Astral Codex Ten

People: X

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People: X

Writers, artists, hosts, DJs, filmmakers, and recurring characters across the archive. This section collects the X slice of the category index.

Reference Index

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

Xi14 mentions across 14 issues

Xi is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 14 times across 14 issues between March 18, 2021 and March 25, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "whether in Erdogan's Turkey or Xi's China"; "How did Xi come to power? How did he defeat those safeguards?"; "Xi's secondary education [was cut short] when all secondary classes were halted". It most often appears alongside China, US, America.

Article page
Xi
Mention count
14
Issue count
14
First seen
March 18, 2021
Last seen
March 25, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Book Review: The New Sultan
March 18, 2021 · Original source
But even quashing conspiracy theories isn't enough. When Erdogan wasn't spinning wild stories about vast treasonous conspiracies, he got his opponents on smaller things. Ordinary bribe-taking style corruption, admittedly totally endemic in Turkey, such that any given allegation was completely plausible, becoming suspicious only because of the consistency with which people standing in Erdogan's way got accused. Businessmen and tycoons who Erdogan needed swept aside got accused of tax fraud, or sometimes just audited with such a fine-toothed comb that they agreed to what Erdogan wanted knowing it would get the audit called off. Maybe it's easy to instantly dismiss wild treason accusations; what about corruption and tax evasion? Don't we want to punish those crimes? I think Erdogan's story has me sufficiently spooked that I wonder if we should trade off our ability to catch corrupt officials and tax evaders, in favor of very high burdens of proof for those specific misdeeds. "Anti corruption campaign" seems to be a code word for "arresting the enemies of people in power", whether in Erdogan's Turkey or Xi's China. I'm not sure what to do about it without leaving corruption in place, but, uh, maybe we should leave corruption in place. Hard to say.
Dictator Book Club: Xi Jinping
April 06, 2022 · Original source
When Xi Jinping first joined the Politburo Standing Committee in 2008, eight of its nine members were engineers. Paramount Leader Hu Jintao was a hydroelectric engineer. His second-in-command Wen Jiabao was a geological engineer. There were two electrical engineers, a petroleum engineer, a radio engineer, and two chemical engineers (including Xi himself). The only non-engineer was Li Keqiang, an economist.
Hu was not quite as adept a politician as Jiang, and was disadvantaged by his opponent having spent ten years consolidating power (plus the secret police), so the remaining Shanghai Gangers frequently outmanuevered him. He served for ten years, then dutifully turned over power to the Shanghai favorite, Xi Jinping.
Xi Jinping was their guy. He’d made a focus of rooting out corruption in his previous posts, and had a reputation for being non-corrupt himself. He had already been a leading candidate to succeed Hu, but the Bo Xilai incident made him a shoo-in.
Highlights From The Comments On Xi Jinping
April 28, 2022 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
22
May 10, 2022 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Grading My 2018 Predictions For 2023
February 20, 2023 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Most Technologies Aren't Races
April 05, 2023 · Original source
Even in the unlikely scenario where AI causes a singularity and remains aligned, I have trouble worrying too much about races. The whole point of a singularity is that it’s hard to imagine what happens on the other side of it. I care a lot how much relative power Xi Jinping, Mark Zuckerberg, and Joe Biden have today, but I don’t know how much I care about them after a singularity.
“Wouldn’t Xi Jinping put people in camps?” Why? He put the Uighurs in camps because he was afraid they would revolt against Chinese rule. Nobody can revolt against someone who controls a technological singularity, so why put them in camps?
Dictator Book Club: Putin
August 03, 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.
Dictator Book Club: Chavez
November 02, 2023 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Highlights From The Comments On The Lab Leak Debate
April 09, 2024 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Highlights From The Comments On POSIWID
April 15, 2025 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Links For September 2025
September 04, 2025 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Fascism Can't Mean Both A Specific Ideology And A Legitimate Target
October 10, 2025 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Every Debate On Pausing AI
March 25, 2026 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Xi Jinping7 mentions across 7 issues

Xi Jinping is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 7 times across 7 issues between August 08, 2021 and April 05, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as ""or Donald Trump, or Xi Jinping, or all sorts of other terrible things and people""; "Noahpinion: What If Xi Jinping"; "Noahpinion: What If Xi Jinping Just Isn’t That Competent?". It most often appears alongside China, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Shanghai.

