-the-patient-have-not-had, said things like, JR writes:, this
During the pandemic, the executive branch declared a state of emergency and the DEA lifted those restrictions.
Exodus Space Systems1 mentions across 1 issues

Exodus Space Systems is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 03, 2022 and February 03, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "CEO and Design Lead for Exodus Space Systems"; "I’m Mike Le Page, CEO and Design Lead for Exodus Space Systems". It most often appears alongside 538, 55-gal drum, 750k horny men.

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Exodus Space Systems
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February 03, 2022
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February 03, 2022
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ACX Grants ++: The First Half
February 03, 2022 · Original source
#46: Clean Up Space Debris If you’ve heard about space debris – tens of thousands of uncontrollable artificial objects in orbit around Earth – then you probably agree this is a problem worth solving. You might assume there are people working on it (true), and they have found a way to turn this cleanup work into a viable business (debatable). Our project is a novel, first-principles solution that will more cost-effectively address the hardest part of the problem (the multitude of smaller, pre-existing debris in orbits 600-1000km in altitude). We think this method has the greatest chance of major positive impact in decades to come, but regular investors struggle with its lack of near-term gain. I’m Mike Le Page, CEO and Design Lead for Exodus Space Systems, and my two core values are (1) that space exploration is good for humanity, and (2) that sustainability is crucial to everything humanity does in the future. Glad to discuss further: exodusspacesystems.com/contact/
Express Scripts1 mentions across 1 issues

Express Scripts is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 27, 2022 and January 27, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "These companies are: CVS/Caremark, Express Scripts, OptumRx, Prime Therapeutics". It most often appears alongside ACA, Acrolectics, Aetna.

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Express Scripts
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January 27, 2022
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January 27, 2022
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Highlights From The Comments On Health Care Systems
January 27, 2022 · Original source
The PBM step generally keeps an administrative cost per prescription plus a % of the cost of branded drugs. These companies are: CVS/Caremark, Express Scripts, OptumRx, Prime Therapeutics and a lot of minors. They negotiate "rebates" with manufacturers. This basically works like this: Humalog and Novolog are effectively equivalent drugs. They cost ~$300/month without insurance. The PBM will say to Lilly "That's a nice humalog you've got there. I'm going to need $150/month as a check back to me or else every patient on my plan gets Novolog unless the doctor fills out 500 pages of paperwork to get Humalog AND the patients pay $200 of the cost." Lilly says "ok fine." According to the PBM lobbying organization, PCMA, most of the rebate money goes back to purchasers, but IMO that just makes the problem worse because it makes purchasers complicit in the game by sending them checks that they use to reduce their premiums instead of reducing the cost of drugs to their plan members.
ExpressPetCertify1 mentions across 1 issues

ExpressPetCertify is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 09, 2024 and May 09, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Or even ExpressPetCertify - Same Day ESA Approval, Guaranteed Landlord Acceptance". It most often appears alongside CertaPet, ESADoctors, Fido.

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ExpressPetCertify
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May 09, 2024
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May 09, 2024
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The Emotional Support Animal Racket
May 09, 2024 · Original source
Or you could wash your hands of it. You could say “I’m going to be ultra-responsible and demand you see a third party. But just between you and me, that third party could be Pettable - Get Your ESA Letter In 24 Hours. Or maybe CertaPet - Get Your ESA Letter In 3 Easy Steps. Or even ExpressPetCertify - Same Day ESA Approval, Guaranteed Landlord Acceptance. Or how about ESADoctors - Get Your Legitimate ESA Letter? Or any of their one thousand competitors. You don’t have to feel conflict-of-interest-y. Your patient will only be out $100 or so, and only slightly pissed at you. And you get the warm glow of knowing this will definitely work, because these services have never, ever turned anyone down.
Inline links: Pettable - Get Your ESA Letter In 24 Hours, CertaPet - Get Your ESA Letter In 3 Easy Steps, ExpressPetCertify - Same Day ESA Approval, Guaranteed Landlord Acceptance, ESADoctors - Get Your Legitimate ESA Letter
Extelligence1 mentions across 1 issues

Extelligence is a recurring organization 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 "Extelligence has a post responding to my critique of the cultural Christianity argument". It most often appears alongside /r/BadMTGCombos, @cremieuxrecuel, @justin_garson.

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Extelligence
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November 01, 2024
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November 01, 2024
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Links For November 2024
November 01, 2024 · Original source
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: @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
ExxonMobil1 mentions across 1 issues

ExxonMobil is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 01, 2023 and March 01, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Imagine ExxonMobil releases a statement on climate change"; "This would be the equivalent of ExxonMobil making a legally-binding promise". It most often appears alongside AGI, AI, Anthropic.

