Astral Codex Ten

People

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People

Entities classified as people within this archive.

Reference Index

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Australian Aborigines1 mentions across 1 issues

Australian Aborigines is a recurring people in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 15, 2025 and July 15, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Australian Aborigines are a tempting battleground for this conflict". It most often appears alongside Aboriginal, Aboriginal Australia, Aboriginal society.

Reference entry
Australian Aborigines
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
July 15, 2025
Last seen
July 15, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Book Review: Arguments About Aborigines
July 15, 2025 · Original source
The Australian Aborigines are a tempting battleground for this conflict. Even as we’re not supposed to dub them noble savages, so we definitely aren’t supposed to call them “the oldest society in the world” with a “fifty thousand year history” - just because they arrived fifty thousand years ago doesn’t mean their culture has been stagnant during that time. Still, certain decamillennia-old rock art appears to depict some of the same beings mentioned in Aboriginal mythology during colonial times and into the present. And on a very literal interpretation of cultural evolution, the longer you’ve been in a specific niche, the more adapted to it you get. We are citizens of an industrial society that gets five or ten years to adopt to each new paradigm before the technologists throw out something new to knock us off balance again, heirs to a Judeo-Christian tradition barely three thousand years old and a Greco-Roman-Indo-European tradition hardly any older. What does something really ancient look like? The Aborigines, whose culture can seem impossibly complex at times (is this an illusion? we’ll discuss that later!) give a feeling of something over-optimized, a genetic algorithm run for 999,999,999 epochs until it ends up at weird edge cases that break the reward module and get assigned infinite utility.
Australian Aborigines are a polygynic gerontocracy with infant betrothal.
French1 mentions across 1 issues

French is a recurring people in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 08, 2025 and August 08, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "the French eventually had to concede that potatoes do no". It most often appears alongside Ainu, Altiplano, American cheese.