Article page
Xi Jinping
Mention count
7
Issue count
7
First seen
August 08, 2021
Last seen
April 05, 2023
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Contra Drum On The Fish Oil Story
August 08, 2021 · Original source
I know anger looks bad, and I try hard not to sound angry, and I think I succeed really amazingly well. You have no idea how non-angry I can sound about malaria killing millions of people, or climate change killing millions of people, or Donald Trump, or Xi Jinping, or all sorts of other terrible things and people. Overall given how enraging the world is, I think I’m doing a really commendable job of not sounding angry all the time. But everyone fails on something and for me it’s this.
Links For November
November 25, 2021 · Original source
Boris Johnson (left) is 5’9, so the guy in the middle must be gigantic. Who is he? Looks like it’s Milo Djukanovic, President of Montenegro, who’s 6’6 (198 cm). Is he the tallest world leader? It seems like he’s tied with his colleague across the border, Serbian president Aleksandar Vucic. Why are Balkan leaders so tall? As usual, the answer is “genetics”. This article says: It has been noted that men from Herzegovina are taller on average than men in other places—the average male height is just over six feet...Putting all the data together, researchers concluded that the most likely cause of larger-than-average height of Herzegovinian men is lifestyle during the Paleolithic—men hunted large animals such as mammoth for survival—such a diet, heavy in protein, combined with small population densities, would have provided ideal conditions for height selection, resulting in increasingly taller men who passed the trait down through their I-M170 chromosome to future generations. Some sources note that they manage to beat the Dutch despite the latter country’s much higher human development index. The Dutch are probably tall through a combination of nature and nurture; Balkan people are tall through nature alone. 7: Eliezer Yudkowsky doesn’t need more ego boosts, but an idea he had a couple of years ago - using strings of bright lights to provide a better and brighter experience for Seasonal Affective Disorder sufferers than regular light boxes - spread from him to the rationalist community to the wider world, and has finally gotten tested in a formal study (see Acknowledgments section). Results seem vaguely positive: "SAD symptoms of both groups improved similarly and considerably...exploratory analyses indicate that a higher illuminance is associated with a larger symptom improvement in the BROAD light therapy group" 8: Percent of people who choose woke options on polls very tentatively and preliminarily seems to be going down post-Trump (h/t Richard Hanania). 9: Twitter conspiracy theories 10: Did you know: all those reconstructions of “how classical art would have looked with the original paint” are probably inaccurate. There is no reason to think the Greeks and Romans used garish technicolor hues on their statues; what evidence we have suggest they were good at shading, and the statues were probably colored very tastefully. 11: Complaints about how Karl Friston uses the term “Markov blanket” 12: Trevor Klee on the claim that cyclosporine patients don’t get dementia. Apparently there was a big study where basically nobody on the immunosuppressant cyclosporine ever got dementia, and there are some theoretical reasons why cyclosporine might prevent neurodegeneration. But another study found people on cyclosporine got dementia at the usual rate. I think in a situation like this you should have a really high prior on “the people who got the crazy result bungled their study somehow”, but I’m interested in hearing what other people think. 13: Also from Trevor: a history of fluvoxamine treatment for COVID. 14: To tide you over until the next book review contest, here is awanderingmind’s review of The Conquest Of Bread. 15: Claims: cnbc.com/2021/11/05/sam…\nft.com/content/dcb75a… (better article, but paywalled)","username":"moskov","name":"Dustin Moskovitz","profile_image_url":"","date":"Fri Nov 05 15:49:46 +0000 2021","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":184,"like_count":1188,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{"url":"https://www.ft.com/content/dcb75a56-ca23-439c-96db-56483979bf34","image":"https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/80a58c96-c72f-4301-b571-aa9384f132bd_2400x1350.jpeg","title":"Subscribe to read | Financial Times","description":"News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication","domain":"ft.com"},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM"> 16: Big trial on Vitamin D for depression finds null result. Peter Attia tries to tear it apart here, but I am unconvinced, especially in the context of Vitamin D never working for any of the things people say it does besides the most boring aspects of bone health. 17: “California is actively considering the adoption of flawed and inequitable guidance on math curricula based on misleading data and inaccurate success metrics reported by San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD)...Based on our review of the data, we found misleading, unsupported, and cherry-picked assertions of success for the new math program. We noted that overall test scores are down and enrollments in UC-approved advanced math classes have dropped as well.” It looks like San Francisco is trying the good old “lower standards, then when more kids meet the standards, claim your school reform plan worked” trick again. 18: A new study claims that self-reported “Long COVID” symptoms are more associated with believing you’ve had COVID than with actually having it (as measured by serologic testing), which sounds like pretty strong evidence that it’s psychsomatic. Expert reactions are mixed-to-negative, although the only one of these that doesn’t sound like excuse-making is Dr. Rossman’s about the unreliability of the tests. I haven’t confirmed test reliability stats but Philippe Lemoine also thinks this is a plausible confounder. 19: Noahpinion: What If Xi Jinping Just Isn’t That Competent? I appreciated this for making me think, and for underlining the extent of the difference between the Deng/Jiang/Hu era and what Xi’s doing. I especially appreciated this line, which I’d never thought about before: Xi presided over the end of China’s hypergrowth. To some extent this is not his fault. No country can grow at 10% forever, and there were many structural forces pushing downward on China’s numbers — the end of the demographic dividend, the exhaustion of rural surplus labor (the Lewis Turning Point), the saturation of export markets, and so on. But China is also slowing down earlier than South Korea, Taiwan, or Japan did in their day. China’s per capita GDP (at PPP) is still only about 1/3 that of a developed country, so if they stop catching up at about half of developed-country levels, that will not be a great showing. A big lesson of the past twenty years has been “actually liberal democracy isn’t necessary to reach developed-country status”, so it would be quite the twist if it turned out you needed liberal democracy to reach developed-country status. This gets pretty close to the great mystery of why some less-developed countries “catch up” and others don’t; whatever happens in China is going to be a really useful data point. 20: Variations on the fable of The Frog And The Scorpion. 21: You’ve probably heard about the University of Austin, the new project by a bunch of wokeness-critical academics to start a new university that won’t cancel people or force conformity (New York Post article, Politico article - these were the two least “you need to be super-outraged about this right now” articles I could find). Tyler Cowen and Larry Summers are involved; Steven Pinker was supposed to be but left for unclear reasons. My thoughts, in no particular order: Even forgetting the political aspect, attempts to start new universities are always welcome.