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ExxonMobil
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OpenAI's "Planning For AGI And Beyond"
March 01, 2023 · Original source
Imagine ExxonMobil releases a statement on climate change. It’s a great statement! They talk about how preventing climate change is their core value. They say that they’ve talked to all the world’s top environmental activists at length, listened to what they had to say, and plan to follow exactly the path they recommend. So (they promise) in the future, when climate change starts to be a real threat, they’ll do everything environmentalists want, in the most careful and responsible way possible. They even put in firm commitments that people can hold them to.
Sam Altman posing with leading AI safety proponent Eliezer Yudkowsky. Also Grimes for some reason. Planning For AGI And Beyond (“AGI” = “artificial general intelligence”, ie human-level AI) is the latest volley in that campaign. It’s very good, in all the ways ExxonMobil’s hypothetical statement above was very good. If they’re trying to fool people, they’re doing a convincing job! Still, it doesn’t apologize for doing normal AI company stuff in the past, or plan to stop doing normal AI company stuff in the present. It just says that, at some indefinite point when they decide AI is a threat, they’re going to do everything right. This is more believable when OpenAI says it than when ExxonMobil does. There are real arguments for why an AI company might want to switch from moving fast and breaking things at time t to acting all responsible at time t + 1 . Let’s explore the arguments they make in the document, go over the reasons they’re obviously wrong, then look at the more complicated arguments they might be based off of. Why Doomers Think OpenAI Is Bad And Should Have Slowed Research A Long Time Ago OpenAI boosters might object: there’s a disanalogy between the global warming story above and AI capabilities research. Global warming is continuously bad: a temperature increase of 0.5 degrees C is bad, 1.0 degrees is worse, and 1.5 degrees is worse still. AI doesn’t become dangerous until some specific point. GPT-3 didn’t hurt anyone. GPT-4 probably won’t hurt anyone. So why not keep building fun chatbots like these for now, then start worrying later? Doomers counterargue that the fun chatbots burn timeline. That is, suppose you have some timeline for when AI becomes dangerous. For example, last year Metaculus thought human-like AI would arrive in 2040, and superintelligence around 2043. Recent AIs have tried lying to, blackmailing, threatening, and seducing users. AI companies freely admit they can’t really control their AIs, and it seems high-priority to solve that before we get superintelligence. If you think that’s 2043, the people who work on this question (“alignment researchers”) have twenty years to learn to control AI. Then OpenAI poured money into AI, did ground-breaking research, and advanced the state of the art. That meant that AI progress would speed up, and AI would reach the danger level faster. Now Metaculus expects superintelligence in 2031, not 2043 (although this seems kind of like an over-update), which gives alignment researchers eight years, not twenty. So the faster companies advance AI research - even by creating fun chatbots that aren’t dangerous themselves - the harder it is for alignment researchers to solve their part of the problem in time. This is why some AI doomers think of OpenAI as an Exxon-Mobil style villain, even though they’ve promised to change course before the danger period. Imagine an environmentalist group working on research and regulatory changes that would have solar power ready to go in 2045. Then ExxonMobil invents a new kind of super-oil that ensures that, nope, all major cities will be underwater by 2031 now. No matter how nice a statement they put out, you’d probably be pretty mad! Why OpenAI Thinks Their Research Is Good Now, But Might Be Bad Later OpenAI understands the argument against burning timeline. But they counterargue that having the AIs speeds up alignment research and all other forms of social adjustment to AI. If we want to prepare for superintelligence - whether solving the technical challenge of alignment, or solving the political challenges of unemployment, misinformation, etc - we can do this better when everything is happening gradually and we’ve got concrete AIs to think about: We believe we have to continuously learn and adapt by deploying less powerful versions of the technology in order to minimize “one shot to get it right” scenarios […] As we create successively more powerful systems, we want to deploy them and gain experience with operating them in the real world. We believe this is the best way to carefully steward AGI into existence—a gradual transition to a world with AGI is better than a sudden one. We expect powerful AI to make the rate of progress in the world much faster, and we think it’s better to adjust to this incrementally. A gradual transition gives people, policymakers, and institutions time to understand what’s happening, personally experience the benefits and downsides of these systems, adapt our economy, and to put regulation in place. It also allows for society and AI to co-evolve, and for people collectively to figure out what they want while the stakes are relatively low. You might notice that, as written, this argument doesn’t support full-speed-ahead AI research. If you really wanted this kind of gradual release that lets society adjust to less powerful AI, you would do something like this: Release AI #1
Inline links: Planning For AGI And Beyond, Metaculus, they can’t really control their AIs
This would be the equivalent of ExxonMobil making a legally-binding promise to switch to environmentalist mode at the exact moment that warming passes 1.5 degrees C - maybe still a little strange, but starting to sound more-than-zero meaningful.
EZs1 mentions across 1 issues

EZs is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 08, 2025 and April 08, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as ""EZs covering a few blocks in Detroit"". It most often appears alongside 1960s sci-fi, AI 2027, AI 2027.

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My Takeaways From AI 2027
April 08, 2025 · Original source
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