Reference entry
French
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 08, 2025
Last seen
August 08, 2025
Outbound links
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Your Review: My Father’s Instant Mashed Potatoes
August 08, 2025 · Original source
These roots resemble the ancestral stock of modern potatoes (source) Andean peoples found all sorts of ways to prepare their potatoes. The most immediate method was to boil them into stews, soups, or mashes with local flavoring agents - herbs, salt, chilis. Earthenware ovens called huatias were used to bake them. With even more time, they could be fermented into tocosh, an edible paste with antibacterial properties. To get the spuds to really last, though, they were subjected to a natural freeze-drying method that produced shrivelled potato pellets called chuño. Repeatedly frozen by bitter mountain nights, baked in the sun, and stomped on to remove water, chuño remains shelf stable for up to a decade and can be rehydrated into a spongy, earthy, slightly less nutritious potato-like object. The ability to produce chuño on the Altiplano is thought to have contributed to the Incan empire’s military dominance of the region, since despite its generally unappealing gustatory properties it’s perfect for keeping troops fed on long marches. Chuño also allowed Incan civilization to stockpile surpluses against lean years and trade potatoes as commodities over great distances. It wasn’t the best way to eat a potato you harvested today, but it was the only way to turn a potato you have today into a potato you’ll have two years from now. That had immense value. After the Spanish conquest and the Columbian exchange, the potato made gradual inroads into the Old World, where the previous best root vegetables were often comparatively less nutritious parsnips and turnips. There was an initial adjustment period: new cultivars capable of growing in shorter hours of daylight had to be developed, objections to the absence of tubers in the Bible needed to be quelled, and the French eventually had to concede that potatoes do not, as they at first believed, cause leprosy. With these hurdles cleared, in the 19th century the potato spread out and became one of the easiest and most efficient ways to turn arable land into palatable calories the world over. National cuisines incorporated the new staple crop thoroughly, and it’s now hard to imagine Italian food without gnocchi, French sans vichyssoise, tapas without patatas bravas, a Eurasia bereft of aloo and rösti and colcannon and latkes. Europe’s new potato lovers also took to the simple recipe of boiling ‘em and mashing ‘em. While South America had lacked the livestock for dairy, in Europe the potato mash soon achieved its ultimate form with the addition of milk and butter, which impart a smoother texture and richer taste. Hannah Glasse’s procedure published in 1747 in The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy is, minus the long s’s, still just about how I make them today: Maſhed Potatoes. BOIL your potatoes, peel them and put them into a ſauce-pan, maſh them well ; To two pounds of potatoes, put a pint of milk, a little ſalt, ſtir them well together, take care they don’t ſtick to the bottom, then take a quarter of a pound of butter, ſtir in and ſerve it up. Nowhere was the potato embraced more thoroughly than in Ireland. In the early 19th century, extractive British demands on Irish agriculture to feed the armies fighting Napoleon reduced the available land for Irish farmers to feed themselves. Achieving maximum caloric density on the remaining land was paramount, and almost nothing is denser than the potato. Potatoes quickly became an integral part of Irish life, so essential to the food systems of the island that when a blight hit them in the mid-1840s it led to one of the most devastating famines in history. The failure of the potato crops created starvation and emigration so profound in scale that the population of the island still has not recovered to its 1845 level almost two centuries later. Among those millions of potato-starved emigres were my dad’s ancestors, who came to America in the decades following the famine. My great-grandfather, who bore the extremely Irish name Gerald FitzGerald, instilled in his children (including my grandmother) a reconstructed sense of Irish-American ethnic pride that included an affinity for corned beef and cabbage, Guinness beer, and the affordable practicality of mashed potatoes. As the generations marched on, those mashed potatoes turned out to be one of the only things my grandmother would make that my exceedingly picky father would eat. Their creamy texture and subtle starchy taste didn’t trigger the “ew gross” reaction he had to so many other foods. Mashed potatoes, just like the ones Glasse had written about more than two centuries earlier, became his favorite side - and eventually, when I finally got to try them, one of mine too. Whatever My Dad Had Been Eating at Home Was NOT Mashed Potatoes The chuño-chomping Incans were not the last military to rely on dehydrated potatoes for sustenance. In World War II, the US Army experimented with various forms of potato dehydration to help stretch supply lines. The