Inline links: Milo Djukanovic, Aleksandar Vucic, This article, in a formal study, Richard Hanania, Twitter conspiracy theories, There is no reason to think, Complaints about, cyclosporine patients don’t get dementia, a history of fluvoxamine treatment for COVID, The Conquest Of Bread, Vitamin D for depression, here, is trying, A new study, Expert reactions, Philippe Lemoine also thinks, What If Xi Jinping Just Isn’t That Competent?, Lewis Turning Point, slowing down earlier, per capita GDP (at PPP), the great mystery, Variations on the fable of The Frog And The Scorpion, New York Post article, Politico article
Dictator Book Club: Xi Jinping
April 06, 2022 · Original source
When Xi Jinping first joined the Politburo Standing Committee in 2008, eight of its nine members were engineers. Paramount Leader Hu Jintao was a hydroelectric engineer. His second-in-command Wen Jiabao was a geological engineer. There were two electrical engineers, a petroleum engineer, a radio engineer, and two chemical engineers (including Xi himself). The only non-engineer was Li Keqiang, an economist.
Hu was not quite as adept a politician as Jiang, and was disadvantaged by his opponent having spent ten years consolidating power (plus the secret police), so the remaining Shanghai Gangers frequently outmanuevered him. He served for ten years, then dutifully turned over power to the Shanghai favorite, Xi Jinping.
Xi Jinping was their guy. He’d made a focus of rooting out corruption in his previous posts, and had a reputation for being non-corrupt himself. He had already been a leading candidate to succeed Hu, but the Bo Xilai incident made him a shoo-in.
Biography of Jason Shea, 44th US President
April 13, 2022 · Original source
When I was working on the Dictator Book Club entry for Xi Jinping, I frequently found myself lost in unfamiliar Chinese names and concepts. For example, from Xi’s Wikipedia page:
Inline links: Wikipedia
None of this made sense to me the first ten times I read it, and I wanted to experiment with ways to convey it more efficiently. So I tried to “translate” the story of Xi Jinping into the story of Jason Shea, 44th US President.
PS: The picture on the top is what happens if you ask the Artbreeder AI to make Xi Jinping’s face look like a white person. I think it’s pretty good!
Inline links: Artbreeder
Links For June
July 01, 2022 · Original source
24: Interview with Edward Luttwak. TIL that Xi Jinping has memorized Faust. Also, the claim of global cognitive decline due to decreasing nicotine use hits exactly my sweet spot for insane yet intriguing theories.
Inline links: Interview with Edward Luttwak
Moderation Is Different From Censorship
November 03, 2022 · Original source
The racket works by pretending these are the same imperative. “Well, lots of people will be unhappy if they see offensive content, so in order to keep the platform safe for those people, we’ve got to remove it for everybody.” This is not true at all. A minimum viable product for moderation without censorship is for a platform to do exactly the same thing they’re doing now - remove all the same posts, ban all the same accounts - but have an opt-in setting, “see banned posts”. If you personally choose to see harassing and offensive content, you can toggle that setting, and everything bad will reappear. To “ban” an account would mean to prevent the half (or 75%, or 99%) of people who haven’t toggled that setting from seeing it. The people who elected to see banned posts could see them the same as always. Two “banned” accounts could still talk to each other, retweet each other, etc - as could accounts that hadn’t been banned, but had opted into the “see banned posts” setting. Does this difference seem kind of pointless and trivial? Then imagine applying it to China. If the Chinese government couldn’t censor - only moderate - the world would look completely different. Any Chinese person could get accurate information on Xinjiang, Tiananmen Square, the Shanghai lockdowns, or the top fifty criticisms of Xi Jinping - just by clicking a button on their Weibo profile. Given how much trouble ordinary Chinese people go through to get around censors, probably many of them would click the button, and then they’d have a free information environment. This switch might seem trivial in a well-functioning information ecology, but it prevents the worst abuses, and places a floor on how bad things can get. And this is just the minimum viable product, the case I’m focusing on to forestall objections of “this would be too hard to implement” or “this would be too complicated for ordinary people to understand”. If you wanted to get fancy, you could have a bunch of filters - harassing content, sexually explicit content, conspiracy theories - and let people toggle which ones they wanted to see vs. avoid. You could let people set them to different levels. Set your anti-Semitism filter to the weakest setting and it will only block literal Nazis with swastikas in their profile pic; set it to Ludicrous, and it will block anyone who isn’t an ordained Orthodox rabbi. Or you could let users choose which fact-checking organization they trusted to flag content as “disinformation”. The current level of moderation is a compromise. It makes no one happy. Allowing more personalized settings would make the free speech side happier (since they could speak freely to one another and anyone else interested in hearing what they had to say). And it would make the avoid-harassment side happier, since they could set their filters to stronger than the default setting, and see even less harassment than they do now. This doesn’t solve all our problems. There are some genuine arguments for true censorship: that is, for blocking speech that both sides want to hear. For example: That it’s a social good to avert the spread of false ideas (and maybe even some true ideas that people can’t handle). People might want to hear these ideas (“What? Joe Biden is a lizard person spy? I hadn’t heard anything about that on the so-called mainstream media!”) but they should not be allowed to.
Inline links: The racket
Most Technologies Aren't Races
April 05, 2023 · Original source
Even in the unlikely scenario where AI causes a singularity and remains aligned, I have trouble worrying too much about races. The whole point of a singularity is that it’s hard to imagine what happens on the other side of it. I care a lot how much relative power Xi Jinping, Mark Zuckerberg, and Joe Biden have today, but I don’t know how much I care about them after a singularity.
“Wouldn’t Xi Jinping put people in camps?” Why? He put the Uighurs in camps because he was afraid they would revolt against Chinese rule. Nobody can revolt against someone who controls a technological singularity, so why put them in camps?
Xiomara Castro2 mentions across 2 issues

Xiomara Castro is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between December 06, 2021 and June 28, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as ""Immediately upon assuming the presidency, we are going to send the National Congress an initiative for the repeal of the ZEDE law," incoming president Xiomara Castro said"; "a socialist party led by Xiomara Castro". It most often appears alongside Balaji Srinivasan, Charter Cities Institute, Honduras.

Article page
Xiomara Castro
Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
December 06, 2021
Last seen
June 28, 2022
Outbound links
Issue trail
  • 21 December 06, 2021
  • 22 June 28, 2022
Related pages
Source context
21
December 06, 2021 · Original source
The socialist opposition has won Honduras’ election and pledges to fight against charter cities there. "Immediately upon assuming the presidency, we are going to send the National Congress an initiative for the repeal of the ZEDE law," incoming president Xiomara Castro said.
Inline links: said
22
June 28, 2022 · Original source
In January, Honduras kicked out the right-wing government that passed the ZEDE law and replaced it with a socialist party led by Xiomara Castro, which had made opposition to the ZEDEs part of its platform. In April, the new government repealed the ZEDE law, with uncertain consequences.
Inline links: the new government repealed the ZEDE law
X Æ A-Xii1 mentions across 1 issues

X Æ A-Xii is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 18, 2023 and September 18, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "The list is ... X Æ A-Xii". It most often appears alongside 787, adderallposting, ADL.

Reference entry
X Æ A-Xii
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
September 18, 2023
Last seen
September 18, 2023
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Highlights From The Comments On Elon Musk
September 18, 2023 · Original source
Nevada (deceased) Xavier (later changed name to Vivian) Griffin Kai Saxon Damian X Æ A-Xii Exa Dark Sideræl Techno Mechanicus Strider Azure
Xaikáibaí1 mentions across 1 issues

Xaikáibaí is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 19, 2024 and July 19, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "“You stay here and we will be back for you later.” Xaikáibaí said gently but firmly". It most often appears alongside Alan Turing, Amazon, Amazon jungle.