easiest way to get a uniform potato commodity into the hands of G.I.s was to pulverize the potatoes into granules, dehydrate them, and then plan on bringing them back to life with boiling water in an imitation of “mashed potatoes”. These shreds resemble the ancestral stock of modern Instant Mashed Potatoes (source) The result was an affront. The potatoes were swimming in their own gluten, released during the granule-making process, which when mixed with imprecise water ratios made for a slop that was somehow both gluey and soupy. Immediately after the war, French’s (now best known for mustard) tried to introduce “instant mashed potatoes” as a consumer product category. America’s veterans were not having it. They didn’t want to be reminded of the awful slurry they’d had on the front. The commercial fortunes of instant mashed potatoes began to turn around a decade later, however, when food scientists in the US and Canada converged on methods for producing dehydrated potato flakes rather than granules. The flakes had substantial advantages. They didn’t get as glutinous when reconstituted. Their geometry made them easier to dry quickly, on the order of minutes or even seconds. Using a multi-step process called the “Philadelphia Cook”, they could lock in a more natural flavor. When prepared on the stove with butter and milk, they were supposed to turn out almost as good as the real thing without any onerous prep work on the part of the consumer. This raises the question, though, of why food scientists kept working on improving instant mashed potatoes a decade after they were no longer required for the war effort. If you’re no longer constrained by having to stick it to the Axis, why not return to Glasse-style maſhed potatoes in all circumstances? This is a pattern that recurs frequently in reading about American foodways of the 20th century: choices and innovations made under extreme duress in the World War II economy didn’t fade away when the duress subsided. Instead they echoed back into American life a few years later, despite the lean conditions that birthed them being replaced by extreme abundance. Why did America start eating like it was on a total war footing again when my parents’ generation was young? There are a lot of overlapping explanations. Here are a few: Industrial inertia: Companies that had spun up to supply a vast army didn’t want to shut down overnight, so they necessarily pivoted to the consumer market. Some of these efforts succeeded at entrenching new consumer categories (fish sticks, canned peaches) while others (hamburgers-in-a-can) did not.
Inline links: source, chuño, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!sdbs!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F785f66d4-986b-476e-9008-311ff035bcc1_1600x1307.png, source
These shreds resemble the ancestral stock of modern Instant Mashed Potatoes (source) The result was an affront. The potatoes were swimming in their own gluten, released during the granule-making process, which when mixed with imprecise water ratios made for a slop that was somehow both gluey and soupy. Immediately after the war, French’s (now best known for mustard) tried to introduce “instant mashed potatoes” as a consumer product category. America’s veterans were not having it. They didn’t want to be reminded of the awful slurry they’d had on the front. The commercial fortunes of instant mashed potatoes began to turn around a decade later, however, when food scientists in the US and Canada converged on methods for producing dehydrated potato flakes rather than granules. The flakes had substantial advantages. They didn’t get as glutinous when reconstituted. Their geometry made them easier to dry quickly, on the order of minutes or even seconds. Using a multi-step process called the “Philadelphia Cook”, they could lock in a more natural flavor. When prepared on the stove with butter and milk, they were supposed to turn out almost as good as the real thing without any onerous prep work on the part of the consumer. This raises the question, though, of why food scientists kept working on improving instant mashed potatoes a decade after they were no longer required for the war effort. If you’re no longer constrained by having to stick it to the Axis, why not return to Glasse-style maſhed potatoes in all circumstances? This is a pattern that recurs frequently in reading about American foodways of the 20th century: choices and innovations made under extreme duress in the World War II economy didn’t fade away when the duress subsided. Instead they echoed back into American life a few years later, despite the lean conditions that birthed them being replaced by extreme abundance. Why did America start eating like it was on a total war footing again when my parents’ generation was young? There are a lot of overlapping explanations. Here are a few: Industrial inertia: Companies that had spun up to supply a vast army didn’t want to shut down overnight, so they necessarily pivoted to the consumer market. Some of these efforts succeeded at entrenching new consumer categories (fish sticks, canned peaches) while others (hamburgers-in-a-can) did not.
Inline links: source
Malawians1 mentions across 1 issues

Malawians is a recurring people in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 16, 2025 and January 16, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Malawians are 60-80% subsistence farmers". It most often appears alongside Afghanistan, Africa, African small-plot subsistence agriculture.

Reference entry
Malawians
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
January 16, 2025
Last seen
January 16, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Highlights From The Comments On Lynn And IQ
January 16, 2025 · Original source
For the second effect mentioned in the post - the one where Malawians are obviously smarter than intellectually disabled people - you could attribute it to any of:
(source) … sub-Saharan Africa is also a hot spot. I wonder what’s wrong in Cuba - this is exactly the sort of easily gameable metric I would usually expect them to be good at, or at least carefully faking. If you’re interested, you can donate to Iodine Global Network here. Bob Jacobs writes: > His opponents pointed out both his personal racist opinions/activities That's the mildest possible way you could've put it. He wasn't someone who had "personal racist opinions" that he kept as "personal racist opinions". He was the editor-in-chief of Mankind Quarterly, a white supremacist journal that was founded by people like: Henry Garrett an American psychologist who testified in favor of segregated schools during Brown versus Board of Education, Corrado Gini who was president of the Italian genetics and eugenics Society in fascist Italy, and Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer who was director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of anthropology human heredity and eugenics in Nazi Germany. He was a member of the Nazi Party and the mentor of Josef Mengele, the physician at the Auschwitz concentration camp infamous for performing human experimentation on the prisoners during World War 2. Mengele provided for Verschuer with human remains from Auschwitz to use in his research into eugenics. It's funded by the pioneer fund, an organization he was a board member of and that has been classified as a white supremacist hate group, with one of its first projects being to fund the distribution in US churches and schools of "Erbkrank", a Nazi propaganda film about eugenics. He's not just called racist, he *is* racist, he even describes *himself* as a racist. No contesting any of this. MM writes: I spent 18 months in a country where people are supposed to have an iq of about 70, according to the map. My neighbors and friends were mostly non-literate. They did not seem less intelligent than the people I know in my current (US) neighborhood or the people I grew up with (in the US). Most of them would not have performed well on IQ tests, though. They'd never attended school and had no familiarity with puzzle-solving. This was 35 years ago and most people had not seen movies or even photographs. I remember sitting with one older woman and helping her interpret a black-and-white photograph: this is the arm, here's where it connects to the body, etc. It's hard for people from literate societies with tons of exposure to text & graphical representations to see the extent of the gap. Calvin writes: I have a decent amount of experience with the intellectually disabled, and saying "cognitive issues are only responsible for a small part of the [communication] deficit" is so wrong that it makes me question everything else in this essay. Trust me, even making allowances for poor hearing or difficulty forming words, the cognitive issues are responsible for 90% of the deficit. An IQ of 60 is really low and it's a significant handicap. I was concerned to hear this - I have a little experience with the intellectually disabled, but it didn’t involve knowing people’s exact IQ, so I’m not very well-calibrated here. Looking for more information, I found https://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/ustat/ustat0301-01.htm, which purports to describe the characteristics of very low IQ people, mostly in the context of criminal justice (where lawyers often try to use a client’s low IQ as a mitigating factor - ie maybe he didn’t truly understand that crime is wrong). The report says things like: Although all persons with mental retardation have significantly impaired mental development, their intellectual level can vary considerably. An estimated 89 percent of all people with retardation have I.Q.s in the 51-70 range. An I.Q. in the 60 to 70 range is approximately the scholastic equivalent to the third grade […] Although mental retardation of any degree has profound implications for a person's cognitive and social development, it is a condition which in many cases is not readily apparent. While some of the mentally retarded, such as those whose retardation is caused by Down's syndrome or fetal alcohol syndrome, have characteristically distinctive facial features, most cannot be identified by their physical appearance alone. Unless their cognitive impairment is unusually severe (e.g. an I.Q. below 40), persons with mental retardation may be thought of as "slow" but the full extent of their impairment is often not readily appreciated, particularly by people who have limited contact with or knowledge of them, including police, prosecutors, judges, and other participants in the criminal justice system. Many capital offenders with mental retardation did not have their condition diagnosed until trial or during post-conviction proceedings. And gave some examples (slightly out of order for this list): Oliver Cruz, who was executed in Texas on August 9, 2000, had an I.Q. that was measured variously at 64 and 76. Cruz nonetheless insisted to reporters that, although he was perhaps "slow in reading, slow in learning," he was not mentally retarded. Mitigation specialist Scharlette Holdman recalled a client who so successfully hid his retardation from his attorneys that he allowed them to sign him up for college-level calculus classes, which he could not comprehend. He had gone through much of his schooling allowing his younger sister to complete his homework for him. When he was given papers to read in connection to his case, he would carefully stare at them. If he was asked a substantive question, he usually responded, "I don't recall." Only when experts in retardation evaluated him and investigators reviewed his school records and spoke to his family did lawyers discover he had mental retardation and had been considered "slow" since his early childhood. Another capital defendant "hid his