Reference entry
Xaikáibaí
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
July 19, 2024
Last seen
July 19, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Your Book Review: How Language Began
July 19, 2024 · Original source
Everett interviewing some Pirahã people. (source) Everett did eventually learn their language, and it’s worth taking a step back to appreciate just how hard that task was. No Pirahã spoke Portuguese, apart from some isolated phrases they used for bartering. They didn’t speak any other language at all—just Pirahã. How do you learn another group’s language when you have no languages in common? The technical term is monolingual fieldwork. But this is just a fancy label for some combination of pointing at things, listening, crude imitation, and obsessively transcribing whatever you hear. For years. It doesn’t help that the Pirahã language seems genuinely hard to learn in a few different senses. First, it is probably conventionally difficult for Westerners to learn since it is a tonal language (two tones: high and low) with a small number of phonemes (building block sounds) and a few unusual sounds3. Second, there is no written language. Third, the language has a variety of ‘channels of discourse’, or ways of talking specialized for one or another cultural context. One of these is ‘whistle speech’; Pirahãs can communicate purely in whistles. This feature appears to be extremely useful during hunting trips: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 11, pg. 187-188) My first intense contact with whistle speech came one day when the Pirahãs had given me permission to go hunting with them. After we’d been walking for about an hour, they decided that they weren’t seeing any game because I, with my clunking canteens and machete and congenital clumsiness, was making too much noise. “You stay here and we will be back for you later.” Xaikáibaí said gently but firmly. … As I tried to make the best of my solitary confinement, I heard the men whistling to one another. They were saying, “I’ll go over there; you go that way,” and other such hunting talk. But clearly they were communicating. It was fascinating because it sounded so different from anything I had heard before. The whistle carried long and clear in the jungle. I could immediately see the importance and usefulness of this channel, which I guessed would also be much less likely to scare away game than the lower frequencies of the men’s normal voices. Fourth, important aspects of the language reflect core tenets of Pirahã culture in ways that one might not a priori expect. Everett writes extensively about the ‘immediacy of experience principle’ of Pirahã culture, which he summarizes as the idea that: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 7, pg. 132) Declarative Pirahã utterances contain only assertions related directly to the moment of speech, either experienced by the speaker or witnessed by someone alive during the lifetime of the speaker. One way the language reflects this is that the speaker must specify how they know something by affixing an appropriate suffix to verbs: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 12, pg. 196) Perhaps the most interesting suffixes, however (though these are not unique to Pirahã), are what linguists call evidentials, elements that represent the speaker’s evaluation of his or her knowledge of what he or she is saying. There are three of these in Pirahã: hearsay, observation, and deduction. To see what these do, let’s use an English example. If I ask you, “Did Joe go fishing?” you could answer, “Yes, at least I heard that he did,” or “Yes, I know because I saw him leave,” or “Yes, at least I suppose he did because his boat is gone.” The difference between English and Pirahã is that what English does with a sentence, Pirahã does with a verbal suffix. Everett also convincingly links this cultural principle to the lack of Pirahã number words and creation myths. On the latter topic, Everett recalls the following exchange: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 7, pg. 134) I sat with Kóhoi once and he asked me, after hearing about my god, “What else does your god do?” And I answered, “Well, he made the stars, and he made the earth.” Then I asked, “What do the Pirahãs say?” He answered, “Well, the Pirahãs say that these things were not made.” And all of this is to say nothing of the manifold perils of the jungle: malaria, typhoid fever, dysentery, dangerous snakes, insects, morally gray river traders, and periodic downpours. If Indiana Jones braved these conditions for years, we would consider his stories rousing adventures. Everett did this while also learning one of the most unusual languages in the world. People on the bank of the Maici river. (source) By the way, he did eventually sort of achieve his goal of translating the Bible. Armed with a solid knowledge of Pirahã, he was able to translate the New Testament’s Gospel of Mark. Since the Pirahã have no written language, he provided them with a recorded version, but did not get the reaction he expected: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 17, pg. 267-268) When we returned to the village, I recorded Mark’s gospel in my own voice for the Pirahãs to listen to. I then brought in a wind-up tape recorder to play the recording, and I taught the Pirahãs how to use it, which, surprisingly enough, some of the children did. Keren and I left the village and returned a few weeks later. The people were still listening to the gospel, with children cranking the recorder. I was initially quite excited about this, until it became clear that the only part of the book that they paid attention to was the beheading of John the Baptist. “Wow, they cut off his head. Play that again!” One reaction to hearing the gospel caught Everett even more off-guard: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 17, pg. 269) "The women are afraid of Jesus. We do not want him." "Why not?" I asked, wondering what had triggered this declaration. "Because last night he came to our village and tried to have sex with our women. He chased them around the village, trying to stick his large penis into them." Kaaxaóoi proceeded to show me with his two hands held far apart how long Jesus's penis was—a good three feet. But the Pirahã had an even more serious objection to Jesus: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 17, pg. 265-266) Part of the difficulty of my task began to become clear to me. I communicated more or less correctly to the Pirahãs about my Christian beliefs. The men listening to me understood that there was a man named Hisó, Jesus, and that he wanted others to do what he told them. "The Pirahã men then asked, "Hey Dan, what does Jesus look like? Is he dark like us or light like you?" I said, "Well, I have never actually seen him. He lived a long time ago. But I do have his words." "Well, Dan, how do you have his words if you have never heard him or seen him?" They then made it clear that if I had not actually seen this guy (and not in any metaphorical sense, but literally), they weren't interested in any stories I had to tell about him. Period. This is because, as I now knew, the Pirahãs believe only what they see. Sometimes they also believe in things that someone else has told them, so long as that person has personally witnessed what he or she is reporting. In the end, Everett never converted a single Pirahã. But he did even worse than converting zero people—he lost his own faith after coming to believe that the Pirahã had a good point. After keeping this to himself for many years, he revealed his loss of faith to his family, which led to a divorce and his children breaking contact with him for a number of years afterward. But Everett losing his faith in the God of Abraham was only the beginning. Most importantly for us, he also lost his faith in the God of Linguistics—Noam Chomsky. III. THE WAR In 2005, Everett’s paper “Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirahã: Another look at the design features of human language” was published in the journal Cultural Anthropology. An outsider might expect an article like this, which made a technical observation about the apparent lack of a property called ‘recursion’ in the Pirahã language, to receive an ‘oh, neat’ sort of response. Languages can be pretty different from one another, after all. Mandarin lacks plurals. Spanish sentences can omit an explicit subject. This is one of those kinds of things. But the article ignited a firestorm of controversy that follows Everett to this day. Praise for Everett and his work on recursion in Pirahã: He became a pure charlatan, although he used to be a good descriptive linguist. That is why, as far as I know, all the serious linguists who work on Brazilian languages ignore him. Noam Chomsky, MIT professor and linguist
Inline links: source, monolingual fieldwork, 3, number words, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!yx-R!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F77975f2c-ef0f-47d7-9ed9-f22bbe04f78b_1024x768.jpeg, source, Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirahã: Another look at the design features of human language
Xander Balwit1 mentions across 1 issues

Xander Balwit is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 21, 2022 and November 21, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Xander Balwit’s report on factory farming". It most often appears alongside Asterciskmag.com, China, CHIPS act.