mental retardation for most of his life by working at a very repetitive job as a switcher on the railroad. He lied about finishing high school. He was actually in special education classes and did not finish the sixth grade. He was drafted into the army and discharged because of his mental retardation. He lied about his service record. He often made things up so that people would not suspect mental retardation." Morris Mason, whose I.Q. was 62-66, was executed in 1985 in Virginia after being convicted of rape and murder. Before his execution, Mason asked one of his legal advisors for advice on what to wear to his funeral As one psychiatrist testified about a capital defendant with an I.Q. of between 35 to 45: "[People with mental retardation try] to go along with people that they suspect are in authority. For example, I asked [the defendant] where we were when I saw him, and he obviously didn't know, so I asked him if we were in Atlanta and he said `Yes, we are in Atlanta.' In fact, we were in Birmingham, Alabama. I could have said New York and he would have said `Sure, New York' These people are obviously not going to win Nobels anytime soon. But even the guy with IQ 35 - 45 was still talking to people. I think this supports the thesis that intellectually disabled people without specific syndromes can seem pretty normal most of the time. (though keep in mind that anything from the court system should be treated with a grain of salt - defense attorneys have an incentive to exaggerate the intellectual disability of their clients in the hopes that it gets them a lighter sentence) Lyman Stone writes: Emil's post isn't correct, however. We know from the recent Reich lab paper on long-run genetic selection that there was strong selection for IQ in the neolithic revolution, which implies agriculture strongly selects for IQ and ability to plan. Malawians are 60-80% subsistence farmers. Even a "normal" low-IQ person cannot do the implied math and long-term planning involved in this kind of farming. And in fact, economists routinely find that African small-plot subsistence agriculture is actually highly optimized; farmers make very precise choices about where to plant which seeds, which fertilizer to use, etc. Key point is basically: it really isn't true that an IQ 60 person can run a farm functionally. Moreover, mean IQ of 60 implies large shares even lower, at ranges that are uniformly nonverbal even without specific disability. And this is why in the actual record-level NIQ database, they truncate estimates below 60, because even the database managers realize these estimates are crazy. See my post here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-154757665 We know that people with extremely low IQs in the Flynn sense must be capable of subsistence agriculture, because pre-Flynn Effect, most of the West had extremely low IQs, and they were all doing subsistence agriculture. How is this possible? Responding to Lyman’s comment, I wrote: I stick to the claim in this post - that our estimates for what a very low IQ means are poorly-grounded, and that people with low IQs can do some pretty impressive things, especially if they're concrete and part of a cultural transmission package. Maybe this is the Joseph Henrich "Secret Of Our Success" thing. We know that Malawians get poor test scores in school, so it seems like there's some disconnect between do-well-on-tests intelligence and run-a-subsistence-farm intelligence, and the abstract/concrete and novel/cultural distinctions are the best explanation that I can think of. You say that "the phenotype that arises from a given tested IQ in America is clearly vastly worse than the phenotype arising from the same tested IQ in Africa", which I basically agree with. I think part of it is the syndromes issue raised above, and part of it is that maybe Malawians have zero contact with the culture of abstraction that IQ tests come out of whereas even very uneducated Westerners have some contact with it, and maybe another part of it is that whatever health/nutrition issues the Malawians have preferentially harm faculties responsible for more abstract tasks rather than more concrete ones. For an opposite data point, when I was in Haiti, my boss told me (secondhand, no personal experience) of extreme difficulties working with Haitians, like that they couldn't alphabetize files even when that was explained to them. Many Haitains are also successfuly subsistence farmers, so I think this also supports some kind of heavy abstract/concrete distinction. I don't think we're really disagreeing, just agreeing on something like the correlations that make up IQ being less valid outside the normal range. Maybe one way to look at it is to go back to the claim from the justice system document above, saying that people with IQ in the 60s are the mental equivalent of third-graders. The third-graders I know are very into Pokemon, and have all sorts of opinions on how if you add X bonus to a Y strength fire-type Pokemon and then play Z combo, it will [commence six weeks of droning on about different Pokemon cards]. Is this the sort of math/reasoning/strategizing that we don’t expect someone with IQ 60 to be able to do? Does the fact that third-graders can do it mean that we’re miscalibrated? I’m not sure. The part of Lyman’s comment that gives me the most pause is his observation that, if the mean IQ is 60, a decent fraction of people must be 45, and a non-negligible portion 30. At this point, even third-grader comparisons don’t save us. I guess this is where I bring in the claim that IQ breaks down as a guide to practical living skills below some point. You can see several more layers of response between me and Lyman here, but I was especially grateful for him teaching me two things I didn’t already know: First, he corrected my misconception about Reich on ancient European cognitive evolution. Reich had said that pre-agriculture Europeans were “2-3 standard deviations” below moderns. I had interpreted that as IQ deviations of 15 points, making them genetic IQ 55-70, which would have been pretty crazy. Stone tells me he actually meant PGS deviations, each of which was about 3-4 IQ points, so he’s claiming that pre-agriculture Europeans had genetic IQ of 90 (they probably also had lower IQ for environmental reasons).,
Inline links: source, donate to Iodine Global Network here., writes, writes, writes, https://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/ustat/ustat0301-01.htm, writes, https://substack.com/home/post/p-154757665, here
Medes1 mentions across 1 issues

Medes is a recurring people in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 10, 2024 and January 10, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "half-Mede, half-Persian, and alternates between the almost-literally-spartan Persian court and the luxurious Median court"; "their foil the Medes didn’t do this because they were too civilized". It most often appears alongside Alexander the Great, Amorites, Anshan.

Reference entry
Medes
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
January 10, 2024
Last seen
January 10, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Source context
Book Review: Cyropaedia
January 10, 2024 · Original source
There’s a big historical dispute about exactly what happened with the Medes, of which the Cyropaedia presents one side. In 575 BC, the Median Empire was the local great power, with the Persians as one of their many vassals. By 525 BC, the Median Empire had been absorbed by Persia. Nobody knows how. Herodotus says Cyrus conquered Media. Xenophon says that Cyrus conquered his empire while still sort of a vassal of Media, and the Median king was so impressed that he gave him his daughter’s hand in marriage and made him the heir. Historians lean toward Herodotus’ story, but the details remain obscure.
Xenophon’s Cyrus is constantly giving speeches on the virtues of simple living. He is half-Mede, half-Persian, and alternates between the almost-literally-spartan Persian court and the luxurious Median court; in the latter, he monologues about how all of the Medes’ fancy foods and wines are less satisfying than simple bread well-earned after a day of hard labor. “Hunger is the best relish” is practically his catchphrase.
Amorites taking over Babylon: Okay, but the Babylonians could hardly go into the hills to wipe them out, so they got basically unlimited chances. The way I would frame this is that settled decadent people do win more often than they lose, but unsettled barbarians still seem to punch above their weight given the material disadvantages they face. In one of his few concessions to the Fremen, Devereaux has a soft spot for Ibn Khaldun’s theory of asabiyyah - that small tribes can maintain camaraderie and a “family” type atmosphere as their larger neighbors spread themselves too wide and get involved in satrapial backstabbing. The tightly-knit small tribe can then conquer the large but fragmented empire, benefit from its camaraderie for a generation or two until it fades away, and then become the next fragmented decadent empire in turn. Xenophon hints at this in Cyropaedia. Cyrus and his childhood friends form a tightly-knit cadre for the Persian army; their bonds of trust are unbreakable. Meanwhile, Assyria and all the Persians’ other enemies are collections of backstabbing vassals held together with gum and duct tape, who fragment at a mere poke from the crystalline perfection of the Persian machinery. In one of his few other concessions, Devereaux agrees that the Mongols were very impressive, but says this was because of very specific aspects of their society rather than general Fremenness. For example: Steppe warriors battled with tactics learned from the hunt and engaged in operations with logistics they used for every day survival. But it isn’t the ‘hardness’ of this way of life that provided the military advantage (if it was, one might expect non-horse cultures on similarly marginal lands to be equally militarily effective and – as we’ve shown – they were not), it was the overlap of very specific skills (namely riding, horse archery and the logistics of steppe pastoralism) that led to the military advantage. Okay, but one of Xenophon’s points is that Cyrus was a great warrior because he and his friends learned tactics from hunting constantly, and their foil the Medes didn’t do this because they were too civilized and decadent. So my model of Xenophon’s response to Devereaux would be that Devereaux is accurately recognizing various features of non-decadent societies, and judging each of them a contingent exception, rather than Directly The True Effect Of Non-Decadence. But non-decadence, if it’s valuable as a concept at all, will be made of things like “camaraderie among tribe members” and “a tradition of learning tactics from hunting”. Is it useful to think of all of these things as coming from a central concept of “non-decadence” rather than as a bunch of separate things? Here I think about Zvi’s review of Moral Mazes, a book about (essentially) corporate decadence, the difference between a bloated megacorporation and a nimble startup. On average, a bloated megacorporation beats a startup - the next-generation smartphone is more likely to be developed by Apple than by three people in a garage. But everyone agrees startups have advantages of their own, and are sometimes able to beat the megacorporation despite how unlikely this seems. Moral Mazes posits that the bloated megacorporation has so many layers of middle management that the average leader is dealing entirely with social reality - trying to manipulate the beliefs of other middle managers, who are themselves concerned mostly with the beliefs of other middle managers, and so on. Meanwhile, the startup is concerned mostly with physical reality. Either you’re working on real business things (like engineering the product, or looking for customers, or even managing the budget) or you’re at least managing someone who’s doing those things rather than living entirely in some giant house of mirrors. Megacorporations have high volume and low surface area - most points are far away from any boundary with the outside. Startups have low volume and high surface area - most parts of them are being constantly tested against reality and honed into some useful form. One reading of Cyropaedia portrays Cyrus the Great as a guy in touch with physical reality. Part of that is that he goes hunting (and later, goes into battle). But part of that is that his friends are real people, who are his friends for specific reasons, and not ten layers of courtiers and flatterers and vassals. Cultures whose leaders spend time in physical reality tend to get different norms from cultures whose leaders spend time in social reality (read Zvi if you don’t believe me). I think this is enough to link Ibn Khaldun, Xenophon, and the Western tradition of decadence (this is just a possibility proof, not an “I’m definitely right” argument). Then you could use that to explain why barbarians seem to punch above their weight (eg rule China 20% of the time even with 1% of the population). Did Cyrus The Great Invent Niceness? This is a claim I’ve sometimes heard. Machiavelli said that it is better to be both loved and feared, but if you can only have one, be feared. The history of the late Bronze and early Iron Ages is a history of fearmaxxing. Kings would torture their rivals and slaughter their enemies, then erect steles saying “I massacred the Vorgundians, laid waste the land of the Hapidians, enslaved the Gargulians . . . “ etc etc etc. The story goes that Cyrus was the first to get Machiavelli’s perfect balance of fear and love. I don’t know how true it is - some of this comes from the Cyrus Cylinder, Cyrus’ own propaganda about himself. Still, it has to mean something that when every other king erected steles about how many people he massacred or enslaved, Cyrus chose to write about how many people he had liberated, helped, or given rights back to. Wikipedia says: A comparison of the Cyrus Cylinder with the inscriptions of previous conquerors of Babylon highlights this sharply. For instance, when Sennacherib, king of Assyria (705-681 BC) captured the city in 690 BC after a 15-month siege, Babylon endured a dreadful destruction and massacre. Sennacharib describes how, having captured the King of Babylon, he had him tied up in the middle of the city like a pig. Then he describes how he destroyed Babylon, and filled the city with corpses, looted its wealth, broke its gods, burned and destroyed its houses down to foundations, demolished its walls and temples and dumped them in the canals. This is in stark contrast to Cyrus the Great and the Cyrus Cylinder. Sounds pretty easy to get a reputation as “the nice tolerant guy” when this is your competition! Xenophon follows the Cylinder and the invented-niceness side of the story. In fact, he hits you over the head with stories of how Cyrus was nice to people and it ended out helping him. For example: When the Armenians rebel against their master the Medes, the Medes send Cyrus to pacify them. Cyrus wins, but the Prince of Armenia argues that Cyrus should spare the life of his father the king, because this will be so over-the-top unexpectedly nice that his father will be a more grateful and helpful vassal than anyone else Cyrus could put in his place. Cyrus agrees and the Armenians are loyal to him forever.
Inline links: Moral Mazes, Cyrus Cylinder
Scots1 mentions across 1 issues