Reference entry
Xander Balwit
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
November 21, 2022
Last seen
November 21, 2022
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
"Is Wine Fake?" In Asterisk Magazine
November 21, 2022 · Original source
They May As Well Grow On Trees: Xander Balwit’s report on factory farming in the year 2053. Featuring eyeless, beakless, featherless, near-brainless chickens that “[resemble] something between an animal and a fruit”.
Inline links: They May As Well Grow On Trees:
Xavier1 mentions across 1 issues

Xavier is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 18, 2023 and September 18, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Xavier (later changed name to Vivian)". It most often appears alongside 787, adderallposting, ADL.

Reference entry
Xavier
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
September 18, 2023
Last seen
September 18, 2023
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Highlights From The Comments On Elon Musk
September 18, 2023 · Original source
Nevada (deceased) Xavier (later changed name to Vivian) Griffin Kai Saxon Damian X Æ A-Xii Exa Dark Sideræl Techno Mechanicus Strider Azure
Xenofilo1 mentions across 1 issues

Xenofilo is a recurring person 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 "Contact: Xenofilo Contact Info: xenofiloACX[a t]hotmail[period]com". It most often appears alongside 10 E Main Street, Fairborn 45324, 11841 Wagner Street, Culver City, 13 Mile road.

Reference entry
Xenofilo
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
March 25, 2025
Last seen
March 25, 2025
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Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places
March 25, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Xenofilo Contact Info: xenofiloACX[a t]hotmail[period]com Time: Saturday, April 19th, 05:00 PM Location: Parque Bicentenario, al lado de municipalidad de Vitacura. Llevo un cartel con " ACX meetup ". :) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/47RFJ92X+J8 Notes: Porfavor siéntanse libres de traer amigos/familia :). También té, café, pan.. Lo que vean mejor.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/47RFJ92X+J8
Xenophon1 mentions across 1 issues

Xenophon is a recurring person 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 "In 370 BC, Xenophon noticed that everyone sucked except Cyrus the Great"; "Xenophon says that Cyrus conquered his empire while still sort of a vassal"; "Xenophon says that Cyrus conquered his empire". It most often appears alongside Alexander the Great, Amorites, Anshan.

Reference entry
Xenophon
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
January 10, 2024
Last seen
January 10, 2024
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Book Review: Cyropaedia
January 10, 2024 · Original source
In 370 BC, Xenophon noticed that everyone sucked except Cyrus the Great:
Xenophon was a mercenary who fought beside Persians, making him potentially qualified to know things about Cyrus. He was a member of Socrates’ inner circle along with Plato, making him potentially qualified to know things about political philosophy (Plato’s Republic might be a response to Cyropaedia or vice versa; classicists aren’t sure).
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.
Xi Zhongxun1 mentions across 1 issues

Xi Zhongxun is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 06, 2022 and April 06, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Xi’s father, Xi Zhongxun, was former Vice-President of China". It most often appears alongside America, American consulate, Attorney General.

Reference entry
Xi Zhongxun
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
April 06, 2022
Last seen
April 06, 2022
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Dictator Book Club: Xi Jinping
April 06, 2022 · Original source
Xi’s father, Xi Zhongxun, was former Vice-President of China. That made Xi a “princeling”, ie a descendant of Communist “royalty”. China-watchers disagree on how organized the princelings are and whether they count as a “faction”. But they’re at least kind of a faction, and it didn’t hurt that he represented them too.
Xia Ji1 mentions across 1 issues

Xia Ji is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 01, 2023 and September 01, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "They each wore her intimate garments under their robes, bantering about them in court". It most often appears alongside 536 BC, ACX, Ai Jiang.

Reference entry
Xia Ji
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
September 01, 2023
Last seen
September 01, 2023
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Your Book Review: Zuozhuan
September 01, 2023 · Original source
Lord Ling of Chen, Gongsun Ning, and Yi Hangfu all had liaisons with Xia Ji. They each wore her intimate garments under their robes, bantering about them in court. Xie Ye remonstrated with the lord: “When lords and ministers demonstrate their licentiousness, the people have nothing to look to as example. Moreover, the reports that spread as a result will not be good. You, my lord, should put away those garments!” The lord said, “I will be able to change my ways.” He told the two noblemen about this, and when the two requested to have Xie Ye killed, he did not stop them. They thus put Xie Ye to death.
Xiafu Fuji1 mentions across 1 issues

Xiafu Fuji is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 01, 2023 and September 01, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "At this time Xiafu Fuji was the master of ritual". It most often appears alongside 536 BC, ACX, Ai Jiang.