Scots is a recurring people 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 "Even the Scots could muster more soldiers". It most often appears alongside Africa, Agamemnon, Age of Empires II.

Reference entry
Scots
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 01, 2025
Last seen
August 01, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Source context
Your Review: Joan of Arc
August 01, 2025 · Original source
This was unwise. It had been a reasonable decision to attack Edward II, inept, oppressive, and so devoted to his favorites his lords had plotted his murder; Edward III took after his grandfathers on both sides, conquerors both, and what he had been busy with during his French grandfather’s death was plotting a coup against his regents. At age seventeen he imprisoned his mother, murdered her lover10 and invaded Scotland. After a decade or so the Scots wars pulled the French in - the Auld Alliance was not so Auld back then but it existed - and since the French wanted to get Guyenne back, why not?
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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.
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Now was a moment of opportunity, but the Armagnacs were in no position to take it. The battle of Verneuil, when they had the aid of the Scots, took place two years after the death of the two kings,27 and even though the Scots knew how to fight Englishmen the French and their allies were as beaten as ever. Henry's government rested in the hands of his brother, the Duke of Bedford, and if Bedford was not quite his brother's equal it was only because very few men could be. The Armagnacs were despised by the population at large as corrupt and murderous, and the educated, cultured classes looked towards Burgundy as the sole hope of France and thereby accepted the necessity that the reign of the Valois kings was over. Some villages supported the Armagnacs as the lesser of two evils, others were pro-Burgundian, and bands of men-at-arms under any authority or none wandered the country, pillaging as they pleased. The most despised of them were the English army, the goddams, respecters of no property and of no religion,28 not speaking the French language or feeling the slightest mercy for the French people. South of the Loire river, the country was Armagnac to the extent it was anything; north it was Burgundian, and the key crossing lay at the city of Orleans, with an English army besieging it in spite of every relief effort the inept Dauphin could put together.
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