Reference entry
Xiafu Fuji
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
September 01, 2023
Last seen
September 01, 2023
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Your Book Review: Zuozhuan
September 01, 2023 · Original source
In autumn, in the eighth month, on the dingmao day (13), a great affair was undertaken in the Grand Ancestral Temple. We elevated the tablet of [the more recent ruler] Lord Xi above that of Lord Min: this violated the order of sacrifices. At this time Xiafu Fuji was the master of ritual. He did reverence to Lord Xi, and then he declared what he had seen: “I saw that the new ghost is larger and the old ghost is smaller. To put the larger first and the smaller last is to follow the right order. To elevate sages and worthies is wise. To be wise and follow the right order is in accordance with ritual propriety”...
Xian Shi1 mentions across 1 issues

Xian Shi is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 01, 2023 and September 01, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "He sent someone to pay his respects to Xian Shi with a zither". It most often appears alongside 536 BC, ACX, Ai Jiang.

Reference entry
Xian Shi
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
September 01, 2023
Last seen
September 01, 2023
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Your Book Review: Zuozhuan
September 01, 2023 · Original source
As they were about to do battle, Gongsun Xia ordered his troops to sing “The Funeral of Yu.” Chen Ni ordered all his troops to hold jade in their mouths. Giving orders to his troops, Gongsun Hui said, “A length of rope for each man: in Wu they cut their hair short.” Dongguo Shu said, “If I go to war three times, I am certain to die. With this it comes to three.” He sent someone to pay his respects to Xian Shi with a zither, saying, “I will not see you again.” Chen Shu said, “In this march, I will hear the drums alone. I will not hear the bells.”
Xiangzhong1 mentions across 1 issues

Xiangzhong is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 01, 2023 and September 01, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "‘Oh, Heaven! Xiangzhong violated the proper way. He killed the legitimate heir and established a secondary son". It most often appears alongside 536 BC, ACX, Ai Jiang.

Reference entry
Xiangzhong
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
September 01, 2023
Last seen
September 01, 2023
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Your Book Review: Zuozhuan
September 01, 2023 · Original source
The existing foundations of our world are damaged but not broken. For all the upheavals in recent years, I struggle to believe that the pace of change will slow, or that the ideas to truly make sense of these changes already exist. This is only the beginning, and the Zuozhuan gives a visceral sense of what that really means. Our culture wars will seem like people getting mad over ancestral tablet placements. People in the future will look at us the way we look at Ai Jiang weeping for her murdered sons, “Oh, Heaven! Xiangzhong violated the proper way. He killed the legitimate heir and established a secondary son.” There’s more than one layer of grief.
Xiao et al1 mentions across 1 issues

Xiao et al is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 09, 2024 and April 09, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Xiao et al (2021) - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91470-2". It most often appears alongside #S14, 2009 flu pandemic, 2013-16 West African Ebola outbreak.

Reference entry
Xiao et al
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
April 09, 2024
Last seen
April 09, 2024
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Highlights From The Comments On The Lab Leak Debate
April 09, 2024 · Original source
1. Xiao et al (2021) - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91470-2%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B , which includes a co-author of Worobey et al (2022), a leading zoonosis paper states in table 1 that the raccoon dogs were wild caught in Hubei, not farmed as you assert in the piece. This alone rules out raccoon dogs as plausible hosts for two independently sufficient reasons. Firstly, there is unanimity in the literature that the bat ancestral virus to SARS-CoV-2 is in southern Yunnan or South East Asia. Everyone agrees with this, including Shi Zhengli. If a species was wild caught in Hubei, then there would be no explanation of how it acquired the ancestral bat virus, given that Hubei is 1000 miles from southern Yunnan.
Inline links: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91470-2%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B
Xiao et al (2021) has a list of species sold at the Huanan market. I would encourage you to read that list and suggest which animals you think are plausible, and I will tell you why they are not actually plausible.
Xiao et al (2021)1 mentions across 1 issues

Xiao et al (2021) is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 09, 2024 and April 09, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Xiao et al (2021) has a list of species sold at the Huanan market". It most often appears alongside #S14, 2009 flu pandemic, 2013-16 West African Ebola outbreak.

Reference entry
Xiao et al (2021)
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
April 09, 2024
Last seen
April 09, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Highlights From The Comments On The Lab Leak Debate
April 09, 2024 · Original source
1. Xiao et al (2021) - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91470-2%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B , which includes a co-author of Worobey et al (2022), a leading zoonosis paper states in table 1 that the raccoon dogs were wild caught in Hubei, not farmed as you assert in the piece. This alone rules out raccoon dogs as plausible hosts for two independently sufficient reasons. Firstly, there is unanimity in the literature that the bat ancestral virus to SARS-CoV-2 is in southern Yunnan or South East Asia. Everyone agrees with this, including Shi Zhengli. If a species was wild caught in Hubei, then there would be no explanation of how it acquired the ancestral bat virus, given that Hubei is 1000 miles from southern Yunnan.
Inline links: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91470-2%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B
Xiao et al (2021) has a list of species sold at the Huanan market. I would encourage you to read that list and suggest which animals you think are plausible, and I will tell you why they are not actually plausible.
Xiao (2021) Table 1 only says that some raccoon dogs in Wuhan had wounds, suggesting they were wild-caught. It makes no claims that all raccoon-dogs were wild-caught. There are dozens of raccoon-dog farms in the same province as Wuhan.
Xiaochang1 mentions across 1 issues

Xiaochang is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 25, 2025 and September 25, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "She points to your friend Xiaochang, who winks at you". It most often appears alongside Armenians at Harvard, barberpole model of fashion, Baron von Ungern-Sternberg.

Reference entry
Xiaochang
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
September 25, 2025
Last seen
September 25, 2025
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Sources Say Bay Area House Party
September 25, 2025 · Original source
“Sorry,” she says. “I’m here with my date, Chad Redstate.” She points to your friend Xiaochang, who winks at you.
Xie Ye1 mentions across 1 issues

Xie Ye is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 01, 2023 and September 01, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Xie Ye remonstrated with the lord: “When lords and ministers demonstrate their licentiousness, the people have nothing to look to as example". It most often appears alongside 536 BC, ACX, Ai Jiang.

Reference entry
Xie Ye
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
September 01, 2023
Last seen
September 01, 2023
Outbound links
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Your Book Review: Zuozhuan
September 01, 2023 · Original source
Lord Ling of Chen, Gongsun Ning, and Yi Hangfu all had liaisons with Xia Ji. They each wore her intimate garments under their robes, bantering about them in court. Xie Ye remonstrated with the lord: “When lords and ministers demonstrate their licentiousness, the people have nothing to look to as example. Moreover, the reports that spread as a result will not be good. You, my lord, should put away those garments!” The lord said, “I will be able to change my ways.” He told the two noblemen about this, and when the two requested to have Xie Ye killed, he did not stop them. They thus put Xie Ye to death.
Does this not describe Xie Ye?”’
xingxia Zhou1 mentions across 1 issues

xingxia Zhou is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 01, 2026 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "Contact: xingxia Zhou". It most often appears alongside 1108 R St, 11841 Wagner Street, 131 Colonie Center.

Reference entry
xingxia Zhou
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
April 01, 2026
Last seen
April 01, 2026
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Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places
April 01, 2026 · Original source
Contact: xingxia Zhou Contact Info: zhou[.]yefei1990[@]hotmail[.]com Time: Saturday, April 11th, 5:00 PM Location: guopi bar,NO.64, Fangcao street, wuhou Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8P26J3F2+Q3 Group Link: https://discord.gg/vBD [remove this bit] fmdH3r Notes: it’s not a bar, actually it’s a writers’ club. welcome to come with your children.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8P26J3F2+Q3
Xirong1 mentions across 1 issues

Xirong is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 04, 2021 and October 04, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Related, from aesthetics tweeter Xirong : Thailand seems to have a daily minimum wage of $10". It most often appears alongside 19th century African art, 20th century, 9-11.

Reference entry
Xirong
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
October 04, 2021
Last seen
October 04, 2021
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Highlights From The Comments On Modern Architecture
October 04, 2021 · Original source
Related, from aesthetics tweeter Xirong:
Inline links: Xirong
Related, from aesthetics tweeter Xirong: Thailand seems to have a daily minimum wage of $10, which probably works out to a little over a dollar an hour, which is probably close to what the West was paying people back when it had Art Nouveau and such. I don’t know if this is a coincidence.
Inline links: Xirong
XiXiDu1 mentions across 1 issues

XiXiDu is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 15, 2021 and November 15, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "XiXiDu on times when expert forecasts were repeatedly wrong". It most often appears alongside America, Bay, Biden.

Reference entry
XiXiDu
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
November 15, 2021
Last seen
November 15, 2021
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  • 15 November 15, 2021
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15
November 15, 2021 · Original source
2: XiXiDu on times when expert forecasts were repeatedly wrong:
2: XiXiDu on times when expert forecasts were repeatedly wrong: 3: Reddit launches an on-platform predictions feature.
Inline links: launches an on-platform predictions feature
Xpym1 mentions across 1 issues

Xpym is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 21, 2025 and February 21, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Xpym writes : I think you're conflating two things - mathematical objects are logically necessary". It most often appears alongside /r/slatestarcodex, ACX, Adrian.

Reference entry
Xpym
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
February 21, 2025
Last seen
February 21, 2025
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Highlights From The Comments On Tegmark's Mathematical Universe
February 21, 2025 · Original source
Xpym writes:
Inline links: writes
Xuan Jiang1 mentions across 1 issues

Xuan Jiang is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 01, 2023 and September 01, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Xuan Jiang, the woman from Qi, conspired with her younger son Shuo against Jizi". It most often appears alongside 536 BC, ACX, Ai Jiang.

Reference entry
Xuan Jiang
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
September 01, 2023
Last seen
September 01, 2023
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Your Book Review: Zuozhuan
September 01, 2023 · Original source
Xuan Jiang, the woman from Qi, conspired with [her younger son] Shuo against Jizi. Lord Xuan sent Jizi to Qi and had brigands await him at Shen, where they were to kill him. [Her older son] Shou told Jizi of the plot, intending to make him flee, but Jizi was unwilling and said, “Of what use is the son who rejects his father’s command? If there were a domain without fathers, then I could flee there.” When Jizi was about to depart, Shou plied him with wine. Shou then carried his banner and went first. The brigands killed him. When Jizi arrived, he said, “I am the one you were after. What crime did he commit? Please kill me!” The bandits also killed him.